Donal O’Kelly’s one-man play “Catalpa” was such a hit at the 2001 Chicago Humanities Festival that the festival’s presenters tried to bring him back the next year. But strict new visa regulations prevented the Irish playwright and actor from entering the United States in time for the 2002 festival.
This year organizers got their paperwork done, and O’Kelly will present an encore of “Catalpa” tonight at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. The free performance will follow the annual July meeting of the cultural group known as The Humanities Festival.
And in November O’Kelly will return to perform another one-man play, “Bat the Father Rabbit the Son,” as part of the organization’s yearly main event, the Fall Celebration, from Oct. 25 to Nov. 9.
Since its original one-day program in 1990, the group has expanded its programming to include year-round events culminating in the Fall Celebration. Organizers expect more than 45,000 audience members for the readings, performances, lectures, films, discussions and concerts that compose the celebration.
One of the festival’s smaller programs is O’Kelly’s performance of “Catalpa” tonight.
O’Kelly, who is well known in Ireland and Europe, has won numerous awards at the Melbourne International Festival and Edinburgh Festival, among others. He also has performed as far afield as Australia as well as in Europe and at home in Ireland.
While performing a show in western Australia, O’Kelly came across the story of captain George Anthony, who set out in 1875 on the whaling ship “Catalpa” to rescue six Irish political prisoners from Fremantle Colony in Australia. He found the story fascinating, and decided to dig deeper.
“There were a number of written sources, so we did a lot of research and wrote the script,” said O’Kelly, who first presented the show in 1995 in Ireland.
During the performance he takes on the persona of Matthew Kidd, a screenwriter who imagines an epic movie based on Anthony’s rescue, and portrays all of the film’s characters himself. The captain, the sailors, the ghost of the captain’s mother-in-law, and even the sea itself are brought to life by O’Kelly’s voice.
“The theatrical challenge is for the audience to see the epic movie in their heads, larger than they could on the screen,” he said.
That difference between theater and film is very important to O’Kelly.
“When theater is good, it can move an audience the way on-screen can’t,” he said. “There’s a dynamic relationship between actor and audience.”
Although the 2001 Humanities Festival was the Chicago debut of “Catalpa,” O’Kelly previously had performed in New York, Toronto, Pittsburgh and other North American cities.
Eileen Mackevich, president of the Chicago Humanities Festival, called O’Kelly’s 2001 performance “one of the most critically acclaimed, artistically successful programs that year,” and said many people were concerned that he hadn’t reached the largest possible audience.
Their solution was to invite him back.
“I love touring — it’s a clean deal with the audience,” O’Kelly said. “They don’t know me or my bag of tricks. The challenge for me is to give people a night of the theater they’ll remember.”
