About Making Strange
Making Strange explores the stories we tell ourselves—that is, not simply the stories told in a particular time or culture, but the stories we as individuals tell ourselves to get through our lives. We investigate where they come from, how they change, and how the public and live act of communal sharing through art has the power to transform the personal story each audience member carried with them to that moment and allow it to grow, strengthen or dissolve in service of something new.
Megan Riordan and fellow American ex-pat Joe Roch formed Making Strange 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 next production, Luck, premiered at the 2008 Dublin Fringe Festival. Following unanimous 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 the 2009 Cork Midsummer festival to further acclaim, and toured internationally later that year to the Edinburgh Fringe, performing at the Underbelly‘s Bosco tent in the Georges‘ Square Gardens, and to Origin Theatre Company‘s 1st Irish festival at 59E59 Theatres in New York City. The international tour continued with a four-week engagement in the Garden of Unearthly Delights at the Adelaide Fringe Festival (February-March 2010) in a co-production with Melbourne-based company Strut ‘n‘ Fret.
The company also ran The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis in the Space Upstairs at Project Arts Centre in July 2009, 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 (now designated as Project CATALYST) in May 2009. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot earned two nominations for Irish Times Theatre Awards in January 2010: Best Supporting Actress for Kate Brennan, and Best Director for Matt Torney.
2010 was the company’s most prolific year in terms of generating new work: a original, solo, one-on-one ritual- based theatrical communion called Evaporated (Lost and Found), created and performed by Megan at thisispopbaby‘s inaugural WERK at the Peacock; the creation of the Pop Céilí, a trad-pop-mashup musical venture that premiered at Electric Picnic, went on to play the ABSOLUT Fringe Festival Club, WERK, and finished the year by opening for The Rubberbandits; and True Enough! The Interactive Post-Fact Game Show with Real Cash Prizes, also at ABSOLUT Fringe, which Christine Madden named as one of the “Unusual, innovative ideas for performance that change the way I look at the world and myself” in the Irish Times. 2010 also featured an extended development period and workshop showing at Project Arts Centre for a multimedia piece entitled Jacques Cousteau is in The Silent World, written and directed by Matt Torney in collaboration with the company.
Scheduled for 2012 at present is a further solo autobiographical piece by Megan, You Remember the Stories You Wish Were True, created in collaboration with Luck‘s Dodd Loomis, currently under development as part of Fishamble‘s New Play Clinic.
