Frasier star inspired by creative Christian

City Lives – Bernie Ní Fhlatharta meets resourceful playwright and TV writer Christian O’Reilly

The story of how Chapatti, a play featuring John Mahoney that is running in this year’s Galway International Arts Festival, got staged is almost as interesting as the drama itself. Playwright, Christian O’Reilly had written the play a number of years ago with the American actor from the TV sitcom Frasier in mind.

In fact it had originally been written as either a short film script or radio play and was indeed produced as a radio play and broadcast in a very different form.

But once Christian saw Mahoney on the stage in Galway during a previous Arts Festival, he knew the script had to be staged and he went working on it again.

Two years ago when he was happy with the reworked script, he asked the Festival’s Artistic Director if he could give it to Mahoney who was in a play in the Town Hall Theatre that year with Chicago’s Northlight Theatre Company.

Apparently, professional actors are not supposed to read unsolicited scripts, but with nothing else to read on the plane on his way home to Chicago, Mahoney read Christian’s script and the rest is history.

Scripts are usually sent to agents who represent actors but Christian had a gut feeling that he needed to go directly to Mahoney.

“I mightn’t have done that had I not had a good relationship with the Town Hall staff having done a residency there,” he says.

“It was a long shot but a few months later I got an email from him (Mahoney) saying he loved it. Then the Northlight [Theatre] people got in touch to invite me to Chicago to do a public reading of the play in front of about 200 people followed by a Q&A. That was positive.

“I really wanted the play to be heard and seen by an audience and I always thought John Mahoney would be perfect for the part. It’s a huge compliment when an actor of his calibre wants to do your work.”

Christian was right. Mahoney himself thought he would be ideal for the part and insisted Penny Slusher from their Northlight Theatre Company play the other part. She played Stella in Stella & Lou at last year’s Galway event.

They play two lonely pet-lovers who meet through their pets and strike up a relationship if not a romance in this one-act play.

“I was brought up in a house of cats and dogs, my grandmother’s house in Listowel and I always wanted to write about dog — and cat — owners, about their humanity and tenderness to their pets,” Christian explains.

“I really had no expectations that John Mahoney would even read the script. Leaving a script in an actor’s dressing room is not something I would normally do. I had asked Paul Fahy (Artistic Director of GIAF) and he had advised me to be ambitious for the play and to do what I felt I had to do to get it staged.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.