Writing about love is ‘tricky’: Kelly

Sonya Kelly returns to the 1st Irish Festival with “How to Keep an Alien.”

By Orla O’Sullivan

Sonya Kelly’s last autobiographical show in Origin’s 1st Irish was my favorite of the 2013 festival, so I’m looking forward to her next, which opens on Thursday, Sept 15, at the Irish Arts Center.

“How to Keep an Alien” tells the tale of how Kelly fell for Kate Ferris, an Australian woman, four weeks before her visa to remain in Ireland expired. That was eight years ago. Today, the two are engaged to be married.

Sign up to The Irish Echo Newsletter

Sign up today to get daily, up-to-date news and views from Irish America.

Meanwhile, I anticipate another chance to savor the physical comedy, fresh descriptions and Pavlovian memory-triggers for anyone raised in 1980s Ireland that Kelly brought to the New York stage last time.

Her snort-worthy, hilarious 2013 1st Irish entry “I Can See Clearly Now” told the fundamentally poignant story of her upbringing in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, in which her near blindness went undetected. Kelly, too timid to say that she could not see the blackboard (or much else) was widely written off as stupid or odd.

As much as it reflected her story, the play was about how different Ireland was. She said: “Then, the attitude towards children was, ‘Get out on the road and play!’”

Even after getting a life-changing pair of glasses—one and a half-inch thick—Kelly says they “garnered ridicule” unlike the sympathy she would elicit if her disability placed her in a wheelchair. So, the play’s original title was “The Wheelchair on my Face,” but the Manhattan theatre that staged it felt it had to be changed for an American audience. It’s something that evidently chafes the playwright still.

This time she is going with the IAC in part because, she says, “This play is so Irish there isn’t a glossary long enough.”

Those with still have questions after the 75-minute performance can have them answered at Q&A sessions with Kelly on Sept. 17 or 25. Readers can also get a taste of what’s to come in a YouTube video with Kelly and her stage manager Paul Curley.

He participates in a way that stage managers usually do not, prompting Kelly to describe this play as less a solo show, more a “one and three-quarter person.” This novel approach probably was a factor in “Alien” winning the best production award in the Dublin Fringe Festival, where it was first performed in 2014.

Kelly describes this play as both “more sophisticated” and more challenging to write than “I Can See Clearly” (even if that play, her first, was a New York Times Critics' Pick).

It is “very tricky,” to write about someone with whom you are in a relationship, she agrees. “Every time I sit at the computer and have a good idea, I think of all the people I’m going to be in trouble with.”

The play charts the couple’s odyssey from the Irish Midlands to the Australian bush as they try to persuade the Irish authorities of their right to live together in Ireland. One stop on its international tour was Brisbane, Kate Ferris’s home city, reportedly leaving her “absolutely rattling” with all her family attending.

Kelly’s family includes the inimitable comic actor Frank Kelly, her uncle, who died earlier this year, at age 77.

Something of the mad flights of Gobnait O’Lunacy or Fr. Jack Hackett live on through his niece, who says she is “very drawn to the amalgam between theatre and stand-up.”

In “I Can See Clearly,” Kelly conveyed how she experienced the world largely through sound, using up-close descriptions of her toddler self sitting on adults’ laps at her parents’ dinner party. This poetically builds to the swelling sound of Abba’s 1976 mega-hit “Fernando”: “secret sounds like breath whistling through nostril hair… gulps of wine and crunches of water biscuits… intestinal whale music… diamante beads, the occasional bra strap!”

Today, Kelly’s eye problems endure. An operation 10 years ago--the equivalent of having contact lenses inserted in her eyes--is losing its effectiveness.

Nonetheless, Kelly is working away, following a short play done recently for the Abbey Theatre with one for the National Theatre in London.

Of the autobiographical plays, she says, “I had to write them out of my system, but I’m going to step back from my own work.”

“How to Keep an Alien” written and performed by Sonya Kelly, and directed by Gina Moxley, runs at the Irish Arts Center, 553 West 51st St., from Sept. 15 to Oct. 1, as part of Origin’s 1st Festival. Tickets from irishartscenter.org or (866) 811-4111.

 

Donate