This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Leah Walsh: Hi, and welcome to The Compass, the podcast documenting the struggles of life as an artist.

[0:05] Leah Walsh: I'm Leah Walsh.

[0:06] Leah Walsh: My guest today is Anna O'Donoghue.

[0:09] Leah Walsh: Anna is an incredible actor whose work I've admired so much over the years.

[0:13] Leah Walsh: She was in the class two years ahead of me at Juilliard, and I've always just loved her energy and the enthusiastic support she gives to her fellow artists.

[0:22] Leah Walsh: We talk about all sorts of things in this conversation, but we also mention a little bit about the fact that I'm pregnant.

[0:27] Leah Walsh: Frankie and I finally shared the news on social media, so I figured I could go ahead and tell you guys too.

[0:33] Leah Walsh: Longtime listeners will know that we've wanted to grow our family for a while now.

[0:37] Leah Walsh: So we're really excited about this kid.

[0:40] Leah Walsh: I'm due at the end of August, so I'm sure I'll tell you more about it as it goes along and how it's affecting my creative life.

[0:46] Leah Walsh: And with that, I hope you enjoy the 116th episode of The Compass.

[1:01] Leah Walsh: How do you keep from going to the dark side as an artist?

[1:05] Anna O'Donoghue: Wait, I've listened to this podcast so many times. That's literally the first thing you say to people.

[1:10] Leah Walsh: How do you know?

[1:12] Anna O'Donoghue: Hello.

[1:14] Anna O'Donoghue: How do you try to keep from going to the dark side as an artist?

[1:18] Anna O'Donoghue: That is a really important different phrasing.

[1:21] Anna O'Donoghue: No, but we usually have this whole conversation beforehand, like we just did.

[1:25] Anna O'Donoghue: Great.

[1:26] Anna O'Donoghue: Edit at Will.

[1:27] Anna O'Donoghue: I don't let them in the door and just say that.

[1:29] Anna O'Donoghue: Jeez Louise.

[1:31] Anna O'Donoghue: Um well, as many times as I've heard that, and even though I knew it was coming, I was just surprised.

[1:39] Anna O'Donoghue: I think the answer is I don't.

[1:43] Anna O'Donoghue: I am a pretty dark person.

[1:45] Anna O'Donoghue: Like I grew up obsessed with the Holocaust.

[1:51] Anna O'Donoghue: I had a really intense fixation on Adolf Eichmann when I was like nine.

[1:56] Anna O'Donoghue: I read the entirety of Stephen King's oeuvre by I was obsessed with Satanism and the Antichrist.

[2:03] Anna O'Donoghue: I yeah I am dark kind of in my...

[2:03] Leah Walsh: You're intrigued by that.

[2:08] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah and drawn to it and I think it is a part of me.

[2:13] Anna O'Donoghue: I think that the dark side, nihilism, decay, destruction, cruelty, like all of those things I think are really part of us as humans and it's important and interesting to get interested in them.

[2:32] Leah Walsh: What do you think of for yourself when I say like the dark side as an artist and what does that mean to you?

[2:39] Anna O'Donoghue: What it mean well I think what my translation of that would be is what is this is so reductive and like small but unuseful um yeah that makes sense and for me getting really dark can be actually really invigorating and inspiring.

[3:00] Anna O'Donoghue: I think it's a thing I have to contribute what is unuseful is there's a bunch of different versions of it but the like triangle are probably stasis paralysis just a sense of a sense of stuck why bother you know um and shame and um like deep paranoia and and then this is connected to that, but it's separate a a sort of like very Calvinist, like binary, magical thinking, feeling that um there's a caste system of human beings as artists and special, and you kind of either have it or you don't, and that other people are over there being like magical and interesting and important and look at them, and that I'm not in the categories, so just like why even bother?

[4:05] Leah Walsh: Right.

[4:06] Leah Walsh: It can feel that way sometimes.

[4:07] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, and I think that even like the most special, whatever, like that's a terrible construct, like as if specialness can be on a gradation or a scale, which it can't, but it can really feel that way.

[4:24] Leah Walsh: Right, and I'm sure everyone who in that moment you feel that way about feels that way about someone else.

[4:30] Anna O'Donoghue: Absolutely.

[4:32] Anna O'Donoghue: And I have so many unbelievably special people in my life who don't experience that for themselves, and it's so easy to reflect to them and be like, you're amazing.

[4:43] Anna O'Donoghue: It's the phenomenon of the girl who's like, I'm not pretty, and you're like, Jesus Christ, shut up.

[4:50] Anna O'Donoghue: But it feels really real when you're in it.

