NYC play premieres from Origin Theatre all May long all for free

How it’s New York: All plays readings are in NYC

How it’s Irish: All plays are by Irish and Irish-American playwrights

Origin Theatre brought a quartet of plays to New York audiences for the first time this month. “Plays in May” is the new name for this season, previously known as “Mondays in May”.

Artistic Director of Origin, Mick Mellamphy explains that scheduling was much easier with a move away from a specific day and there is still some poetry in the rebrand. 

Mellamphy also revealed an overall overhaul of Origin Theatre’s mission, after twenty years of courageous, high quality theatre-making, showcasing pan-European work in NYC. Irish plays will now take centre-stage, year-round, drawing from the Irish diaspora around the world, not just the island of Ireland; an acknowledgement of the continued success of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival.

As Mellamphy notes, each new European play had needed to rally a new audience and sponsors because, in spite of universal themes and the best efforts of the EU – and the Eurovision Song Contest – each individual country retains particular allegiances. Yet the cultural reach of Ireland, has, as we all know, a much broader appeal.

So the inaugural round of “Plays in May” presented ‘live readings that represent the Irish experience through the lens of Irish/Irish-American contemporary playwrights from both sides of the Atlantic’, with the following lineup:

Mellamphy enthuses, ‘Origin can kind of be a platform for new contemporary work by previously unheard voices, or voices that we’ve worked with in the past, to have a through-line of development.’

‘up and coming playwrights who really need a place for their work to shine’

‘With these four plays this year, I do believe there is something in the future for all of them’, he continues, sustaining the Origin pedigree for supporting and advancing new works.

‘Especially coming out of the Pandemic, it’s the new, up and coming playwrights who really need a place for their work to shine and that’s the area Origin can occupy, especially as we have wonderful partners such as The Irish Rep’.

He talks of ‘joining the dots’ and reflecting ‘the purpose of theatre to hold a mirror up to society’, which is especially the case for the opening play, at the Irish Rep, “Five Minutes of Heaven” since it deals with The Troubles, as we mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

Cortisol

Fresh from winning the Breakthrough Artist Award at Origin’s 1st Irish Festival in February, Shannon Haly made a bold return to the New York stage, this time with her sister, Megan, in a piece they have written and are starring in together.

Collaborating across different timezones, in NYC and London, the Halys began writing their play during the COVID Pandemic, inspired to ‘not be helpless and waiting around’ by such acclaimed women actor-writers as Michelle Cole, Sarah Horgan and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

With just 18-months between them, the sisters want to address commonly held misconceptions about people in their 20s, by offering an opportunity to ‘feel a little less lonely and to have a little more understanding’.

Director Bailey Bass has loved working with the Haly sisters, describing them as being ‘extremely collaborative’ in developing ‘a really relatable story for any age’. She says ‘Cortisol’ is ‘like a puzzle piece you are putting together in your brain as you’re watching’.

‘A massive hug together’ is what the Halys offered the audience at the Irish Rep on Monday May 22nd at 7pm.

The Visit

Fresh from a 10-stop tour of Ireland, produced by Dublin’s Draíocht arts centre, Deidre Kinahan‘s play about ‘resilience…about reaching back out into the joy of life’ was read for the first time in NYC on Tuesday 16th May.

According to Kinahan, ‘Rose has been deeply controlled for years, but we meet her at the point of emergence, when she has created a path to freedom for herself.’

Acclaimed New York-based, Irish actor Jo Kinsella brought the role of Rose to life at the Irish Arts Center and loves her ‘vulnerability and honesty.’ She recommends the play for ‘anyone who’s stayed in a relationship for all the wrong reasons.’

Pop Tart Lipstick

Actor-Director Rex Ryan was compelled to write his first play when his Dublin theatre company, Glass Mask, was at a loss for new Irish plays. It took just two days for the first draft of “Pop Tart Lipstick” to ‘explode forth.’

Ryan explains that he set out to write ‘an Irish Reservoir Dogs’, but, ‘what came out was an offbeat, Dublin gangster love story, loosely based on the mad friends I grew up with in East Wall and who shaped me.’

Now onto his third play, Ryan is excited to be bringing his brand of ‘mayhemic stories from both sides of a warping Dublin’ to the city of New York, where, he finds, ‘the blood of the Irish runs through the wild streets.’

Five Minutes of Heaven

After admiring the 2009 film by Guy Hibbert, playwright Michael Egan tells of taking ‘something critically successful on the screen and distilling it to a riveting theatrical experience.’

Egan was determined to stay true to Hibbert’s ‘beautiful dialogue’ and much of it remains in the play, which premiered at the Illusion Theatre in Minneapolis in October 2022.

He speaks of ‘the possibility of forgiveness and the possibility of grace and…the reconciliation of communities’ with the pressure cooker of the Pandemic synthecizing the play to the central drama of the two men, at the heart of this real-life story.

And the piece found particular resonance in post-George Floyd Minneapolis, where Egan drew many parallels with the Northern Irish experience, with the militarization, the murals and ‘we can’t breathe’ slogans that had appeared in (London)Derry.

When the stars aligned

Both Egan and director of the Origin reading, Ciaran Byrne, credit the stars aligning with how the play has been brought to New York, after publicist Beck Lee saw it in Minneapolis and as Ciaran – also an actor – had recorded a monologue from “Five Minutes of Heaven” for auditions.

In addition to their writing and directing credits, both men have also taken on the Alistair Little role – played by Liam Neeson in the film version – Michael in Minneapolis and Ciaran in New York and they cheer each other on.

They are equally passionate about the potential for healing and reconciliation with this story and Michael and Ciaran share their great gratitude to the Irish Rep, Origin Theatre and Beck Lee for the play’s NYC reading, which, according to Byrne, has a ‘cast of legends’.

Byrne emphasizes that casting is always 99% of creating great theatre and film and really his directing strategy is to ‘love hard on the actors’ and ‘stay out of the way and do no harm.’