THISISPOPBABY Stage The U.S. Premiere of Mark O'Halloran's Hit Play CONVERSATIONS AFTER SEX

THISISPOPBABY return to the Irish stage after a magnificent programme of work in 2022. This year the company go transatlantic with the U.S. premiere of Mark O'Halloran's intimate, outstanding drama which was a huge theatrical success in 2021, Conversations After Sex - an honest account of anonymous sexual encounters, where a clever heightened realism takes centre stage. The play then returns to Ireland for a run at Project Arts Centre where the play made its world premiere, this April, and touring nationwide to five venues.

In a series of unexpected and unguarded conversations after anonymous sexual encounters, a woman discovers men with the same deep need to communicate and connect in the lonely, atomised city. Conversations After Sex examines grief and the type of honesty that can thrive through anonymity. Ten years after Trade (Best New Play, Irish Times Theatre Awards 2011), multi award-winning writer Mark O'Halloran, director Tom Creed and THISISPOPBABY reunite in 2023 for this funny, tender and brutally honest new play exploring intimacy, loss, grief, and connection.

O'Halloran began writing each encounter of the play, scene by scene, sending each individually to Creed, both THISISPOPBABY collaborators of over a decade - until they began to take shape as a play traversing one year in its protagonist's life.

Winning the 2022 Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play and having earned much acclaim for its tour-de-force performances by Kate Stanley Brennan and Fionn Ó Loingsigh, the play's surprising candor and vulnerability of sexual hookups in Conversations After Sex, is something that really needs to be experienced. Playwright Mark O'Halloran's humane script, and director Tom Creed's meticulous staging underscores the intensity of small and fleeting moments creating a realistic look at the landscape of intimacy in this era. Carrying audiences across a year of vastly varied conversations-cathartic, candid, vulnerable, evasive, flirtatious, biting, curt, violent, gentle-after sex, the play is a gripping portrait of the facets of ourselves we allow others to see, and how much our vision of others is a projection of our own needs.

O'Halloran says, "The encounters in the play often serve an emotional as well as physical purpose, and set up a unique confessional space between two people. I wanted to write a character dealing with unbearable pain through these interactions. The weight of pain is too huge for her to deal with the people in her life-but she can deal with her pain piece by piece with each new encounter."

With a week-long run at Project Arts Centre, and a nationwide tour to five venues across the country this April and May, the play will have its U.S. premiere at New York's Irish Arts Center (IAC), renowned for presenting dynamic, inspiring, collaborative experiences of the evolving arts and culture of Ireland and Irish America. Following IAC's 2018 acclaimed co-presentation of THISISPOPBABY's RIOT at NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts, the beloved company comes to IAC's versatile, state-of-the-art new home for the first time. Performances take place February 22-March 11 (with an official opening February 26) at Irish Arts Center (726 11th Ave). The presentation marks a New York City encore for O'Halloran and Creed, whose opera double-bill Mary Motorhead and Trade, with score by Emma O'Halloran, recently concluded an acclaimed run in the 2023 Prototype Festival.

CAST: Kate Stanley Brennan, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Niamh McCann and Clelia Murphy

CREATIVE TEAM:

Written by Mark O'Halloran

Directed by Tom Creed

Set and Costume Design: Sarah Bacon

Lighting Design: Sarah Jane Shiels

Sound Design: Ivan Birthistle

Music Composition: Emma O'Halloran

Movement & Intimacy Director: Sue Mythen

For fifteen years, THISISPOPBABY has been ripping up the space between popular culture, counterculture and high art, providing vehicles for our associate artists' dreams and exhilarating access points to the arts for diverse audiences. Our shows have played
 to 275,000 people (and counting) around Ireland, the UK, Australia and beyond, winning major theatre awards and thrilling audiences.

THISISPOPBABY has just set the city alight with their smash-hit, critically acclaimed show WAKE, playing to over 7000 in The National Stadium as part of Dublin Fringe 2022.

Other recent highlights include: Winning Best New Play for Conversations After Sex by Mark O'Halloran (Irish Theatre Awards 2022); Winning Best Production (Dublin Fringe Festival 2016) and touring the world with RIOT; a sold-out world tour and accompanying film of Panti's High Heels in Low Places in 2015; Where We Live Festival in 2018 as part of St Patrick's Festival, a highlight of which was Tara Flynn's acclaimed Not A Funny Word.

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