[4:54] Leah Walsh: It totally does.

[4:55] Anna O'Donoghue: Um yeah.

[4:56] Leah Walsh: So what are some of the ways that you try to combat those useless feelings?

[5:02] Anna O'Donoghue: I try to get sort of practical about it and go like, well, there's a couple of things.

[5:07] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, what if you're right?

[5:12] Anna O'Donoghue: Maybe you're right, like maybe that's true.

[5:16] Anna O'Donoghue: You can't fix it, you can't change it.

[5:18] Anna O'Donoghue: What are you gonna do?

[5:19] Anna O'Donoghue: You know, like you must proceed anyway.

[5:23] Anna O'Donoghue: Um so I try to kind of like lean into the potential veracity of it and then spin from there.

[5:33] Leah Walsh: Right, kind of take the power out of it that way.

[5:35] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, and kind of go like, well, it's true, we are all gonna die.

[5:39] Anna O'Donoghue: I mean, you know, like if you wake up in the morning and go, like, oh no, the world will cease to exist in eight billion years.

[5:47] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes, correct.

[5:48] Anna O'Donoghue: Like, but you can still draw a picture, you know, right?

[5:52] Anna O'Donoghue: And you can still make some really great tree shopping today.

[5:54] Leah Walsh: Totally.

[5:56] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, so I do that, and then I also just think about all of the incredible people that I know that grapple with the same paralysis and evil feelings, and I know how wrong they are, and I go, well, I could be right, even though they're wrong, I could be right, but they're so wrong, and I too could be wrong, and feelings are not facts, and um I try to just it can be sort of like an evil wheel that you get on, and so I try to step off of it, but more and more I'm trying to just name it and be like, well, I'm doing that thing, cool.

[6:36] Leah Walsh: What if I do something else?

[6:38] Anna O'Donoghue: Right, yeah, you're if you're able to recognize that you're doing it, yeah, that's a huge thing.

[6:44] Anna O'Donoghue: And it's I feel like most artists are able to recognize it if they're if they've gone through the especially like the type of training that we went through at Juilliard, where you're like, you're aware of your habits.

[6:58] Anna O'Donoghue: If nothing else, you realize through Alexander and stuff, you realize how to point out your own habits, and I think that that applies a little bit to these like mental habits.

[7:09] Leah Walsh: Totally.

[7:09] Anna O'Donoghue: I mean, a lot of thought is just habit, it's like the A to B to C to D to.

[7:15] Anna O'Donoghue: And if you can go like, it's strange that I'm constantly connecting A to J when not necessarily.

[7:22] Anna O'Donoghue: Like maybe let's just take A back to B, and maybe eventually it'll get to J, but so yeah, recognition is big.

[7:30] Anna O'Donoghue: Um and then it's just about trying to make another choice, you know.

[7:36] Anna O'Donoghue: In Alexander language, it's what is it, disinhibiting?

[7:42] Anna O'Donoghue: But I do find physical things really helpful, actually.

[7:45] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[7:46] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, I've I found Alexander Technique to be that an IPA to be like people are like, what did you learn in college?

[7:53] Anna O'Donoghue: And I'm like, well, I learned how to code sounds, and I learned how to lie on the floor and breathe, and like after that, I really couldn't tell you.

[8:06] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, but Alexander Technique, I think is an amazing system.

[8:11] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, I have been like hungry to like get back into it recently.

[8:16] Anna O'Donoghue: It's so helpful.

[8:18] Anna O'Donoghue: I have a hard time self-practicing, but I have found a friend who just got certified recently-ish, who's offering group classes for actors, and they're amazing, and I recommend them completely.

[8:31] Leah Walsh: Well, you should give me the information.

[8:32] Anna O'Donoghue: I will.

[8:33] Anna O'Donoghue: I will give it to anyone.

[8:35] Leah Walsh: Um you grew up in New York, correct?

[8:38] Anna O'Donoghue: I did.

[8:40] Leah Walsh: How is it for you being an adult still living in the same city?

[8:44] Anna O'Donoghue: Oh, that's such a great question.

[8:47] Anna O'Donoghue: It's um fascinating because so many of us moved here from afar.

[8:52] Anna O'Donoghue: Well, I know, I mean, I'm so jealous of that experience of getting to like come to New York, as an adult.

[8:59] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, and to like basically have it be kind of a coming out party.

[9:02] Anna O'Donoghue: Like it's an identity assumption, it's it's a rite of passage, it's a new chapter.

[9:09] Anna O'Donoghue: Whereas for me, like sometimes I get off the subway and I'm like, cool, I've been getting off of the same stop since I was 11 years old.

