Paul Nugent’s email in late-summer 2018 is one of the more memorable I have received. He wanted to know if AboutFACE Ireland, the company he and his wife Anna founded, could perform Holy and Unruly as part of their 2018 NEWvember Festival in Dublin. This was the first time anyone had wanted to do anything with Holy and Unruly, a full length play about the 1593 meeting between England’s Queen Elizabeth and Irish Pirate Grace O’Malley. I wanted to respond “Um, duh!” Instead, I presented myself as adult(ish) and replied something like “Are you kidding? Yes!”
I’m thrilled when anyone wants to do any of my plays: ten-minute script, one-minute script, it really doesn’t matter; my response is generally, “Yippee! Bring it on.” But the feeling is a little different when it’s a full-length script. So much time and effort goes into a full length. For me, it’s generally a three-to-six-month slog to a first draft, followed by a six-month forced march of rewrites, and then (maybe… maybe) I feel confident enough to start sending it to development opportunities like NEWvember. Then the chorus of “no thank you” notes start rolling in. Or, the crickets chirp and I hear nothing at all. My shoulders start to sag, my confidence begins to flag, and I start to dread opening my email inbox. And then Paul Nugent writes and says he wants to do it, and suddenly the world is technicolor once again. It’s different when someone wants one of your full lengths.
But this wasn’t just any acceptance note. This was a “yes” from a festival in Dublin. My little play about Irish Pirate Grace O’Malley was going to get its first official staging in, of all places, Dublin. Holy $hi+! The only place more appropriate than Dublin (which, alas was a haven for English sympathizers back in Grace’s day) would be Galway, which was nearer her base of operations, and which she relished plundered on a regular basis. Or maybe, Clare Island, the island guarding the entrance to Clew Bay, where she spent her childhood. But is there even a theater on Clare Island? But I digress; to have this play staged in Dublin was more than I ever could have hoped for when I began working on it in April 2017.
So, in November 2018, I flew to Dublin and had one of the most thrilling nights of my life watching Kathleen Warner Yeates, Fiana Toibin, Ian Blackmore, Tad Morari, Michelle Audrey, Patrick William de Montfort, Maureen O’Connell, Shane Connolly, Ciaran McGlynn, David Ryan, and Yvonne Ussher read Holy and Unruly, with direction by Paul Nugent and dramaturgy by Krystal Sweedman.
How is it possible that I didn’t take any pictures of the performance? Fortunately, AboutFace posted a big album of photos from the festival, which includes several of the H&U reading. I do have these two, though:
That’s the New Theatre on the left, in Dublin’s Temple Bar neighborhood. On that right, is me with fellow playwright Matthew Cole Kelly, whose amazing play The Gods of the Ozarks, ran just before mine, and Dramaturg Krystal Sweedman, who helped to shape my reading and made some really helpful and insightful observations about my play. And just because I can’t help embarrassing myself, here’s a little introduction to the reading, recorded by me, that AboutFACE posted on Facebook. Finally, a couple shots of Dublin.
You can read and inquire about producing Holy and Unruly on New Play Exchange. Or, if you’re not a member of NPX, you can contact me for information.