BELFAST GIRLS, by Jaki McCarrick, opens in Kansas City, Missouri on April 7th and runs until April 29th. Presented by Fishtank Theatre, BELFAST GIRLS (which is about the female experience of the Irish Famine but is also an allegory of the 2008 Irish banking crisis), was developed at the National Theatre Studio, London in 2012, and then shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 2014 BBC Tony Doyle Award. Chicago’s Artemisia Theater gave the play its US premiere in 2015, where it was the Windy City Times’ Critics’ Pick. Having had three transatlantic productions in 2017, the Kansas City show is the seventh international run of the play and is billed as the US regional premiere.
Details about the Kansas City production: http://charlottestreet.org/event/belfast-girls/
Fishtank’s Artistic Director Heidi Van directs this show. Fishtank, founded in 2009, presents contemporary experimental live theatre that challenges the way theatre meets its audience. Material performed by the Fishtank is fresh, its content progressive and its writers and performers committed to the aesthetic of risk-taking.
Working with set designer, Mark Exline, BELFAST GIRLS will be staged aboard a multi-level ghost ship, resembling a skeleton, and the skin and bones of the population a government let starve.
Jaki was recently interviewed by Michael Davis of “Breaking the Fourth Wall” theatre journal about the genesis of the play:
Q&A with Jaki McCarrick, author of Belfast Girls
She has just completed the screenplay of BELFAST GIRLS under the mentorship of the Irish Film Board.