Ronán Noone
Ronán Noone, Author of THIRST and THE SMUGGLER
Ronán Noone believes in playing with a myriad of elements to find the right way to tell a good story; a necessary story that tells us who we are, where we have been, and where we are going.
He believes in stories that resonate beyond the theatre’s door and that add ideas to the national conversation. He believes in the playwright as thinker traveling in the direction of their fear. His play The Smuggler won the Best Playwright award at the 1st Irish Festival of New York, (2019) . The Second Girl was the inaugural winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Excellence in Playwriting Award (2015) and an Edgerton Award winner in 2014. Additional plays include, Thirst, The Atheist; Brendan; Scenes from an Adultery; The Lepers of Baile Baiste, The Blowin of Baile Gall, The Gigolo of Baile Breag (The Baile Trilogy); The Compass Rose; Little Black Dress; and A Small Death.
The Atheist played at the Huntington Theatre Company, Boston, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. It was also co-produced by The Culture Project and Ted Mann’s Circle in the Square productions in New York, and received both Drama Desk and Drama League acting nominations. Other recent international productions have taken place in the UK (London and Edinburgh), Spain, India, Canada, the Philippines, and Ireland.
His full-length and ten-minute plays are published by Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, Bakers Plays, Dramatists Play Service, and upcoming with TRW Plays. Awards include Jeff recommendations in Chicago; Helen Hayes recommendations in Washington D.C.; Ovation recommendations in Los Angeles; Critics Award in Austin, Texas; American Critics Steinberg New Play Award nomination; nomination for best play at 1st Irish Festival New York 2013 and 2015; three Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Awards for Best New Play; the Boston Theatre Critics Association’s Elliot Norton Outstanding Script Award; The Kennedy Center Michael Kanin National Playwriting Award; a 2014 Edgerton New American Play Award, and a finalist for the ScreenCraft Stage Play Award (2020).
His essay on theatre, “Being Afraid to Breathe,” is published by the Princeton University Library Chronicle LXVIII and his play The Second Girl was featured and published in the fall 2016 edition of the Eugene O’Neill Review published by Penn State University Press. Other plays have been featured in books on Irish studies, such as Anail an Bheil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture and Sinead Moynihan’s Other People’s Diasporas. Upcoming is his book - 36 Essential lessons for Playwriting in the Classroom.
Noone has attended the Sundance Theatre Workshop and developed work at New York Stage and Film, The Orchard Project, Eugene O’ Neill Foundation Festival at Tao House in Danville CA, The Lark Theatre, Theresa Rebeck’s Vermont Writer’s Retreat, American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco, and The Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida.
He is an Artistic Associate at the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard and he has developed work for television with Pretty Matches Productions and the reality TV-based production company High Noon Entertainment. His 2014 live action short The Accident (based on his short play I Glue You) has played the Boston International Film Festival and the Montclair Film Festival. Noone is also on the board of the Éire Society of Boston.
After studying politics and mathematics at University in Galway (NUIG), Ireland, he began a writing career with a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism. He wrote for various newspapers in Ireland with a small stint in Prague. After an editor said his writing was de-constructive and did not meet the formula for a newspaper’s parameters, he wrote his first play. Later, he immigrated to America and submitted that play to Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and studied with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. There he understood that deconstruction was not a bad word and for a play to develop you need the support, belief, and resources of a theatre community behind you. As a teacher, he guides writers to search for the beating heart in their work, to critique with care, to rewrite using the pen as a scalpel, and to read and reread plays, screenplays, and TV pilots..
