Deirdre Kinahan – Playwright Article

Studio Theatre Performance Guide

It wasn’t until a student in a playwriting summer program mentioned it that Deirdre Kinahan noticed a common focal point in her plays that “shines a light on people in society that don’t normally come to the fore or aren’t usually given center stage.” Perhaps the political implications of this act initially escaped Kinahan’s consciousness because for her the kernel of the plays was born of an empathetic impulse connected to recognizing, respecting, and investigating the humanity of those in situations foreign to her own experience. The past lives of Kinahan’s characters are unflinchingly colored by experiences that often boldly paint inescapable stereotypes that obscure one’s humanity: prostitution, violent crime, childhood trauma, and even infanticide. Yet while her characters constantly grapple with the grip of their past on their present lives and the pain of stolen futures, there is an undeniable glimmer of hope from the playwright that life can and will go on–and, more specifically, that there is still the very real potential for value in the humanity of the life yet to be lived.

The paradigm for this approach naturally developed from the impetus for her first play. A couple years after founding Tall Tales Theatre Company with a friend to create acting opportunities for herself, Kinahan linked up with Ruhama Women’s Project to provide education to women who had worked in prostutition all their lives in Dublin. One of the women approached Kinahan with an idea for a play about their lives. Kinahan agreed to find a writer and produce the play, but the women from Ruhama insisted that Kinahan write the piece herself despite having no prior experience because she was the only person they trusted with their story.

Be Carna, Kinahan’s first play, was produced locally and then taken to the Edinburgh Festival in 1999 where it garnered interest in the budding playwright. It also marked the start of Kinahan writing a new play for Tall Tales each year throughout its 15-year existence.

Though many of Kinahan’s following plays did not find a future life beyond Tall Tales, when The Bush Theatre in London produced Moment in 2011 to critical acclaim and sellout audiences, it catapulted Kinahan into the international spotlight. In Moment, a long-absent son’s visit to his ailing mother reignites his sisters’ long-simmering resentments and sets the siblings on a collision course over his criminal past. Michael Billington in The Guardian noted, “Plenty of other plays, such as Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and David Storey’s In Celebration, deal with the reverberations of the past on family life. What gripped me about this one was Kinahan’s assured handling of dramatic form. I suspect she knows her Chekhov.” In its US premiere, the Chicago Tribune described it as “a play that dances deftly on the knife-edge of normalcy – a play that’s asking, really, if and when some semblance of normalcy should ever return to a family.”

Next up was expanding her radio play Bogboy into a full production that ultimately won Best Production in the Irish Festival New York. The play looks at various perspectives on Irish history and how it has shaped the way in which contemporary Irish society interacts through a connection to The Disappeared, civilians murdered by the IRA as suspected informants who went missing and were secretly buried. Kinahan noted, “We are complicit in everything that happened up there, but we turn our back on it again and again and just let it disappear from our consciousness. That’s the underlying theme.” The NY Times praised Bogboy for its “pungent, pared-down language.” A nod toward Kinahan’s self-described influence by David Mamet, in particular Glengarry Glen Ross and “the authenticity of the way that Mamet’s characters speak.”

Her next play, These Halcyon Days, was drawn from a more personal connection, watching her own uncle deteriorate through dementia in a nursing home in North County Dublin while simultaneously taking work from Tall Tales Theatre to a series of nursing homes throughout Ireland. She shared:

“One particular day, I went with my daughter, who was five at the time. And she’d picked a little flower in the garden. And Sean, my uncle, wasn’t in the best of form when we arrived, but there was something when she gave him the flower. He just looked at the flower, and he put it up to his ear and pretended it was telling him a story; then he spoke to the flower and he put it up to her ear as if the flower was telling her the story. It was really playful, and I remember him being exactly like that with me when I was a kid. And it just kind of struck me–he’s all still in there–all that intellect and that culture and that playfulness and that joy. Do you know? There’s always the capacity for joy and there’s always a capacity for meaning. That was the message I came out of those nursing homes with. That no matter where you are in life, no matter how disabled or debilitated you may seem, there is a human being in there, a whole gamut of emotions and potential.”

These Halcyon Days went on to win a Fringe First award at Edinburgh in 2013 and subsequent critically acclaimed productions in New York and regionally throughout the United States. Though vastly different in context, Kinahan had once again captured a flame of humanity threatened to be snuffed out by an accumulation of the past, in this case age itself.

Whether representing Ireland in the Royal Court’s PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) festival focused on the austerity aftermath of the eurozone crisis or exploring the impact of recently skyrocketing divorce rates in Ireland, it is clear that Kinahan is hitting her stride as a writer, consistently noted for plays that masterfully weave voice and craft into poignant reflections on humanity through the individual.

“I think theatre is a reflection of ourselves and a means through which we can explore our own humanity,” she states. “It is a magical and truly important place. It allows us to explore the chaos and the tenderness, the cruelty and the potential within ourselves and every human being.”

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