International productions for local playwright Jaki

DUNDALK playwright Jaki McCarrick is getting used to seeing her name up in lights as her play ‘Belfast Girls’ is fast becoming a favourite on the international stage.

The play about five young women who depart Ireland during the Irish Famine. Based on true accounts, it’s also about emigration and the female experience of the Famine, and ‘ the powers-that-be who scapegoat and victimize their most vulnerable during a crisis.’

It was developed at the National Theatre in London in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and the 2014 BBC Tony Doyle Award.

The latest production of the play which calls for an all female cast opens at Shaking the Tree Theatre, Portland, Oregon, USA, on November 17th, running until December 10th. Directed by Gemma Whelan and presented by one of Portland’s foremost theatre companies, Corrib Theatre. ‘Belfast Girls’ is one of three new Irish plays programmed for Corrib’s 2017/18 season. The Portland production marks the fifth international production of this all-female play, which was Windy City Times’ Critic’s pick when it premiered in Chicago in 2015, and marks the West Coast Premiere of the play. There is also another run of ‘Belfast Girls’ in the US in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when Ghostlight Theatre Company bring the play to the Carnegie Stage in Pittsburgh, directed by Rich Kenzie, opening tomorrow night. Next year, ‘Belfast Girls’ is also to open in Kansas - and will premiere in Australia.

Jaki also has a reading of her new play Bohemians in the Canal Café Theatre in London on November 4th, directed by Tilly Vosburgh and is working on an all-female version of her award-winning play, Leopoldville’, which will be staged in New York next year.