Kathleen Cahill

Kathleen Cahill

Kathleen Cahill is a graduate in Musical Theatre at the Tisch School of the Arts. Her awards include three Edgerton Foundation Awards, the Jane Chambers Playwrighting Award, two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Playwrighting Awards, a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, a Rockefeller Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts New American Works Grant, and a Drama League Award. She was a DGF Travelling...
Kathleen Cahill is a graduate in Musical Theatre at the Tisch School of the Arts. Her awards include three Edgerton Foundation Awards, the Jane Chambers Playwrighting Award, two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Playwrighting Awards, a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, a Rockefeller Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts New American Works Grant, and a Drama League Award. She was a DGF Travelling Master in 2019. Her play Charm (NNPN Showcase) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; her play The Persian Quarter was nominated for a Steinberg Award. (Both published by Dramatic Publishing.) Her produced musicals include Friendship of the Sea (North Shore Music Theatre) Dakota Sky(Olney Theatre) an opera, Clara, two opera/cabarets, A Tale of Two Cities: Paris and Berlin in the Twenties (Maryland Center for the Performing Arts), a comic opera cabaret, Fatal Song (most recently Utah Opera)
a short opera, and The Better Man, (Utah Opera)) Her plays include the comedy, Course 86B in the Catalogue (Salt Lake Acting Company) The Still Time (Georgia Rep/ Porchlight Theatre, Chicago) the comedy, Women Who Love Science Too Much (Porchlight Theatre and NPR Radio) Charm ( National New Play Network Festival, Salt Lake Acting Company premiere, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Dallas; Orlando Shakespeare; Taffety Punk, Washington D.C., New Hampshire Theatre Project, among others) The Persian Quarter ( Salt Lake Acting Company, Merrimack Rep.) Harbur Gate, an NNPN commission. (Salt Lake Acting Company, 16thstreet Theatre, Chicago.) Henry, Louise and Henri (one act) and The Robertassey at Women’s Playwrights Initiative, Ivoryton Playhouse, CT; The Robertassey was the featured play at the 2019 Seven Devil’s Playwrights Conference. Silent Dancer a groundbreaking dance/play premiered at the Salt Lake Acting Company in April 2019. A new musical, LATE, about the effects of gun violence on a small group of high school students, will be presented at Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2020 (Postponed due to coronavirus) and is currently a project with Moonbox Productions, Boston. Recent: Her play One Stone was a semi-finalist at the Gary Marshall New Play Festival, and the first prize winner in the Women’s Voices Festival at Mad Cow Theatre, Orlando. Madera Canyon was recently produced in “The Seven Festival” at Fusion Theatre, Albuquerque. She wrote the screenplay for the independent feature, Downtown Express.

Plays

  • ONE STONE by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 3
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    Cast: 
    2
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    Genre: drama, period
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    Keyword: science, women + 3 more
    Genre: drama, period
    Keyword: science, women, Albert Einstein, History, dark romance
    SYNOPSIS
    ONE STONE is a play about an intimate relationship between two scientists – one who became internationally famous, and one who disappeared from history. It is a story about the sexual, emotional and intellectual connection between Albert Einstein and the physicist Mileva Marić who was his first wife. It dramatizes the uncredited role she played in Einstein’s breakthrough achievements, and...
    SYNOPSIS
    ONE STONE is a play about an intimate relationship between two scientists – one who became internationally famous, and one who disappeared from history. It is a story about the sexual, emotional and intellectual connection between Albert Einstein and the physicist Mileva Marić who was his first wife. It dramatizes the uncredited role she played in Einstein’s breakthrough achievements, and raises questions about how gender affects the success or failure of talent. It is a historical play which leads us to ask if it is any easier for women in science today.


  • CHARM by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 4
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    Cast: 
    7
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    Genre: biography, comedy + 2 more
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    Keyword: charming, Margaret Fuller
    Genre: biography, comedy, drama, romantic comedy
    Keyword: charming, Margaret Fuller
    It is set in the 1840’s, about people who actually existed: a remarkable woman, Margaret Fuller, and her relationships with many of the great literary figures of her time—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne—men whose works we know well. But the past is an invention, and therefore the characters glide between worlds: they live in and out of history, in and out of the past.
    ...
    It is set in the 1840’s, about people who actually existed: a remarkable woman, Margaret Fuller, and her relationships with many of the great literary figures of her time—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne—men whose works we know well. But the past is an invention, and therefore the characters glide between worlds: they live in and out of history, in and out of the past.

    The play is about writers, people who made worlds out of words. The language of the play is rich. It is also full of anachronisms. Margaret Fuller was a woman ahead of her time, and so she sometimes uses the language of our time, and dreams our dreams.

    On another level, CHARM is about several famous men, and one forgotten woman. It is a play about who history remembers and who it forgets, and why.

    It is a surreal comedy of manners, a play about what men and women want from each other, the difficulties of communication, and how we are inhibited or freed by the manners and conventions of our time.

    It’s also about American Transcendentalism, the belief in the freedom of the human spirit to transcend the confines of history and time. I believe great writing can free the soul. The writings of the Transcendentalists continue to inspire me, and I believe we need them more than ever now, as our towers of greed crumble around us.


