About Making Strange

Making Strange Theatre Company is dedicated to creating dazzling, daring new works by premiering texts from abroad for the Irish stage, and creating original theatrical pieces with a focus on collaboration with international practitioners.

Megan Riordan and fellow American ex-pat Joe Roch formed Making Strange Theatre Company in 2005 as a means to produce (and star in) the Irish premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the Focus Theatre. Following a standing-room-only run and critical acclaim, Hedwig returned to perform a night in the Spiegeltent at the Dublin Fringe Festival and subsequently won the Best in Spiegeltent Award for Dublin Fringe 2005. In July of 2006, Hedwig returned to the Dublin stage once more for a wildly successful run in the Space Upstairs at Project Arts Centre.

Making Strange’s next project, Revisions, was an original devised piece conceived and directed by Megan for the Dublin Fringe Festival 2006 which won the Jayne Snow Award (“For artistic innovation and risk-taking in pursuit of excellence”) and also earned Best Actor and Actress nominations for Joe Roch and Elaine Fox. The company’s third production, The Coming World, premiered American playwright Christopher Shinn’s work in Ireland. Directed by Tom Creed, The Coming World ran at Project Cube in November 2007.

The company’s current production, Luck, premiered at the 2008 Dublin Fringe Festival. Following universal critical acclaim and a sold-out run, the production won the Bewley’s Cafe Theatre “Little Gem” Award at the Fringe and returned to the Dublin stage shortly thereafter for a two-week run at Bewley’s. Luck ran at this year’s Cork Midsummer festival to further acclaim, and is now touring internationally to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, performing at the Underbelly’s Bosco tent in the George’s Square Gardens, and to Origin Theatre Company’s 1st Irish festival at 59E59 in New York City.

The company also recently completed its run of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis in the Space Upstairs at Project Arts Centre, to phenomenal popular and critical acclaim. Directed by recent Columbia MFA graduate Matt Torney, the production marked another Irish premiere for the Making Strange and a major leap forward for the company’s scope and vision, in large part because the company was made an Associate Artist of Project Arts Centre in May 2009.