BIO | My Site 2

CHILD ACTING

(1960s-1970s)

Honor Molloy was born in Dublin, Ireland to John Molloy, a noted character actor and playwright at the Abbey Theatre, and Yvonne Voigt Molloy, a writer and producer for RTÉ. She began her career as a child actor, regularly appearing in RTÉ’s Tolka Row, Ireland’s first primetime drama, and Wanderly Wagon, Ireland’s first children’s series. She later immigrated to the suburbs of Philadelphia with her mother and five siblings. As a teen she joined Pennsylvania Stage Company and studied mime with the People’s Theatre Company. She then matriculated to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned a BFA in Drama. Throughout the 1980s, Molloy worked as a performance artist in New York’s downtown arts scene, regularly appearing in storied venues like Judsons Poets’ Theatre, The Kitchen, Gusto House, Dixon Place, and the David Zwirner Gallery. During this period, she co-founded the experimental performance troupe, Half a Dozen Broads, who toured their work around New York City and beyond.

PERFORMANCE ARTIST

(1980s-1990s)

In 1985 Molloy co-founded Working Theater, where she appeared in Henry Lumper by Israel Horovitz and Montana by David Kranes. She later served as the company's Literary Manager and Director of Play Development. From 1989 to 1995 she regularly collaborated Susan Hefner & Dancers, performing and authoring libretto for Attempted Flight (1990), Marrow Clamor (1992), Unruly Graces (1993), and Eve of Consumption (1994). These works were performed at Judson Memorial Church, Dia Center for the Arts, Henry Street Settlement, and many more. She subsequently pursed an MFA in Playwriting at Brown University, where she studied under Paula Vogel. Molloy made her Off-Broadway debut in 1992 when two of her plays, Sticky n Juicy on da Senate Floor

and Rehearsing the Granda, were selected by Joanne Akalitis for The Public Theater’s Special Project Series. The following year her play Maiden Voyages (written with Bronagh Murphy) was produced by New Georges at Theatre Row.

PLAYWRIGHT & LIBRETTIST

(1990s-present)

From 1993-1994, Molloy was an Audrey Skirball-Kennis Playwright-in-Residence at both Lincoln Center Theater in New York and the Royal Court Theatre in London. The following year, Molloy was a featured artist of the 1994 Gay Games, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. In 1995, she made her Australian debut when her play Tongues of Stone premiered at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. That same year Molloy served as the keynote speaker for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, one of the largest Pride festivals in the world. Throughout the 1990s, her solo shows explored themes of gender and sexuality amidst the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS and Third Wave Feminism. These works included Molloy at Todo con Nada (1993) Lez Beux Love at WOW Café (1994) and Lesbian Cheek at HERE Arts Center (1995).

Molloy was living six blocks north of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She would write about this experience in an essay for American Theatre entitled “Climbing Tuesday,” noting:

I am a writer. But in own searing moment, my whole life changed. I was home on that high-skied, blue-eyed Tuesday. I stood on Greenwich Street and watched the world blast open as dozens of Brooks brothers and sisters came raining down. We stood on the street, hundreds on us. And we could do nothing. Useless in the face of the unimaginable, we could save no one. I watched helplessly as my neighbors to the south began. To leap from the windows of this burning towers. One couple held hands as they fell their final mile in this life. A woman clawed her way upward as she plunged, trying so desperately round climb the sky. For months I couldn’t write. The horror of that day were too human. It was the day narrative was lost. But my memory of that climbing woman kept haunting me. Finally, after time, I found a way through my work to see her safely home, send her onwards, upwards, and amend her brutal end. U have no interest in adding to the morass of media that does nothing but turn this tragedy into a commodity. I wrote this work as an elegy for my lost neighbors, my lost neighborhood, my lost America.

Molloy’s one-act play Monument depicts two emergency telephone operators amidst the morning of 9/11. The play premiered at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s 2002 Humana Festival of New American Plays, and was published and licensed by Concord Theatricals. Monument has had 100 individual productions across the United States, Canada, and India. Molloy also authored a full-length play about 9/11 entitled autodelete://beginning dump of physical memory//. The play was developed by the National New Play Network, New Dramatists, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Magic Theatre, Hedgebrook, Seattle Rep, Portland Stage, Portland Center Stage, City Theatre Company, Curious Theatre Company, Merit Theater & Film Group, and the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, but was never produced or published.

In 2005, Molloy’s play Madame Killer was produced as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival and was subsequently published by TheatreForum. In 2012 her play In Pigeon House premiered at the Irish Theatre of Chicago. In 2013 she was commissioned to write the libretto for Corey Dargel’s musical The Three Christs, based on The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach. In 2016, Molloy’s one-act play and in my heart was selected for the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. Later that same year, her play Crackskull Row premiered Off-Broadway at The Cell Theatre as part of the 2016 Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival, where it won Best Production. The play subsequently transferred to the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2017 for an additional eight-week engagement and was named a Critics’ Pick by The New York Times. In 2020, her play Round Room had a workshop production at Theatrelab, where it one the 1st Irish Theatre Festival Playwriting Award.

Molloy has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Skirball Foundation, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Among numerous awards and honors, she is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, two Frederick Loewe Awards for Musical Theatre, the Joe Callaway Award, the Whitfield Cook Award, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation Award, and the Berilla Kerr Playwriting Award. In 2017, she received a Proclamation from the New York City Council in recognition of her "Contributions to Irish Culture."

An alumna of New Dramatists, Molloy has completed residencies with Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Annaghmakerrig, Hedgebrook, the Tennessee Williams Center, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She is a former Playwright-in-Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, the Royal Court Theatre, the Australian National Playwrights Centre, the Playwrights’ Center, Portland Center Stage, Portland Stage, and The Cell Theatre. Her debut novel Smarty Girl: Dublin Savage was published in 2012 by Simon & Schuster/Gemma. Her essays have been anthologized in The Writing Irish of New York (Fordham University Press), Take Ten II (Penguin Random House), and The Reader (Brooklyn Writers Space Series), among others.

Molloy reading at IAW&A Literary Salon, c. 2013.

Molloy reading at IAW&A Literary Salon, c. 2014.

Molloy in Philadelphia c. 1979.