Sell-out show coming to Waihi
Actress Morgana O’reilly has performed her provocative solo show Stories About My Body more than 50 times since its debut last year, and she now has plans to make it into a film.
Her innocent, sometimes “terrible” memoirs, which she wrote daily during Form 1 and 2 at Ponsonby Intermediate School, form part of her selfwritten, solo theatre show, which she’s performed to sell-out crowds more than 50 times in New Zealand and Australia, since April 2022.
The 38-year-old will perform it again in three shows for the Tauranga Arts Festival next week.
Following that, a “reincarnation” of it will turn it into a multimedia film so that it can travel around the world without her.
While she’d love to perform it live internationally, it’s hard being away from home for long periods given that she’s a mum to daughter Luna, 8, and son Ziggy, 5.
She is proud of the show, which she describes as unique, witty, fearless, provocative, moving and “quite crazy”.
“I want an audience to walk out and be like, ‘Holy s***’,” she says.
O’reilly is most famous for her role in the Emmy Award-winning shortform series INSIDE, made in 2020
with her director husband Peter Salmon.
Their Emmy lives on a sideboard in their Auckland lounge.
O’reilly has also played the roles of Narelle Stang (Wentworth) and Naomi Canning (Neighbours). Next year, she’ll play the lead character Nicole in Three’s new six-part drama series Friends Like Her. Shot between Kaiko¯ura and Auckland, it’s a “big juicy, intriguing, salacious tale”.
She could be talking about Stories About My Body with that synopsis, because it features nudity and some
laugh-out-loud moments, including when she relives her job at a New York foot fetish club.
In her 20s and broke, she was paid to have her feet licked and tickled by those who find it a “kink”.
The final part of the show is then about pregnancy and birth and features a video of her delivering her own youngest child, filmed by her midwife on her iphone, and saved permanently to O’reilly’s favourites folder.
And like all good stories, its core lies in its foundation. When it comes to her tween diary entries, she was struck by the “paradox feel” of her adolescent musings, which on one hand are the writings of a child and on the other, someone who is desperate to be a grown-up.
Working some of those diary entries into a stage show and having an objective, “almost retrospectively belittling” take on them, was tough.
She recalls breaking down in rehearsal one day while repeating entries such as “I can’t lose weight and I’m fat”.
She then recalls coming off stage in Wellington, and because the show is a “love letter” to that 12-year-old, she realised: ‘That’s what this show is. We’re doing right by that little girl.’
She uses humour to lighten the mood, but would not call herself a stand-up comedian.
This show is also different to her previous one-woman show The Height of the Eiffel Tower, a play that she made in 2008 to make money so she could travel overseas.
While the audience for Stories About My Body is mainly female, men attend too and have shared how emotional it made them.
“It’s a celebration of having ‘a’ body, and also, especially with childbearing, birthing and rearing, men are so completely and beautifully part of that story. I’ve had some amazing feedback from men. I think it goes beyond, hopefully, being a female show.”