Alum writes her way to success

The riot of a play “Kate Crackernuts,” running this
past month at the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles and now
extended into November, is the fevered brainchild of one of
America’s most exciting and emerging playwrights ““
Sheila Callaghan.

A New Jersey native, Callaghan distinguished herself at UCLA,
earning an Master of Fine Arts in playwriting in 1997.

“I used to act a bit in high school, and I was always
drawn to the stage,” Callaghan said. “I have a very
passionate relationship with words. I’ve always written
stories and poetry and novels, and playwriting was one of the ways
I could combine my interest in theater and my interest in
writing.”

Chock-full of memories from her time in Los Angeles, Callaghan
decided to head back East to ply her trade ““ first to
Minneapolis for a year and then to New York City in 1999.

“There was simply more work,” Callaghan said.
“More workshops, more actors needing work, more people making
work, and less danger that you’ll lose your actor to a film
shoot.”

The life of a writer hasn’t exactly been a walk in the
park for Callaghan even though her inventive and musically poetic
lyrical style earned her early attention and several prestigious
awards, which include the 2000 Princess Grace Award for Emerging
Artists and the 2001-02 Jerome Fellowship from the
Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis.

Still, despite this early success, Callaghan was finding the
going tough in the ultra-competitive East Coast theater scene.
There was still the more mundane matter of simply trying to make
ends meet as a budding writer.

“The commissions are nice for a while, but they
(didn’t) really carry me through for the rest of the year, so
I (had) to pick up part-time jobs like doing Web design or
programming, that kind of thing,” Callaghan said.

Commissions, however, started picking up when her play
“Scab” was picked up for production and garnered rave
critical reviews. Since then, Callaghan has been on a roll of
sorts, with “Scab” and “The Catherine
Calamity,” in particular, regularly in production at regional
and smaller theaters coast to coast. And now, “Kate
Crackernuts,” a modern, rave-drenched deconstruction of an
old British fairy tale, looks poised to follow suit.

Not one to rest on her laurels, Callaghan just finished the
first draft of a new play “Dead City,” which is based
on James Joyce’s “Ulysses” but set 100 years
later in the Big Apple with the gender roles reversed. Another
upcoming project, “The Hunger Waltz,” follows one
woman’s 600-year journey across America.

“I also have a play called “˜We Are Not These
Hands’ that is making the rounds of various literary offices
across the nation,” Callaghan said. “This play is set
in a nondescript third-world country and revolves around two
undereducated girls who are obsessed with Internet cafes and their
relationship with a self-proclaimed “˜freelance scholar’
from another land who has a few secrets. … So, I’m keeping
busy.”