Morgana O'Reilly bares all - emotionally and physically - in her solo show Stories About My Body. She tells Joanna Mathers how she got there and what it's like to be part of a New Zealand Emmy-winning team.
The "um" is a red herring. A ruse. A momentary lapse. On stage at Casa Cipriani, New York City, rapper Method Man is announcing the winner of the International Emmy Award for Best Short-Form Series. "And the winner is, um" ...
in that infinitesimal "um" she knows they haven't won, it's a foreign series, Gente hablando or Diario de Um Confinado, he's struggling with the name
... "Inside."
On November 22, 2021, Morgana O'Reilly is seated on Antonia Prebble's deck. It's that stage of Auckland's lockdown when people can have "picnics". A television is set up, a few friends gathered. A baby on a hip, a dog wandering, companionable, from guest to guest. An announcement, met with joy, swearing, screaming, is captured on video.
"I've watched that moment so many times. We didn't notice Antonia's little baby, he got a huge fright, poor thing! We were so loud! Afterwards, I had a few glasses of champagne and walked back home."
Inside, a dark, insidious short work, was created and directed by O'Reilly's partner, Peter Salmon with Shoshana McCallum and Dan Musgrove. Crafted in level 2 lockdown, O'Reilly plays Rose, a tormented introvert who works for a Zoom-esque video app and spends her time spying on the lives of others.
O'Reilly calls it "a real example of Kiwi ingenuity, with Covid as a backdrop" and admits to a huge sense of pride. "But this masks a Kiwi sense of internalised shame around winning."
The award statue, she explains, has only just arrived in the mail. "It's quite surreal, it's kind of like getting merch from a movie. It's a really shiny statue of a naked lady, that's been given to us for a little show we made in lockdown for a micro budget."
Auckland-based O'Reilly has a fair amount to feel proud of right now. There's that Emmy Award, her supporting role in quirky Kiwi smash hit Nude Tuesday, her two gorgeous kids Luna (6) and Ziggy (3), and the forthcoming reprise of her lauded solo show, Stories About My Body, set to show at Q Theatre from August 4-6.
Drawing on material from 12-year-old O'Reilly's diaries, her recollections of selling her toes to foot worshippers in noughties New York, and the home births of her two babies, it's a moving, visceral work that engages theatre-goers at both macrocosmic and microcosmic levels.
The diaries, written while O'Reilly was at Ponsonby Intermediate, have been simmering as the subject of a dramatic work for decades.
She dutifully kept a diary every day. They were extremely personal, kept "under lock and key".
"It is such an interesting age. It straddles the baby years, but at the same time I'm desperately wanting to grow up, hang out with dudes, drive in cars, and travel," she says.
This was the 1990s: heroin chic, Kate Moss, "nothing tastes better than skinny". Her mother, celebrated dancer Mary Jane O'Reilly (founder of Limbs Dance Company), was taut and toned. O'Reilly's "chubbier-sized body" was an affront to her 12-year-old self.
"I wasn't a long and lean machine. And I had an absolute fury around my body. It really affected my internal sense of worth."
This anguish was burnt on to the pages of her diaries: confrontational, naive, pre-teen pain. And as the years passed, the contents of these diaries tickled the edges of her creative consciousness.
In this time, she would enjoy phenomenal professional success as an actor, starring in Aussie soap opera Neighbours, leading the Kiwi television show Mean Mums, and landing a regular gig on Aussie prison drama Wentworth.
While this success was welcomed, O'Reilly admits to a nagging sense of creative impotency. After the busy-ness of early motherhood (Luna and Ziggy were born in 2016 and 2018 respectively) she says this sense became more pronounced.
But there were internal obstacles. "I was really worried about making mistakes," she admits.
O'Reilly explains that her 2008 stage show (The Height of the Eiffel Tower) had been such a smash hit that she was concerned she wouldn't be able to repeat the success.
But she finally came to the point where she felt that she didn't have to justify, or even understand, the motives behind what she was doing. And if others didn't like it, that was cool.
So, in early 2021 she took herself off to the family bach at Waihi Beach and set about creating a new work, with the diaries as a starting point.
The process of revisitation was emotionally complex. The diaries, as funny, gauche and naive as they are, were a snapshot of self.
"At one stage, when I had been practising lines [extracted from the diaries], this feeling weaselled its way into my gut: 'This is me, this is me, this is me.'
"I had a really big cry," she says. "It felt like I was giving my inner child a really big cuddle."
The second part, Stories About My Body, which deals with her experience selling her feet as objects of worship in New York City, 2009, is liberating.
Aged 23, she had been travelling the world and was looking for a way to fund herself back home to New Zealand. "I felt bulletproof and I was ready to do something mad for the airfare home," she explains.
On Craigslist (the American online classified ad service) she found an ad for women prepared to offer their feet for cash at "foot worship" parties. She decided to give it a try.
"They were held in these really divey clubs in the Bowery. Men would hire girls for sessions, and suck your toes. There were heaps of different types of men, your typical down and outs, uptown guys dressed in suits. They all liked different things. Some of them hated nail polish, for example.
"It was interesting, weird, and strange. I remember strutting down the street at 3am, with a bra full of US dollars, thinking 'I am the dirtiest minx and I am awesome.'"
The third pillar of Stories About My Body deals with her experience of pregnancy and childbirth. It's notable in that it turns the cliches of birth – as terrifying, harrowing, horrifying – on their head.
"I found birth to be the complete opposite. I had two home births and they were so awesome – the oxytocin is for everyone in the room. It's an incredible rite of passage and everyone deserves a special birth. I really wanted to create a birth narrative that was not filled with fear."
Stories About My Body was set to premiere in Auckland on August 17 last year, the day we moved - once again - into level 4 lockdown. The show was then scheduled for March this year (hello, Omicron). Eventually there was a brief season in May. This proved so popular that a new season has been scheduled for early August.
One of these sessions is dedicated to caregivers. Held at 10.30am, it's for people with small kids, who are unable to attend night sessions.
"It's my offering to people [with kids] who were avid theatre-goers but now find it hard to get out at night. They can drop their kids off at school and come to the show. People with babies under 1 are also welcome, but it's not a kids' show, so if you turn up with a 5-year-old you won't be allowed in, sorry!"
She has hosted these shows before and loves "seeing all these babies beaming up at me. It's so lovely and so cute."
But the show is definitely for adults (and babies who don't know what's happening) and has a fair share of challenging content. It opens with her running on to the stage with no top on. She is enthusiastic about the comic potential of "badly behaved boobs".
"Boobs are so funny!" she laughs. "I really think the female body has so much comedy to offer. When I was in my 20s, my body really behaved itself - within Western ideal beauty standards. But now I'm in my late 30s, I've had two kids and it doesn't do what it's meant to do. So, it offers so many comic possibilities."
Stories About My Body will run at Q Theatre from August 4-6, with a 10.30am show on Friday, August 5.
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