Written by: Catherine Higgins-Moore
Directed by: Catherine Higgins-Moore
Theatre Company: The Irish Literary Review

"The Maternity Monologues" by Catherine Higgins-Moore offers a chorus of all female voices touching on subjects of pregnancy, birth, and child rearing. Higgins-Moore built this show by interviewing women on their experiences the show touches on, then based on those transcripts added fictional scenarios and paired them with current events for an honest and previously unspoken dialogue. The piece will be presented for its New York debut by Theater for the New City as part of its 2019 Dream Up Festival from September 5 to September 12, directed by the author.

Written in the tradition of "The Vagina Monologues," "The Maternity Monologues" is an episodic play featuring a unique chorus of all female voices working through subjects of pregnancy, birth and child rearing. Just as Eve Ensler’s play sought to break down the barriers of shame around the word vagina, and the recent Bush Theatre production "Hijabi Monologues" challenged stereotypes of Muslim women, "The Maternity Monologues" demystifies the female experience of pregnancy, birth and mothering. Having trained as a BBC journalist the writer, Catherine Higgins-Moore interviewed women about their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth.

 

Catherine Higgins-Moore is an Northern Irish-born writer based in Tribeca. She is a journalist who has worked in the newsrooms of BBC Oxford and BBC Belfast and holds Master's degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford. She was commended in BBC’s International Playwriting Award 2018 and nominated for Harper Collins' Comedy Women in Print Prize. She writes for The Times Literary Supplement, is founding editor of The Irish LiteraryReview and is one of the sifter judges of BBC's National Short Story Award. She has been awarded bursaries by Kenneth Branagh and the University of Oxford. Her poetry collection, "Strange Roof," was published in the U.S. by Finishing Line Press as part of their New Women’s Voices Series. She has been shortlisted for New York’s Pen Parentis Fellowship, the Ted Hughes Elmet Trust Award, the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, the HG Wells Grand Prize, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Award, Cambridge University’s Jane Martin Girton College Poetry Prize, the Bath Short Story Prize, the Windsor Fringe New Writing Award and The Asham Award. Her other plays include "Just Two People," produced at the Oxford Playhouse's Burton Taylor Studio, and "The War at Home," which had a reading at Belfast's Lyric Theatre. Other works include "Strange Roof," a collection of poetry published by Finishing Lines Press as part of their "New Women's Voice Series." With: Shoshana Canali, Stephanie Flanagan, Alice Marks and Katie Warnusz-Steckel.