In "Making a Show of Myself," Mary Kate O'Flanaga's not-to-be-missed one-woman show now playing at The Irish Repertory Theatre until March 1, she narrates six true stories, each one slyly commenting on the other until the night becomes an absorbing meditation on the power of story itself to transform your understanding - and with that your reality.
Sound like a tall order? It's not. The most impressive aspect of O'Flanagan's artistry is the deceptive ease with which she tells her beguiling tales. It's not just what happens in stories but the stories themselves that are a form of healing magic, she realizes. They can help illuminate even the most painful moments of a life in a way that slowly restores equilibrium. That's why they matter, that's why they endure.
Mary Kate O'Flanagan in Making A Show Of Myself
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes," wrote Emily Dickinson, who understood, as O'Flanagan does, how the heart and imagination build meaning in even the most unendurable events.
O'Flanagan cites three key moments in the creation, experience, and telling of a tale to help us identify which part of the sequence we currently occupy in our own lives when unexpected challenges or opportunities arise.
This is not a saccharine show calculated to comfort you. There's a rawness in some of the events described here that shatters complacency. “You were a convent girl?” is shorthand for a lodestar of cultural and social challenges that could unmoor the same life it describes.
So the economy of her language often contrasts with the vastness of the experiences she contains within them. We begin to pay closer attention to the language and the events that they describe, courtesy of her storyteller's eye and ear for the uniquely clarifying sentence.
All of life is here: childhood innocence, first love, betrayals, cycles of abuse and fear, and the hard reclamation of self after long periods of self-abandonment. Taking a decades-long hero's journey to unravel the great mystery of herself, there's joy to be had in the coming back to sources that she describes in the later stories.
Did I mention the show is often wildly funny? O'Flanagan understands the importance of never being too earnest, allowing the themes she explores here to illuminate instead of overwhelm. It's a particularly skilled balancing act, so it's no surprise she's the world’s only Grand Slam Champion Storyteller on public radio’s The Moth on two continents
Mary Kate O'Flanagan stars in Making A Show Of Myself
"Making a Show of Myself" does the most proscribed thing possible in Irish culture - it dares to suggest there is something about the storyteller that is distinctive and worthy of note, countering years of Irish social conditioning to arrive at that very funny and unmistakably defiant show title.
You don't achieve that blackbelt level of self-awareness without first battling a few demons, and here they all are again, vividly and often hilariously described, and what you will realize and bring home when the lights go up is how elegantly they were brought to life (and often bested) in this life-affirming, in the truest sense, show.
"Making a Show of Myself" runs at the Irish Rep in NYC until March 1.
Comments