I wrote it out on a napkin for Meryl... she put it on Twitter and it went viral
Straight-shooter Laoise Sexton tells it like it is – and if that means asking Oliver Stone if his name is fake, then so be it
I had to kiss this actor every night. We could not stand each other. I’d kiss him longer to p*** him off
AS soon as she saw Meryl Streep walking into St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn on November 11, 2015, actress and playwright Laoisa Sexton knew she had to talk to the world’s most famous actress.
Back home in Dublin, a grassroots movement had sprung up, objecting to the lack of female representation in Waking the Nation, the Abbey Theatre’s programme of events to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising.
Waking the Feminists – a group comprising mostly of women in the arts – staged protests outside the national theatre in an attempt to redress that gender imbalance. Pictures of famous actors holding signs saying ‘I support women in Irish theatre’ went viral on social media. Imagine what a coup it would be to get a powerhouse like Streep on board?
‘She walked in with Christine Baranski,’ says Co. Clare native Laoisa, of that other feted actress. ‘I was there with a playwright friend of mine, Lisa Tierney Keogh, and I said: “You know what? We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to ask her.” Meryl Streep is a big hero of Lisa’s so she was like: “Oh my God!” But I said: “No, we’ve got to do it for Dublin”. Because, I just thought, she’s the biggest actress in the world.
‘So I just went over and said “Hi, my name is Laoisa, I’m an actress and this is my friend Lisa, she’s a playwright.
‘We’re from Ireland and tomorrow in our national theatre they’re having a debate about women in theatre”. She already knew about it and so did Christine Baranski. So they were like: “Oh, yeah, absolutely”. Meryl was talking about doing Dancing At Lughnasa. We were talking to her for a while about it. We were saying how women were underrepresented and how it was important that we get represented and all of that. I borrowed a pen off the bartender and I wrote it out on a cocktail napkin. My friend was saying, “You didn’t spell it right!” and then I had to do another one!’
‘The napkin said: “#Wakingthefeminists I support Irish women in Irish theatre.”
‘There was a security guard there and we asked him to take the photo. Meryl Streep was like, “Take a few!” She was thrilled. She wanted to support it. Then she put it on Twitter and it went viral. I think we were in the Guardian newspaper and everything.’ The same chutzpah that saw Laoisa march up to Meryl Streep informs her work as both an actress and a playwright.
You may have seen her on hit TV3 show Red Rock earlier this week playing brazen Mary Flood – a recurring character in the police drama series – who provided a hilariously raunchy alibi for crook Keith Kiely.
Now she is in the New Theatre in Dublin’s Temple Bar until April 1 in her self-penned play, The Last Days Of Cleopatra.
When we meet in the Clarence Hotel, across the road from the theatre, Laoisa has been rehearsing and her eyes are red from crying.
‘It’s pretty intense,’ she says. ‘We have a tagline – can a family that dance together stay together? It’s a pitch-black comedy about a very dysfunctional family that don’t communicate. The father was in a showband in the Seventies and he had to give up his life of rock’n’roll because the mother got sick. The mother is very sick so they’re facing her impending… they’re going to lose her. But it’s not really about a death. It’s more about a family and how they sort of have to come together now. So all the past is dragged up.’
Laoisa is cagey about her own family history, but it is fair to say that it informs her writing. Her mother, who died seven years ago, was a dancing teacher, like the mother in the play.
‘It’s kind of loosely based on her death but not really. I don’t have a brother. There are loads of things I took but there are differences. My dad wasn’t in a showband. He’s an auctioneer – but sort of a performer, there with the hammer. He’d be very good at it. His father was an auctioneer, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. There’s a big, long line of them. But he loves the spotlight and the limelight.’
Laoisa had a peripatetic childhood and when asked where she grew up, sighs, ‘how much time do we have? We were in Canada, Cork, Limerick, Kilrush, Ennis, Clare, the West of Ireland, then all over Dublin as well.’
HER parents adopted her from Canada and she has one sister but they are not close. Laoisa says her parents left the girls with an aunt in Cork ‘for a good year’ while they moved to Dublin. Then her parents were living in rural Ireland while Laoisa was in digs in Dublin, attending secondary school. She feels like she is from Clare.
‘It was just a mad, circus family. I don’t like talking about my family. You don’t really question things when you’re a child,’ she muses. ‘But it was always like that. We were always in new schools. I always remember having to stand up and having to say my name, because I hate my name. That last name, Sexton,’ she cringes. ‘Because it’s a weird name. Now we have a football player, whatever his name is, so it’s grand,’ she adds, of rugby’s Jonny Sexton.
‘The first audition I ever did was for Oliver Stone and he asked me was my name fake. I said, “No, is yours?” I couldn’t believe that came out from me. I got a call back but I didn’t get the part. I can’t believe I was so feisty, though. I was about 21 or something, full of fight.’
