About the Plays & Playwrights

Program A

Black and Blue

by Sela Ellen Underwood

Sela Ellen Underwood is a writer and actor from Sandy, Oregon. Locally, she’s been on stage with Salt and Sage, Mask and Mirror, Shaking the Tree and the Portland Shakespeare Project. She’s on film as a hillbilly wife in Cheese Bait and as a nurse in Killers of the Flower Moon. Other plays include Fingernails and Oysters, Looking for a Light, and Baby Howie. You can find her short story Lambs to Slaughter published in The First Line. She is currently working on a trilogy of plays, the first of which is called A Priori. “Longest way round is the shortest way home.” James Joyce

“Like most things I write, I started Black and Blue with a simple sight gag that made me laugh: two people trying to unlock the same door with different keys. I kept pulling on that thread, and out unraveled this little play! Now that it’s finished, I see that it’s curious about what it’s like to live most of your life alone, which more and more of us do. I hope you like it.”

Not Beckett

a series of short plays by

Jennifer Barclay

FELISPEAKS

Olwen Fouéré

Hannah Khalil

Nicola McCartney

This international “rolling world premiere” will present 5 new short plays in conversation with Samuel Beckett’s work, written by femme-identifying and non-binary playwrights of diversified Irish descent across the globe.

Not Beckett will premiere internationally in 2025, including performances at Fishamble in Dublin, Jermyn Street Theatre in London, Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, Villanova University in Philadelphia, and here at Corrib Theatre in Portland, Oregon!

I Can’t Remember The

By Nicola McCartney

Nicola McCartney is a playwright, director and dramaturg. She trained as a director with Citizen Theatre/ G&J Productions and Charabanc Theatre Company Belfast. Nicola was Artistic Director of lookout Theatre Company, Glasgow from 1992-2002, and has twice been an Associate Playwright of Playwrights Studio Scotland. She has worked for a host of organisations as a dramaturg including Vanishing Point and Stellar Quines/ Edinburgh International Festival.

Her plays include: EASY, HERITAGE, HOME, STANDING WAVE: DELIA DERBYSHIRE IN THE 60S, RACHEL’S HOUSE, CAVE DWELLERS and LIFEBOAT. She co-authored HOW NOT TO DROWN with Dritan Kastrati (Thick Skin/ Tron/ Traverse) which won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019. She is also a social theatre practitioner and has worked with all sorts of groups including people within the criminal justice system in UK and USA, asylum seekers and refugees, drug users, survivors of domestic violence and childhood abuse.

Nicola has worked with Traverse’s flagship outreach programme, Class Act, since 1997, taking it to Russia, Ukraine and India. In 2018 she was a recipient of a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Olwen Wymark award for encouraging theatre in the UK.

Nicola is currently Reader in Writing for Performance at University of Edinburgh where she leads the Masters programme in Playwriting.

FELISPEAKS is a Nigerian-Irish visionary poet, performer and playwright celebrated for their profound exploration of identity, social justice, and personal growth through poetry, performance and theatre. As well as being featured in the Irish Leaving Cert Curriculum, their compelling work transcends borders, leaving an indelible mark on international literature.

Jennifer Barclay is a Chicago-bred and DC-based actor-turned-playwright. Her two primary missions as a playwright are to increase the canon of juicy, stereotype-busting roles for women, and to write intimate socio-political stories which inspire curiosity and empathy. Her play Ripe Frenzy won the National New Play Network (NNPN) Smith Prize for Political Theatre and the Dramatists Guild Fund Writers Alliance Grant.
Jennifer’s other plays include Hot Little Slice, Housebound, Obscura, Freedom, NY, The Human Capacity, Danny, Red Helen, The Attic Dwellers, Eat It Too, and she is in the midst of developing a trilogy set in the national parks which includes Yellowstone, This Profound Abyss (set in Yosemite) and Behave Yourself (set in Glacier).
Jennifer’s plays have been produced and developed by Steppenwolf, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, RedCat, The Kennedy Center, Center Stage, Roundhouse Theatre, Signature Theatre, Mosaic Theatre, Solas Nua, Boulder Ensemble Theatre Co, Andy’s Summer Playhouse, American Blues Theatre, Fishamble (Dublin), The International Theatre of Vienna and The Edinburgh Fringe, among others.
Jennifer has a Bachelors in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Playwriting from UC San Diego, where she studied with Naomi Iizuka. She is proud to be an NNPN Affiliated Artist, a member of the Dramatists Guild, and Associate Professor of Playwriting and Performance at the University of Maryland.

Olwen Fouéré Olwen Fouéré is an actor, writer, director and creative artist who works internationally in English and in French.
Her most recent stage work includes the role of First Lady opposite Hugo Weaving in The President by Thomas Bernhard in a co-production between Sydney Theatre Company and The Gate Theatre, Dublin (2024); her solo performances of iGirl by Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (2021); the role of Winter in The Last Season by Force Majeure (Sydney Arts Festival 2021); the role of Mother in Marina Carr’s adaptation of Blood Wedding by Lorca (Young Vic Theatre,London, 2019).
Her acclaimed adaptation and performance of the voice of the river in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake – riverrun - has toured internationally since its premiere in 2013, receiving many awards including the Edinburgh Herald Archangel Award 2014, The Stage Award and the Irish Tiimes Special Tribute Award 2013.
Film work includes The Watchers (Dir. Ishana Night Shyamalan), All you Need is Death (Dir. Paul Duane), Tarot (Dir. Anna Halberg and Spenser Cohen), The Actor (Dir. Duke Johnson), The Northman (Dir. Robert Eggers), Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 (Dir. David Blue Garcia), Violet Gibson, the woman who shot Mussolini (Dir. Barrie Dowdall), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald (Dir. David Yates); Mandy (Dir. Panos Cosmatos) and The Survivalist (Dir Stephen Fingleton).
Television work includes The Tourist S2 (BBC/Netflix), The Crown S5 (Netflix), Holding (ITV), Derry Girls S3 (Channel 4), The Head S2 (HBO).

