Black Mayo

Information about my recently-produced full-length play Black Mayo can be found on my playwriting website.

Whitney Smith and Kolby Hume in “Black Mayo”
(photography by Kathleen Cavalaro)

Black Mayo rehearsal

Black Mayo

Black Mayo

Rory McIlroy, on feeling more British than Irish:  “This thing goes back hundreds and hundreds of years and there’s wars and battles of all sorts,” he said with a sigh. “It’s a tricky situation to be in.”

Black Mayo rehearsal

Kolby Hume in rehearsal

Black Mayo

One of the (many) reasons I wrote Black Mayo is that pockets of violence still erupt in Northern Ireland, and issues surrounding the Good Friday Agreement are still relevant fifteen years later.

Yesterday, Boston College was forced to hand over tapes made with Dolours Price, and there’s some worry on both sides of the pond that the release of certain information in those tapes could threaten the peace agreement.

Black Mayo

My latest full-length play has been selected to open the 22nd season of the Players’ Ring in Portsmouth, NH.

In the weeks leading up to the 1998 peace agreement between Ireland and Great Britain, an Irish-American family in New York City feud over their political beliefs. As Brighid Mannion tries to shun her family who support the Irish Republican Army’s causes, she is faced with personal challenges along the waterway of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, a gateway to NYC’s harbor and waterway back to Ireland. The boat she builds becomes a symbol of resiliency and shame, as her family loyalty is tested. A clan of barkeeps and artists, the Mannion family tries to persevere from centuries of political struggles, while maintaining their dignity as their legacy haunts them.

Shash & Seb visit Newmarket

Last weekend we hosted our first pajama party when Shash & Seb made an overnight trip to the seacoast as part of their week in NH.

Saturday night we took part in the haunted tour of Fort Constitution and the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse. A paranormal evening indeed!

The next morning we had breakfast at the Big Bean Cafe and spent time at Schanda Park on the Lamprey River.

Click for photos of their visit

Newmarket Mills

And we’ve moved.

We’re now living on the New Hampshire seacoast in the Newmarket Mills, the newly-restored and now greenly-efficient mills that were originally built in 1825 on the Lamprey River (which has never flooded the building—we checked).

From one of our living room windows

The most fun part about this move was watching our unit be restored from the ground up.  In January our mill was empty, and construction had just begun:

I photographed the mill’s progress from the day we put the deposit down in April all the way through our moving-in the first few days of August:

Entire collection of mill photos

I spent most of my adult life in small NYC apartments with few windows that looked directly at brick walls. Now I have seven river-spanning windows, and watch heron, egrets, cormorants, hawks, seagulls, ducklings, pretty boats, and kayakers all day—an enormous life improvement.

Happy Summer to all!

Moving

This summer we’re gettin’ the hell out of Dodge, and heading to the seacoast. In April we put down a deposit on the lovely, gorgeous, deliciously renovated Newmarket Mills. And no, it doesn’t flood. And yeah, it’s taken me this long to link to the photos here. This coming week we go back to measure our unit (since in April it didn’t even have the room frames yet). Expect updated photos soon/eventually.

Click for more delicious mill photos; just keep clicking Next in the slideshow