  • HARBUR GATE by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 3
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    Cast: 
    6
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    Genre: adventure, drama + 1 more
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    Keyword: NNPN Commission
    Genre: adventure, drama, political
    Keyword: NNPN Commission
    Five soldiers -- two men and three women -- are traveling on the same convoy in northern Iraq at the height of the war. A hidden rape before the journey even began, tests their warriors' code-- and their humanity-- in ways they could never have imagined.
  • The Robertassey (Roberta's odyssey) by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 4
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    Cast: 
    4
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    Genre: comedy
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    Keyword: magical realism
    Genre: comedy
    Keyword: magical realism
    A comedy about grief, which takes place during Roberta's journey back to Ireland, with a box containing the ashes of her recently deceased alcoholic father. He was always been a source of shame to her. And now that he's dead, he seems to be controlling the decisions about the placement of his ashes in an Irish lake outside of Dublin. Unfortunately Air Lingus loses Robert's suitcase with the ashes inside.
  • SILENT DANCER by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 1
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    Cast: 
    8–16
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    Genre: drama, movement/physical + 1 more
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    Keyword: SOCIAL HISTORY, racism + 3 more
    Genre: drama, movement/physical, period
    Keyword: SOCIAL HISTORY, racism, homophobia, coming of age, women
    SILENT DANCER is a play/dance/romance – where the characters express themselves in
    dialogue and also in dance/movement.
    It is set in New York City in 1921, and tells the story of an 18-year old naive, white, Irish-American maid named Rosie Quinn, who works for the most famous couple in New York, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda had black maids growing up in Montgomery, Alabama. She tells Rosie...
    SILENT DANCER is a play/dance/romance – where the characters express themselves in
    dialogue and also in dance/movement.
    It is set in New York City in 1921, and tells the story of an 18-year old naive, white, Irish-American maid named Rosie Quinn, who works for the most famous couple in New York, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda had black maids growing up in Montgomery, Alabama. She tells Rosie that the Irish and African Americans are the same -- mysterious and primitive. When Rosie quotes this to Perry, the African-American piano player she's in love with, he becomes angry in ways Rosie does't understand. She does't understand the pain of racism, and she doesn't understand homophobia -- her beloved brother Michael is a World War I veteran and a closeted gay man. Rosie and Michael have danced on street corners for pennies since they were kids. Now they have dreams of becoming the next Fred and Adelle Astaire. Rosie's education, or, as she puts it, "How it was... what I lived, loved, learned and lost" is the story of SILENT DANCER.
  • HENRY, LOUISE and HENRI by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 2
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    Cast: 
    3
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    Genre: comedy
    Genre: comedy
    Henry and Louise, long married, are travelling in France. Louise steals a painting by Henri Matisse.
  • Course 86B In The Catalogue by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 2
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    Cast: 
    4
    ·
    Genre: adventure, comedy
    ·
    Keyword: science, History
    Genre: adventure, comedy
    Keyword: science, History
    SYNOPSIS:

    COURSE 86B IN THE CATALOGUE is a comedic riff on evolution and time. It is set in a remote corner of an arid western state, and tells the story of Stevie Stuart, a paleontologist who is teaching a course on the history of life on earth, at an obscure community college in the desert. Her lectures are constantly being interrupted by: her soon-to-be ex husband Bill, a womanizing...
    SYNOPSIS:

    COURSE 86B IN THE CATALOGUE is a comedic riff on evolution and time. It is set in a remote corner of an arid western state, and tells the story of Stevie Stuart, a paleontologist who is teaching a course on the history of life on earth, at an obscure community college in the desert. Her lectures are constantly being interrupted by: her soon-to-be ex husband Bill, a womanizing financier who lost his job in the financial meltdown, and is now living in a remodeled chicken coop, hoping to win her back so they can start a family – “evolution is just romance by another name” he says.; her best student, Dell, who is a genius at anatomical drawing, but seems to be from a previous century; and Dell’s boy friend, Sterling, an ambitious young man who lives in a tree and isn’t fully Homosapien. In this part of the country, everyone lives in the present, but the present isn’t the same for everyone. Stevie Stuart, who is ever-ready when it comes to fieldwork, makes one astonishing discovery after another as she hikes out of town, “off the dirt road.” She finds a 500-million year old fossil called opabinia, which represents a vanished, unique life form, and when she discovers the ancient, petrified bones and teeth of ardipithecus, an early hominid, she starts to believe that life itself began here in this obscure deserted corner of the planet. Maybe it did. But first, Stevie’s existence as a scientist and a woman are put to the ultimate test when she loses first her evidence, and then her life…. perhaps not to be re-discovered for another 6, 000 years.
  • SONG OF THE SHIRT BY NATHAN GREY by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 1
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    Cast: 
    6
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    Genre: docudrama/historic, fable/folktale + 3 more
    Genre: docudrama/historic, fable/folktale, melodrama, period, political
    An imaginatively told story based on actual events in the 19th century. Plumy Gray, a girl working in a cotton mill in Massachusetts is unknowingly, but intimately connected to a slave in Virginia. A song is the thread weaving the characters together like a piece of cotton cloth in this theatrical American tale of lust, greed and redemption.