Deirdre Kinahan.
PHOTO: BARRY CRONIN
By Orla O’Sullivan
Amid much discussion lately about how few female playwrights get their work produced, Deirdre Kinahan returns to the Irish Arts Centre for the third time with a new play.
“Wild Sky,” commissioned in Ireland to commemorate 1916, plays this week only in the IAC.
Coincidentally, the production was scheduled to open one month to the day after Waking The Feminists, a protest movement by women in Irish theatre, launched in the U.S. The #WTF protest began in Ireland in reaction to the Abbey Theatre programming just one play by a woman among its 10 to commemorate 1916.
While Irish women playwrights highlight their difficulty getting staged on both sides of the Pond, Kinahan is on a roll—including, recently in the U.S. As she said, “2016 is a very special year for me in America. It feels like US audiences and producers are really embracing my work.”
While “Wild Sky” runs in New York, Kinahan has another play “Moment” running at Studio Theatre in DC (until April 24). She has another play, “Spinning,” opening in Chicago with the Irish Theatre Company on May 25 (to July 3) and she has been commissioned to write a play for the Manhattan Theatre Club. Additionally, after Wild Sky” ends at the IAC on Saturday, “It will be produced by Solas Nua in DC at site specific locations on weekends from the end of April through to early June with an all-American cast,” Kinahan said. (The award-winning Irish actors Caitriona Ennis and Ian Toner perform at the IAC.)
If that’s not enough, “These Halcyon Days”—a wonderful story of friendship between two nursing-home residents that last brought Kinahan to the IAC, in 2013—has been running in Poland since September.
All this made for an obvious question for the Dublin-born playwright, now living in County Meath: To what do you attribute your success in getting staged and what is your response to the WTF movement?
“I am hugely impressed by WTF and most of the leaders are friends and colleagues,” Kinanhan said.
“I always felt I labored under bias. I have been writing for 17 years but it is only since a hit in London in 2011 that I felt a shift in response to my work in Ireland.”
In the States, she added, “The Irish Arts Centre have supported me since a short play appeared at the 1st Irish Festival in 2009 at the Irish Rep. Thanks to that support I now have a thriving career in the US.” She added that she actively promotes her own work and has “excellent agents in New York and London.”
Kinahan has written nine full-length plays, six short plays, three children's plays and has many more in progress, including radio plays and screen plays.
Yet, she is an accidental playwright. Kinahan, now also the mother of two daughters, set out to act rather than write.
Her first play in 1999 came at the request of a group of women to whom she was giving career training. The former prostitutes asked Kinahan to write a play about their experiences in Dublin. The result was “Bé Carna” (women of the flesh) staged at Dublin’s Andrew's Lane Theatre, then the Edinburgh Fringe. “It was considered a powerful debut and set me on the road to being a playwright,” Kinahan said.
There’s also a feminist strand in her current play, “Wild Sky” in that Josie, the woman at the heart of a love triangle, is involved with the suffrage movement.
The play is set in 1910 to 1916, a period when even small, community groups in Ireland were awash wish big international ideals, including socialism and feminism, not just nationalism, Kinahan said.
“It’s strange how after independence we became so insular,” she added. “1916 was the dream and the Free State killed it.”
In “Wild Sky” 1916 is seen through a personal prism, “It’s a beautiful, blighted love story.”
Appropriately, given Yeats’ ill-fated adoration of the political activist Maude Gonne, the play premiered last month in Ireland in Rosnaree, the home of Gonne’s great granddaughter.
“Wild Sky” by Deirdre Kinahan runs at the Irish Arts Center to Sat. April 2. Further details at www.irishartscenter.org.
