Bewley’s Café Theatre is proud to present the
2008 Winner of the Bewley’s Cafe Theatre Dublin Fringe Award
in association with Making Strange Theatre Company
LUCK
DEVISED BY:
Megan Riordan, Dodd Loomis & Shawn Sturnick
"Absolutely the highlight"
On the Fringe, RTÉ Radio 1
This original one-woman show, based on performer Megan Riordan's own life as the daughter of a professional Vegas gambler, powers its way through questions of destiny, free will and faith against a fast-paced background of casino "games of chance", in which the audience are invited to play. Luck takes the shape of a quiz show cross-bred with a Las Vegas style cocktail party, chock full of interrogations, luck rituals, blackjack boot camp, old school Vegas tunes, and lots of cheeseballs.
Rub that rabbit's foot, put a coin in your shoe and wear your lucky underpants, because the course of this show depends on you, the audience. With each shuffled card the audience flips or die they roll, the audience determines which task Megan must undertake, which family secret she must reveal and, in the end, what show they watch. Just like a person's luck, this show is different every day.
* * * * "Vigorously inventive… a cocktail of assured sass and genuine
vulnerability"
Irish Theatre Magazine
* * * * "An engaging and startlingly confessional performance… a
compelling and original piece of theatre"
Irish Times
Three-time Dublin Fringe Festival award winners Making Strange have devised "Luck" in collaboration with avant-garde New York director Dodd Loomis and award-winning playwright Shawn Sturnick, as well as Making Strange's Artistic Director and Las Vegas native, Megan Riordan.
Opens Tuesday 4th November and runs until Saturday 15th November 2008
Monday - Saturday at 1:10pm (Doors open at 12:50pm)
Tickets: €15 (includes light lunch)
Booking - info@bewleyscafetheatre.com or 086-8784001
For IMAGES, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@bewleyscafetheatre.com or Megan at transatlantic.mojo at gmail.com
LADY LUCK - Sunday Tribune, August 17 2008
For actress Megan Riordan, gambling is just the icing on the cake. By Colin Murphy
Megan Riordan plays blackjack.
Sounds glamorous? She demurs.
"I'm a gambler because it's convenient. Because it funds my performing."
True, to a point. A recent trip to Atlantic City, for example, brought in $3,700 in a weekend, and funded a month of theatre workshops in New York.
But now she has reversed the relationship. Demonstrating a deft grasp of the economics of the virtuous circle, she has created a performance about her gambling.
It's called Luck, and plays at the Dublin Fringe Festival next month. A 15-minute snippet recently shown in the Project theatre revealed a spiky, high-tempo, one-woman show, part confessional monologue and part pro-gambling workshop.
The gambling she learned on her father's lap. He'd been a blackjack dealer in LA; passed over for a promotion, he quit and became a professional player. Gamekeeper turned poacher.
As a child, she had "a huge blind spot of not actually knowing what my dad did". He'd written a book, and then they built a house, so she assumed the book had paid for it. (She can't have paid much attention to the book: it was called Comp City: A Guide to Free Casino Vacations.)
Eventually, she realised what was going on in the office her father had built in the house. The full-size blackjack table and roulette wheel must have been clues. Once she was old enough, she was inducted into the team.
The team?
"There are guys who can go out on the town and have enough technique and skill to play solo. I don't."
Around the table in his office, her father taught her the ropes. She memorised the "basic strategy" charts, so she'd know how to play each hand, and learned the team signals, so she'd know what she was being told to do when they ditched basic strategy.
"Basic strategy will not win you anything over time. It keeps you breaking even. But if you can combine that with other information about cards that have come before – counting cards, and things like that – you can make it work for you."
So that's where the team comes in: working together, they can accumulate more information about cards than any one person, cutting the odds considerably. Sounds like a scam, to me.
"Scam's a very harsh word. It's not a scam. It's not illegal. It's not cheating. Everything that we do is 'advantage play'."
Still, casinos don't like "advantage play". They don't respond well to groups of people sitting around their blackjack tables, calling out cards and discussing what's likely to come up next. Which is where the wig comes in.
The wig?
"A brown wig, like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction."
Nice choice, but it didn't work. They were at the Mandalay Bay casino in Vegas. They came out on top and thought they'd gotten away with it, but the casino was suspicious and watched the security tapes afterwards and figured out there had been some kind of team play going on. Despite the wig, Riordan had played in her own name ("stupidly – I wanted the comp points") and she was barred. If she tries to play in the Mandalay Bay again, she's likely to be arrested, she says, for trespassing.
Gamblers disguise themselves so the casinos won't get to know them. Though women tend to be more unassuming, and can get away without wigs, the men all wear hats, to hide them from the ubiquitous cameras.
"Even when the cocktail waitress comes around, instead of tilting your head to look up at her, you stand up to talk to her, so the camera never gets a look at your face."
