In ‘Making a Show of Myself,’ Mary Kate O Flanagan Brings a Delicate Touch to Storytelling

If you’re going to make a career out of telling stories, it probably doesn’t hurt to have a name like Mary Kate O Flanagan. As Ms. O Flanagan notes almost gratuitously in “Making A Show of Myself,” a short, sweet solo piece she wrote and is currently performing, fittingly, at Irish Repertory Company, the Land of Saints and Scholars has also produced an abundance of highly regarded storytellers through the years.The accounts in “Myself” are, as the pronoun suggests, very personal; were Ms. O Flanagan a songwriter — another field in which the Irish have excelled, she points out — she would be the confessional sort, perhaps taking the stage with an acoustic guitar and offering introspective ballads about love and loss, with a socially conscious bent.In spite of her shock of red hair, in fact, Ms. O Flanagan, one of six sisters born to an English mum and an Irish father, sustains a gentle, earnest vibe throughout the show’s 75 minutes, even curtsying demurely between stories. At a recent preview, the playwright and performer spoke so softly that I had to strain to hear her at times; a press representative said this wasn’t normally the case, citing the frigid weather in New York.Ms. O Flanagan’s credits include, in addition to screenwriting and story editing for film and television, live competitions known as story slams, which one would think might favor more dynamic personalities. More than once, she has earned the title of Grand Champion Storyteller from The Moth, an organization whose events can be heard on public radio.But perhaps Ms. O Flanagan’s delicate warmth is part of what has endeared her to slam devotees, who surely get their fill of aggression and snark from some other practitioners. Will O’Connell, who directs “Myself,” describes the show in a program note as “carrying on the ancient Irish tradition of the seanchí,” a figure known for “passing down stories from generation to generation to help us make sense of who we are and where we have come from.”In truth, neither the recollections in “Myself” nor the patter between them could be called revelatory. Ms. O Flanagan talks a great deal about the “shape” of stories, structuring her show around the principle that each must have a beginning, middle, and end. She adds, rather more controversially, that they begin only “when your life stops working” — which I suppose might rule out, say, meeting the love of your love, or winning a marathon, or discovering a cure for cancer.Given the show’s consistently reaffirming, frequently joyful nature, I suspect what Ms. O Flanagan means here is that good stories tend to involve challenges — or as she puts it, the need to “put your will against the forces of destiny and create a different outcome.” At another point, we’re informed that stories shape us as well, as we make “decisions about what we care about and what we value.”If such quotes — which may vary from performance to performance, as Ms. O Flanagan hasn’t written a script — suggest the platitudinous musings of a self-help guru, we learn in the final segment of “Myself” that our host has experience in this arena: Since literally losing her voice in her twenties, Ms. O Flanagan tells us, she has sought relief in Reiki, acupuncture, rebirthing, and tree-hugging.Happily, these pursuits are recounted with a self-deprecating sense of humor, as is an opening bit detailing a fraught period in her love life. Much of “Myself” is focused on family, both the kind you’re born into and the type you can acquire through friendship and acts of generosity. We learn that Ms. O Flanagan’s grandmother established a lifelong bond with a German prisoner of war who was ostracized by her neighbors, and how the playwright herself met a young refugee from South Sudan helped bring him to Ireland.Towards the end, Ms. O Flanagan proposes an amendment to the old theory that history is written by the victors: “The victors,” she posits, “are the people who keep telling their stories.” While “Making a Show of Myself” may not be long on fresh insights, there’s a quiet defiance in its sheer positivity, especially in this moment.

In ‘Making a Show of Myself,’ Mary Kate O Flanagan Brings a Delicate Touch to Storytelling

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