But Laoisa seems to be as feisty as ever, writing her first riotous play in 2013 to distract herself between acting jobs.
‘I only really started writing because you go on Netflix and every single poster is ten men and one woman. Nobody notices because it’s the way it’s been for so long. I just feel like instead of me moaning I’d rather spend the time [writing]. Cos I know some actresses who go: “I’ll just do some more headshots”. I mean, headshots? Please!’
Her debut, For Love, about three working-class Dublin women dating during the recession, was an immediate hit.
‘The Irish Rep [theatre off Broadway] picked it up from a festival and I was really surprised they did because it was kind of raunchy and not their kind of stuff, I thought. Because they do quite classical plays.’
She and her co-stars Georgina McKevitt and Jo Kinsella ended up on the The Late Late Show promoting it.
‘We did a lot of things. We went all over the country with it: Derry, Belfast, Waterford, Galway, a couple of
venues in Dublin. I’m actually writing a feature film on that tour because it was such a disaster,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘The play was fine but the behind the scenes, the out-of-control egos…’
From the cast? ‘Yeah,’ she nods. She’s calling the film The Tour – so whatever happened on tour is definitely not staying on tour. Unlike many of her luvvie counterparts, Laoisa does not seem to feel the need to be liked.
Equally, she enjoys other actors who go against the grain. She tells the story of an actor ‘who will remain nameless – neither of us could stand each other’ – with whom she worked in a New York staging of Gas Light.
‘We had to kiss every night, like BIG kisses. I would kiss him longer because I knew it p **** d him off.’
All was forgiven when the same actor confiscated a plastic bag being rattled by a woman in the front row, throwing it side-stage mid-performance.
‘I thought: “Whoa, respect!” It totally changed my view of him.’
She has a flair for dramatic storytelling – in person as well as on stage – and remembers how in that same run, an elderly man died in the audience. ‘We found out later. It was a daughter with her dad. They just stopped the show, pulled him out, then the show went on. New York minute. “We have intermission!”’ laughs Laoisa, who describes her own comedy as ‘sadness turned on its head’.
She moved back to Dublin in January with her husband Trevor Murphy after years spent in the Big Apple, where she studied drama after winning in the Green Card lottery.
They live by the canal in Dublin 8 with their two chihuahuas, Hamlet and Penelope.
‘We’re hoping we don’t get kicked out because the landlord lost his lease to the bank. Dublin is funny in that way. It’s very hard to get a place. People had been telling me. It took us a month to find somewhere.’
Trevor is a director of photography, currently away filming new movie The Belly Of The Whale, starring Pat Shortt and Peter Coonan. Meanwhile, Laoisa plays Natalie in The Last Days Of Cleopatra, which she first staged in New York’s Urban Stages theatre in 2014. ‘We got five stars in the New York Times Critic’s Pick. It was critically acclaimed across the board but it’s just such a different animal here,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be really interesting to see how Irish audiences react to it.’
Laoisa crowd-funded this production and estimates it costs €12,000 to put on a play in Dublin’s small theatres. At least there are lengths she doesn’t have to go to for the home crowd; Laoisa had been so afraid the New York diaspora wouldn’t understand her Dublinese that she tacked a 6ftby-6ft glossary in the theatre foyer. It included definitions like: ‘Battenberg – marzipan cake, popular with grannies’.
‘New Yorkers are very open and they love a good challenge. But I think when it comes to Irish things they go, “Oh, it’s an Irish play” so you get all the women in the fur coats going…’ and here she adopts a flawless New York accent – “What did she say, oh my Gahd? I loved it, I didn’t understand any of it!” We grew up on American telly so we’re more attuned.’
Her third play, The Pigeon In The Taj Mahal, sounds like her favourite of the three because she keeps mentioning it. Her only play to be ‘picked up from the page’ by the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, she hopes to do it here soon. It centres around a mentally challenged man who rescues a traveller woman on her hen night. ‘They’re very brash, very colourful characters. I think in America in a way that gets lost,’ she says, explaining how some audience members wondered why she was wearing a pink tutu and not a black cocktail dress.
Laoisa has sent her work to Irish theatres like Druid and the Abbey, and has spoken to a number of producers about a TV series she has written based on For Love, but nothing has come of those overtures yet.
‘At the time Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope was being done [by RTÉ] so someone said it was very like that,’ she says, of the series starring Amy Huberman and Seana Kerslake.
‘I watched that and I was like, “But that’s 20-year-olds who are very privileged. Mine’s about women on the wrong side of 30 who are from the northside of Dublin…” Then some other producer – I better not say their name, they’re quite well known and well-funded – said they couldn’t do a movie with three women because they already had a movie with a woman lead in it that year,’ she scoffs.
Somehow, we doubt anything is going to stop her... ÷The Last Days Of Cleopatra runs in the New Theatre, Temple Bar until April 1. See tickets.ie.
The New York women in fur coats go, O my Gahd, I loved it but I don’t understand it!