August Notes

It’s been a few months since I last made an entry here. I’ve been busy (and grieving for my father – the adage that grief comes in waves is true, it does - I’ll be writing about that soon). For the past two months I’ve been finalising the proofs of my plays The Mushroom Pickers and Leopoldville. It has been lovely to return to these very different works and I’m really looking forward to the plans that Samuel French has for the promotion of my trio of plays – including Belfast Girls. There is also probably going to be a launch of the book of Belfast Girls in Ireland  – more details about that anon. I’ve also got a reading of a new play, Bohemians – formerly a short piece  – which is included in the Fall Festival of New Plays presented by Artemisia, the company who did such a magnificent job of Belfast Girls in Chicago earlier this year (Belfast Girls was the Windy City Times’ Critics’ Pick and Theatreworld Magazine called it a work of  ‘tremendous imagination’). That festival takes place in mid-September at the Jackalope Theatre in Chicago. 

http://www.artemisiatheatre.org/p/her-story-is-our-story-2015-fall.html

Bohemians is a departure for me as it is set in the US and has an all-American cast. Essentially, it's the fictional story of Charlie Hopper, a former star of the New York punk scene. Charlie's career is derailed when her eight year-old daughter dies, and years later, when she has finally come to terms with this, she finds she is somewhat marooned in her past and the formative force of Punk Rock. I had the idea for this play a few years ago when I saw a punk couple in London - in full punk regalia and in their mid-fifties. I wondered about how people age when their identities have been moulded to a large extent by a youth culture. Also I wanted to look at the role women played in Punk. The fact that Diablo Cody has also recently written a film script about a female rock icon (with Meryl Streep in the title role) means that the subject of women in popular music/rock/punk etc is timely.

I am so excited to have been given the opportunity to stage this new piece, see how it flies, and to work with Artemisia TWICE in one year! That is, I consider, the most incredible good fortune! 

I knew I wanted to do something different with Bohemians. I wanted it to be an intimate ‘chamber’ piece – pretty much because Belfast Girls is big, with big themes. To that end I was definitely influenced by those masters of the chamber piece – Sam Shepard and John Patrick Shanley. In performance, however, so-called ‘chamber’ pieces are often far from that – because as we know it is often when we are most vulnerable, intimate and ‘small’ in our writing that we make a connection to the universal. So, small and personal – when it’s done right – is actually very rarely just small and personal, if you see what I mean.

I am also pretty close to a final edit on my novel and hope to be sending out reading copies to my agent and friends in the coming months. I’m also halfway through a second collection of short stories. I’m hoping for a 2016/17 publishing date on that.

After these projects I have two plays and a screenplay to complete.

My band CHOICE has taken a long break as we all have different projects to complete. There should be some VERY exciting news on that front soon. But even though we’ve been individually busy we are sorting through songs for recording and are hoping to record our first EP by the end of the year.

There are a few more festival appearances coming up for me in the next while – in Cork and in London early next year. And I’m trying to finish a piece for the Irish Examiner. So as you can see it’s a very busy time. I guess the silver lining of a shit summer (as it’s been in Ireland this year) is that there’s no excuse for not getting the writing work done (though I’ve come up with plenty, believe me). 

The Artemisia Fall Festival runs from September 18th to 26th, at the Jackalope Theatre, Chicago.