Olwen was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate from Dublin City University in April 2015 in recognition of her contribution to the arts and culture of Ireland. 

Hannah Khalil was the 2022 Resident Writer at Shakespeare’s Globe and her work there includes Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Henry VIII and The Fir Tree (2021 and 2022). Hannah’s other stage plays include A Museum in Baghdad (Royal Shakespeare Company) which marked the first play by a woman of Arab heritage on a main stage at the RSC,  Interference (National Theatre of Scotland) and the critically acclaimed Scenes from 68* Years - shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award (Arcola Theatre, London, 2016). Scenes has also been mounted in San Francisco, New York, France and in Tunisia in a British Council supported production called Trouf.  

Hannah’s first opera libretto, The Great Stink for young people was produced by English Touring Opera and toured the UK in Spring 2024. She has written multiple radio plays for BBC Radio 4 and TV work includes the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks. Hannah held the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University and the Samuel Beckett Research Centre Creative Fellowship. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is co creative director of the Not Beckett Festival, a festival of new plays inspired by Beckett which will tour internationally from Autumn 2024 until the end of 2025 visiting London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia and Dublin. 

Program B

Joellen Sweeney is an actor, teaching artist and director with a passion for nature-based art! She was most recently seen at Corrib as Aoife/Púca/Ensemble in From a Hole in the Ground. Other favorite roles include The Quince in Forbidden Fruit (Shaking the Tree), Sonya in Uncle Vanya (PETE) and Charlotte Corday in The Revolutionists (Artists Rep). Joellen is a Company Member with Bedrock Theatre, with whom she makes immersive storytelling events in natural landscapes and an advisory board member at The Verdancy Project. When she is not at the theatre, Joellen can be found snuggling her cats, hiking with her husband, Alec, and running into the ocean with all her clothes on. 

“The Following Day was one of the first plays I ever wrote. It was written for an assignment for Portland Center Stage’s Playwriting residency (then called Visions & Voices) and I wrote it the evening before our final project was due—I had become so frustrated with the play I was supposed to be writing that I angrily opened up a new doc and penned this in a half-hour frenzy. I’m pretty sure I’d just read Godot for the first time, and my takeaway was “oh, so we’re just allowed to right ANYTHING and it doesn’t even have to MAKE SENSE??” This play came out, and I realized I liked it a lot, and I turned it in. And there you have it! So this play is a time capsule from 2009, and it’s shared with big big gratitude to Kelsey Tyler and Matt Zrebski, who lead the PCS class; to Holly, for giving it a hearing; and to my greatgrandpa, whose name was Goolsby, though everybody called him Goob. Enjoy!”

Ken Yoshikawa (he/him) is joyful to be sharing his work with Corrib again! Ken is an actor, poet, and playwright based in Portland, Oregon. He is a resident artist at The Historic Alberta House and an alumnus of the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s (PETE) Institute of Contemporary Performance (ICP) program. He has completed two playwriting commissions: We Wrote This With You In Mind for Shaking the Tree Theatre and From a Hole in the Ground for Corrib Theatre, the latter of which earned him a finalist nomination for the Oregon Book Awards. Ken is also the author of Monster Colored Glasses, a full-length poetry collection published by Lightship Press, available for purchase on his website, yoshikawaken.com. Beyond his artistic pursuits, Ken loves to watch anime, practice astrology, take walks in the trees, and be with friends.

“Conditions for Survival came out of my playwright practice in 2020. I titled the collection: Practice as the Real Deal. During that period I was focused on cultivating my trust in my creative impulses, thinking less and doing more. Regarding the content, I have for so long been transfixed and mystified by zombies - in the media and in my dreams - how that horror archetype encapsulates so much about the disruptions of connection and consciousness between each other and within ourselves. I'm curious about how when we are brought to our most mortal truth, the things we truly value tend to sprint right to the front of the line of our consideration, that is if we have the courage to know ourselves well enough. I am also an avid fan of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which was my inspiration for this piece, as no doubt Waiting for Godot was for Tom Stoppard. I offer this short play to live in conversation with the spirit of that literary lineage. Enjoy!”

Silent Faces is a critically acclaimed theatre company led by Josie Underwood, Jack Wakely and Cordelia Stevenson. After training together at Goldsmiths College, the company was formed in 2015 with the aim of making physical, political, fool-ish theatre.

Combining a unique style of physical theatre, clowning, and new writing, Silent Faces create high-concept, seriously silly devised theatre that tackles big issues.

Their latest show ‘Godot is a Woman’ was named as one of The Guardian’s ‘20 theatre, comedy and dance shows you shouldn’t miss’ and shortlisted for the BBC Writer’s Room and Popcorn Writing Award at Edinburgh Fringe, before touring nationally throughout 2022/23/24.

Silent Faces are a company of disabled and neurodivergent artists, and are proudly female and non-binary led.