[9:17] Anna O'Donoghue: Progress.

[9:19] Anna O'Donoghue: It's great.

[9:20] Anna O'Donoghue: New York is actually a great place to be a kid, but I do wonder if there is some essential like self-realization that I'm missing by not living somewhere else.

[9:35] Anna O'Donoghue: I don't know, but I can't drive, so you can't go anywhere else.

[9:39] Leah Walsh: Um did you go to Juilliard as undergrad?

[9:42] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, yes, you did.

[9:44] Anna O'Donoghue: Yep.

[9:44] Anna O'Donoghue: That's what I so learned in college, IPA and lying on the floor, no other education.

[9:50] Anna O'Donoghue: Deeply, deeply uneducated and stupid.

[9:53] Leah Walsh: Stop it.

[9:55] Anna O'Donoghue: Um what do your parents make of you choosing to be an artist for your career?

[10:01] Leah Walsh: I'm going with all the tough questions for you.

[10:04] Anna O'Donoghue: I know I love it.

[10:05] Anna O'Donoghue: Um laying a foundation.

[10:08] Anna O'Donoghue: It's great.

[10:08] Anna O'Donoghue: It's great.

[10:09] Anna O'Donoghue: I love it.

[10:09] Anna O'Donoghue: This is my f the the darkness of me is like just like let's lay it all out there.

[10:13] Anna O'Donoghue: Let's make it as like cruel and tough and hard as we possibly can.

[10:18] Leah Walsh: No, it's great.

[10:19] Anna O'Donoghue: Um that's been a real trajectory that I think we're still on.

[10:25] Anna O'Donoghue: Um my parents because they still live in New York as well.

[10:30] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, they do an interesting, yeah, an interesting constant.

[10:34] Anna O'Donoghue: And they and my parents are not artists, like even a tiny bit.

[10:38] Anna O'Donoghue: And I'm deeply jealous of people whose parents are because I think a lot of a lot of that caste system like insecurity that I have comes from feeling like, oh, this is another universe that I have to cross into.

[10:52] Anna O'Donoghue: This isn't a thing people really do.

[10:54] Anna O'Donoghue: This is this is the people I've sat in the audience and watched on the stage.

[10:58] Anna O'Donoghue: They're special, they're different.

[11:00] Anna O'Donoghue: Like you didn't know anyone personally.

[11:03] Anna O'Donoghue: No, and I think it's interesting that so many celebrities and movie stars have kids who grew up who grew up to be in the business, and I don't think it's just nepotism.

[11:11] Anna O'Donoghue: I think it's that they grow up thinking like this is a viable, like I deserve to be here.

[11:17] Leah Walsh: Right.

[11:17] Anna O'Donoghue: This is what my dad does, this is what my mom does.

[11:20] Anna O'Donoghue: Like and they make a living at it.

[11:22] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, and this is life.

[11:24] Anna O'Donoghue: Like yourself and your life and your artistry and your creativity are essential and are all part of like being an adult.

[11:32] Anna O'Donoghue: And I just did not have that.

[11:35] Anna O'Donoghue: But my parents really love theater and love the arts, and grew up, and I grew up getting to see an incredible amount of stuff.

[11:44] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, and my best friend's mother, bizarrely was the head theater critic for The Village Voice growing up.

[11:52] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, which was a totally this is a discursive thing, but that knowledge helped me get a really, really healthy um cynicism and uh kind of understanding of the bones of theater criticism because she she's a wonderful person, she's a great writer, she had no background in theater.

[12:13] Anna O'Donoghue: The way that she got started in criticism, the voice was like, one day she went to see a play, and she like had some thoughts about it.

[12:19] Anna O'Donoghue: She wrote them down and she sent them to the head of the paper, and the paper, and the guy was like, hey, do you want to be a critic?

[12:25] Anna O'Donoghue: And she was like, I don't really know what I'm doing.

[12:27] Anna O'Donoghue: He was like, uh-huh, all right.

[12:29] Anna O'Donoghue: And then she ended up being a professional theater critic for like decades.

[12:34] Leah Walsh: That's incredible.

[12:35] Anna O'Donoghue: And I think that's true for so many people.

[12:36] Anna O'Donoghue: So anytime anyone gets hung up over a review, myself included, I just have to go like, hold on, hold on.

[12:43] Anna O'Donoghue: One person's opinion.

[12:44] Anna O'Donoghue: It's one person's opinion who like may or may not just have moved off the restaurant beat, you know.

[12:51] Anna O'Donoghue: Anyway, um, so you get to see a bunch of like downtown theater because of that.

