Jim Lynch didn’t set out to be a playwright. He is a criminal prosecutor by trade and it wasn’t until his father passed away more than 10 years ago that he tapped into his inner storyteller and started honing his craft of playwriting.

After years of staged readings and countless revisions Lynch, a Park Ridge resident, will finally celebrate the opening of his first full-length play “The Tallest Man,” which premieres at the Artistic Home Theatre in Chicago Saturday, June 19.

The play is set in the County Mayo of Ireland and tells the story of Finn, an Irish gypsy in love with a girl whose mother disapproves of him. He is also trying to keep himself and his mother one step ahead of the corrupt clergy and their unlawful landlord.

Lynch said he writes through the lens of his Irish heritage.

The inspiration behind the play stems from his grandfather’s ghost stories and how his parents felt sadness over leaving Ireland. But it is the memory of his father’s larger-than-life personality that motivates him to keep writing.

“My father took tremendous bites out of life and had such a great capacity for joy, anger and passion, and that is what drama is about,” Lynch said about his father who died at 57.

To move the play from first draft to stage ready has been a long process. Lynch worked alongside director John Mossman through countless staged readings to intense rehearsals where the script continues to evolve.

“We are always figuring out how to make the characters more complex and how to make the drama pop more,” said Mossman, who is the theater’s associate artistic director and also a La Grange Park resident.

Lynch is present at a few rehearsals each week. This allows him to answer questions from Mossman and the cast and oversee changes to the scripts. Even when he is unable, technology helps him remain close to the process.

“We have made a few critical adjustments when Jim (Lynch) wasn’t here,” Mossman. “(Lynch) texted me the changes to my iPhone and all the actors huddle around and wrote into their script and then just got up and did it.”

For Lynch, the experience of collaborating with a cast has taken his work to a new level.

“When it has blood and flesh injected into it, good actors and directors do things to your play that you never thought possible,” Lynch said.

While the process has been intense both Lynch and Mossman believe it will pay off in a show the audience will long remember.

“It is a comedy, but there is also a strong sense of the perseverance of the human spirit and depth of emotion we all experience in the midst of hard times and good,”

Mossman said.

And what would Lynch’s father have thought?

”He would have made every single person he knew come to see it or he would not have spoken to them again,” Lynch said.

The show runs Saturday, June 19 to Aug. 1 at the Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark St., Chicago. For more information, call 866-811-4111 or go to

theartistichome.org.