Show captures a ‘moment in time’
[Theatre] brings me to this place now, talking into a black abyss of not being able to see much, but feeling this beautiful audience. Morgana O’Reilly
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 like “I can’t lose weight and I’m fat”.
“That was ‘little me’ saying those awful things. I had such a big cry.”
She then recalls coming off stage in Wellington this year, and because the show is a “love letter” to that 12-year-old, she had the realisation: ‘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.
She is a “storyteller”.
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.
Once away, she performed it in people’s living rooms as a way of thanking them for letting her stay on their couch, and up until 2014 in multiple cities and at festivals, in exchange for a koha.
Using living room lights as opposed to stage lights meant she learned that people’s concentrated faces often resemble “more disgust than beaming faces of wonder”.
“It’s like when you look over at someone in the car next to you in traffic. [They’re] our resting thinking faces,” she said with a laugh.
“[Theatre] brings me to this place now, talking into a black abyss of not being able to see much, but feeling this beautiful audience.”
While the audience for Stories About My Body is mainly female, men, too, attend 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.”
She wrote it at Waih¯ı Beach in 2021, where her family have had the same 1970s bach since she was a preschooler.
It’s a place she goes when she needs to be “thoroughly creative”, and she will perform in Waih¯ı Beach for the first time on October 26 when she brings the show there.
In planning the show, she tells the story of going for a walk on the sand between the “yellow dairy” and the Waihi Beach Surf Club, nutting out the format like a “mad professor”, ranting and raving out loud to herself. And then she received a sign. “I said, ‘Okay, that’s how it ends. What do we think?’
“I looked down, and at my feet, there was this beautiful little rock that looked just like a heart. The universe was like, ‘Yip, we like it’.”
“I was like, ‘Okay, great, I can trust you, Waih¯ı Beach, to tell me whether you like it or not’.”
She pocketed the rock and she still has it.
Fittingly, her show is a heart story. “This show brings the realisation that your body is not an enemy, but something to marvel at and congratulate.”