The Chieftains leader was referring to Aedin Moloney’s love of theatre generally and more specifically to the early shows that she and her brother put on in the shed at the back of their home in Milltown in Dublin City. One that both father and daughter could remember was “Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
These productions usually coincided with the legendary musician coming off of a long tour. “Every time he came back, he would have to sit through some performance or other,” Aedin Moloney said.
Her latest, “Cell,” opens next Tuesday night at the Gene Frankel Theatre in Soho, as part of this month’s 1st Irish Theatre Festival. The play by poet Paula Meehan was described as “Riveting, powerful, [and] brilliantly lyrical” by the Irish Times when it was produced for the Dublin stage. Its New York premiere is directed by John Keating and produced by Fallen Angel Theatre Company, which Moloney founded in 2003, with the aim of bringing to New York the “most outstanding and daring new plays” written by Irish and British women playwrights.
“The writing is the heart of it for me,” she said.
“It’s a very exciting project,” said Paddy Moloney, who was in town to attend a family event, but took time out to see rehearsals for “Cell.”
“It’s gritty stuff, but with that grittiness there’s a poetry and a beauty and magic that evolves,” said his daughter.
Moloney will play one of four women who are imprisoned together in Dublin. “The four are very different, are from very different backgrounds and have different agendas,” she said.
“There’s a psychological power struggle between these women within a very confined space,” she said about the play, which also stars Laoisa Sexton, Laura Knight Keating, Katherine O’Sullivan and Ruth Kavanagh. “There’s an aspect of control and power, about who rules the roost. I don’t want to give it away, but in the end it’s the most unusual person who ends up being the victor,” she said.
Moloney’s career goes back 25 years, including her years studying drama at Trinity College. But her show business memory is longer
She remembered when she was 9, she was flown over to a concert at the Crystal Palace in London to see the Chieftains perform on the same stage as Eric Clapton. “I’d been in a classroom in St. Anne’s in Milltown just a few hours before,” she said.
It was a very normal Dublin childhood, except that her Uncle Mick was the lead singer with the Rolling Stones.
“It’s been a great journey, a long journey,” her father said of his career and a band that has been 48 years on the road.
It took a long time to build towards international success. “We were a struggling artist’s family,” Aedin Moloney said. They didn’t have a television until she was about 8, she remembered, but her mother Rita insisted that they read books.
Rita Moloney initially moved into her grandparents’ 300-year-old house as a child to ease the pressure on her parents, who had a large family. In time, she would raise her own children there.
Aedin Moloney said that after her older brother her closest friend as a child was her great-grandfather Papa, who was also required to be in attendance at her plays. He ran a store at the front of the old house well into his 80s. “It wasn’t very successful,” said Paddy Moloney, with a laugh. “He’d sell six loaves of bread every day, 12 bottles of milk and cigarettes, of course.”
“And lemonade,” said the shopkeeper’s great granddaughter.
“I had a terrific childhood,” she added.
When she returned to school after the summer she turned 13, she told her friends that the family spent time with someone called Sting at Slane Castle. “No way!” was the collective reaction. “That was the moment I realized that my dad was cool,” Moloney said. “The older I get, the more I realize just how cool he really is.”
Paddy Moloney said all three of his children showed interest in music and the arts generally. His elder son Padraig, now a special education teacher in Dublin, is a great musician and storyteller, he reported. “Aedin got great encouragement from him, too,” he said.
Aonghus, who is his sister’s junior by 10 years, played the piano until he was 18. He gave it up when he became the first Irish student to enroll as an undergraduate at MIT. He now works for NASA and is studying for his doctorate at Rice University in Houston.
“I don’t know where he got his brains,” his father said.
“From both you and Mammy,” Aedin Moloney said.
The Moloneys didn’t need to tell their daughter how tough it could be in the arts, but they made sure she learned some marketable skills along the way.
“I have to work, like most actors in New York City,” said Moloney. She temped for years after her move to the U.S. in 1995, but is now employed as an executive assistant to a CEO.
“Nothing gets handed to you on a plate,” she said was the message she got from her parents. “You have to work for a living. That’s always been the motto.”
The actor was able to rely on a good deal of television work when she moved to London in the late 1980s. But she felt there was something missing. She found it in the excitement of the downtown theatre scene in New York. “It reminded of me when I was a teenager in Dublin in the ’80s,” she said.
She described Fallen Angel as “very much a home-run theatre collective.” Most everyone involved can make sets, do the lighting, raise funds and produce, as well as act and direct.
In recent years, Moloney has become well known in New York for her rendition of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from “Ulysses.” On Bloomsday, some people follow her from event to event to see and hear her performance. Some nationally prominent people in the arts have said Moloney’s is the best version they’ve heard and that it ought to be recorded, though none actually has offered to do it. So taking matters into her own hands, she has arranged to record the soliloquy in October.
“It’s one thing Daddy has thought me,” Aedin Moloney said. “You have to make this happen for yourself.”
“Cell” begins on Sept. 8 at the Gene Frankel Theatre, 24 Bond St., in Soho, and will run through Sept. 20. Tickets are $18. Reservations 212-868-4444 or www.smarttix.com. Playwright Paula Meehan and cast members will answer questions following the performance on Saturday, June 12.