Kevin Keelan Monologues - Autumn 2009

 

In October 2009, we played host to a performance of the “Kevin Keelan Monologues”.

This was a one-time informal dramatic reading from an original manuscript called “My Irish Diaries: Travels Through Ireland, North And South”, recounting the first 2 of his 9 Irish sojourns, from the naive but sincere perspective of a clueless American travelling abroad for the first time. PART 1 is called “My Irish Lass”, and is basically a romance, recounting the wonders of falling in love with a woman and a country at the same time. In Part 2, “That Celtic Summer”, he retells the misadventures of a life-changing storytelling tour of the Emerald Isle. He has made over 300 performances on radio, TV and in theatres from Los Angeles to San Francisco and from Limerick to Belfast. His performance is really very different from what we are used to hearing, mixing the dramatic with the humorous in a kind of “dramedy” that reflects the complexities of life, but the universality of his stories becomes readily apparent to diverse audiences.

Kevin Keelan is an old, fat American hippie who has had some success telling crazy stories from a life lived with verve and irony. So far, Kevin has written and performed in 10 original monologues, with content drawn from the often lurid pages of reality. (The past is not always pretty, mixing equal parts humor, pathos and drama.) Kevin resides and performs mostly in northern California, in a seaside town called Santa Cruz, on the beautiful Monterey Bay. He is also a visual artist, specializing in a discipline called ‘altered books’, and a longtime miscreant and notorious troublemaker. He makes annual pilgrimages to Ireland to visit his sainted (Non)Irish mum in breathtaking Glengarriff, where he has always been made to feel welcome and at home among friends, despite his weird American ways and the funny way he talks.

This performance proved to be a welcome diversion from all the doom and gloom of the recession.

 

Photos from the performance
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