But disguises are also about disguising the fact there's a team at play. Riordan, who started acting at school and moved to Ireland some years ago to pursue it full-time (or as full-time as the acting profession would allow), enjoyed the theatrical side of team gambling.
"I used to really take delight in the idea of creating a character on the blackjack table. Unfortunately, nobody else seemed to take so much delight in it."
During one recent game, she played a "boneheaded" young woman, losing money. "I was totally getting into the character. And I got chastised for it later on – they were like, 'You don't need to talk so much!'"
Despite mining this material for a stage show, she is cagey about details: there are "team secrets" she can't divulge; winnings she doesn't want to specify; a team mate who has changed his name. When she refers to him by his new name, accidentally, she barks, "That's off the record." But she agrees to tell one story, as an example…
"The night my brother turned 21, at midnight, we went out on the tables. My brother, me, my dad and – I'll give you his old name – James Grosjean, who is the best gambler in the world, and a guy named Pat.
"We went out for this crazy dinner that was comped by the casino because my dad had been playing there a lot. There were lobster tails the size of footballs. After midnight, we caffeinated and then we went to the Mandalay Bay, which has a high-limit blackjack table."
Megan and her brother avoided disguises, and played together, as siblings (they look alike, so there was no point in trying to pretend otherwise). Her father was playing his favourite character, "the deranged Texan". He was "over first base, in a big Texan hat with big stupid glasses, doing this crazy Texan drawl which he can turn on and off".
James, who she calls "Neo", "because he's wired into the Matrix", was doing the mathematical permutations and calling the shots. "He's a genius", she says. Her father, appropriately, was the "BP", the big player: the one who bets the money and "generally draws down a lot of the heat".
The game started off slowly, with some small wins. "And then we suddenly started winning.
"My dad wanted to win $21,000 for my brother's 21st birthday. Six hours later, we walked out with it."
Riordan is writing, performing and producing her show for the Dublin Fringe, working intermittently with a director who's currently based in Edinburgh. Even still, she'll be lucky to make €21 from it. But she knows what she is: an actor who gambles, occasionally, not a gambler who acts.
"The gambling," she says, "is a nice little icing on the cake." Nice cake if you can get it.
PROJECT BRAND NEW REVIEW - Sunday Tribune, July 27 2008
By Colin Murphy
Earlier this week, I got an email from a writer friend, Simon Doyle. He was writing a new play, he said. It was about the kidnapping of a South Korean film director and his ex-wife actress by North Korean spies in 1978, and their being “forced by dictator Kim Jong-il to make a socialist interpretation of ‘Godzilla’”. It was called ‘¡ZAP!’ He invited me to a staging of some scenes on Saturday, as part of something called Project Brand New.
I couldn’t go, but phoned the Project Arts Centre and asked the publicist what was happening. She paused. “I don’t really know. It’s kind of a secret”, she said. There would be four, short, new pieces of work, each night from Thursday to Saturday. She didn’t know what they were, or who they were by. The Project’s website said they would be “developmental”, showcasing “experimentation”.
I ventured along, nervously, on Thursday. A young woman with an American accent took up a microphone on stage and made us all stand up and perform a “luck” ritual. We turned around three times, and I contemplated leaving.
Luckily, I didn’t. And when I did leave, two hours later, I was buzzing. The young American, Megan Riordan, presented a sharp, gutsy piece of work-in-progress, a sort-of monologue about her life. Megan is a part-time pro gambler. (She recently funded a month-long stay in New York with a $3,700-winning weekend in Atlantic City.) Her piece was an exploration of the nature of luck, and she riffed on the secrets of gambling and her relationship with her father (a full-time pro). The finished work will be in the Fringe in September. Unlike her other job, this should be a sure thing.
Less sure, though with a strong central image, was a piece by Derval Cromie based on a recurrent nightmare about the Leaving Cert. There was a nightmarish quality also to ‘Full Poor Cell’, conceived by David Nolan. This merged moments from ‘The Tempest’ with scenes based on Josef Fritzel’s incarceration of his daughter and their children. The material was risky, but the sensitive performances and careful writing skirted sensationalism and made for deft, if dark, theatre.
And then we met ‘Luca’. A short monologue by actor Nick Lee, performed by John Cronin, this was a fable about a boy who prayed for sunshine. It seemed initially to be on conventional ground, but then it took off: Lee’s writing soared, and Cronin rode it with abandon. It was dark, apocalyptic stuff, in keeping with the zeitgeist, but culminated in a moment of sublime and devastatingly simple beauty. Remember those names.
Project Brand New will be back later in the year with a project called ‘Magic Moments’, and another session of new work – for which they’ll be seeking submissions. The work is all pro bono; the quality, like the gambling, is pro.
“We’ll give you a space to perform in, hopefully a space to rehearse, and we’ll be here for you”, explained co-producer/curator Róise Goan afterwards.
“We will be your springboard.”
Get ready to jump.
Contact Project Brand New at projectbrandnew@gmail.com, or via their Facebook page.
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