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NYC’s First Irish Theater Fest
 It’s
the biggest thing to ever hit the Irish theater scene in New York, the first
ever Irish theater festival held throughout the month of September at the
prestigious 59 East 59th Street Theatre in Manhattan, an unprecedented
rollout for such a fledgling festival.
Called “1st Irish,” it’s the brainchild of Irish actor and director George
Heslin, 36, whose Origin Theatre Company has introduced the works of over 26
new European – most of them Irish – writers to America since 2002. With
admirable nerve, Heslin has programmed the entire festival as though it’s
been running for years, and in the process he’s attracted many of the
biggest names in contemporary Irish theatre.
“What inspired me to do this is that I’ve worked on a personal level with a
lot of these great new playwrights in Ireland and I never saw their work
being produced in America. That was the first spark behind it,” Heslin told
Irish America.
A graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, and an actor, director and
producer, Heslin has starred on the West End and Off-Broadway. Back in
Ireland, he paid his dues working for all the major theatres including the
Abbey, the Gate, the Lyric, and Galway’s Druid before coming to New York to
study with the legendary theatre coach Uta Hagen, until he eventually
decided to stay.
“Enda Walsh and Mark O’Rowe were the playwrights I knew from home and I saw
they hadn’t been presented here in the States before so one of our first
Origin Theatre Company shows was a production of Enda Walsh’s Mister Man.
That ran Off-Broadway for five weeks and then we took it back to Dublin for
the theatre festival. That was our second play project and the rest just
followed on from there.”
What’s remarkable about 1st Irish is that the organizers seem to have taken
Oscar Wilde’s advice about success to heart: just start at the top and then
sit on it. Heslin has curated a major international festival – bringing
together the most important Irish theatre makers in the U.S. and Ireland –
and he’s pulled it off on his first attempt.
As for the plays being staged this year, Origin took an imaginative approach
to festival’s first show, End of Lines, by inviting five prominent new Irish
playwrights to come to New York, ride the subways, then write twenty-five
minute plays inspired by their experiences.
Says Heslin: “All of the writers we invited are award winning and I wanted
to be very strict on including women writers and writers from all four
corners of Ireland. So we have one each from Derry, Belfast, Dublin, Cork
and County Clare. The project opens the entire Irish theatre festival, and
it kind of reflects what we want the festival to be – as inclusive and
diverse as the nation itself.”
– Cahir O’Doherty
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