[12:55] Anna O'Donoghue: Totally, totally.

[12:56] Anna O'Donoghue: And like there was one summer when I was in high school where my friend's mom's protege, who now is a critic for the Times, and it's just so trippy, was covering the fringe, and she was like, I need someone to go with me.

[13:10] Anna O'Donoghue: So I went to probably dozens of fringe shows that summer and like hung out with her, and she's she's maybe nine years older than me, but at the time that's yeah, cavernous.

[13:24] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, so I saw a lot of stuff growing up, but I don't think it ever occurred to my parents that I would actually be an artist.

[13:31] Anna O'Donoghue: It didn't really occur to me either.

[13:34] Anna O'Donoghue: I um I applied to half conservatories and half liberal arts schools when I was going to college, and I think everyone assumed I would get into the liberal arts colleges, even though I had a very spotty academic record.

[13:49] Anna O'Donoghue: And because I sort of didn't go to calculus for a year.

[13:54] Leah Walsh: I don't blame you.

[13:56] Leah Walsh: Calculus is so hard.

[13:58] Anna O'Donoghue: I was home educated, so I have a very spotty education as well.

[14:02] Anna O'Donoghue: They wouldn't let it was like I was in the highest.

[14:04] Anna O'Donoghue: I decided to focus on certain things and not on others.

[14:07] Anna O'Donoghue: I kept being like, I'm not good at math, I don't like this.

[14:10] Anna O'Donoghue: Take me out of this class.

[14:11] Anna O'Donoghue: And they were like, you're not applying yourself.

[14:13] Anna O'Donoghue: And I'd be like, true.

[14:14] Anna O'Donoghue: That is absolutely correct.

[14:16] Leah Walsh: But I don't know.

[14:16] Anna O'Donoghue: Never.

[14:17] Anna O'Donoghue: Never.

[14:18] Anna O'Donoghue: Oh, awful.

[14:19] Anna O'Donoghue: But um, I got into all the liberal arts.

[14:22] Anna O'Donoghue: I got into all the conservatories, and I didn't, I got like wait listed at the liberal arts schools, and that was really surprising to all of us.

[14:33] Anna O'Donoghue: And we're like, hmm.

[14:34] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, well, I mean, I my Juilliard edition was um I was I was doing a school performance.

[14:43] Anna O'Donoghue: Do you know the do you know the play Extremities?

[14:46] Anna O'Donoghue: It's by William Master Simone. It's a terrible play. It's about like Farrah Fawcett stars in the movie. I think Susan Sarandon did it on Broadway, but it's about a woman who's like about to get raped in her house by like a Latino guy who breaks in, and then she gets away from him and chains him in the fireplace and starts like abusing him.

[15:13] Anna O'Donoghue: Oh my goodness. And yeah, it's amazing. And her roommates come home and like don't believe her. So it's a play from the 70s about, you know, rape culture, I guess, but it's deeply offensive, and like very high school. I did it. I was doing, I was playing the rape, the semi almost rape victim in high school, and we had a performance on this day, and I got my Juilliard audition date in the mail, and they were like, be ready to stay all day if you're called back. And I was like, Oh, I have a show that night. Well, whatever, I'm not gonna get called back, it doesn't matter. And I remember seeing the callback list and being like, I have to go. So I like made them move me to the top of the pile and like go for it was the whole thing was just completely random.

Um so yeah. Uh and then my parents were like, what's happening? Uh and I think they still like at every family conversation, their favorite thing to do is be like, you know what? You know what you'd be great at? Oh my goodness. You know what you should go to grad school for? Just in case you needed some ideas. They love it. But they have really like come around to trying really hard to be support. I think they've kind of gotten into their heads that I'm not gonna change my mind. Good. So then they it's nice because you live in the same city, they get to see you in a lot of things.

[16:46] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah. I have, and I sometimes I'm like, you really shouldn't come to this one, guys. Like, um, there was one where I was like, I'm gonna play a sex fairy in a play about like pornography. Please don't come. Like, please don't. Um, but they're incredibly sweet, and they go out of town to everything that I do. I think they like getting the little excuse to like, what are we oh we're in Mary? We're touring the country, watching our daughter do plays. Totally. Yeah, yeah. They're incredible in that way. Um, you've done a ton of work with new plays.

[17:26] Anna O'Donoghue: I have, I observe. It's my favorite over the course of your career. Can we talk a little bit about how that's come about and how you approach your work with um like when the playwright is in the room and when you're working on your work?

[17:43] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah. Um plays are my favorite thing. When I was at school, the playwrights program at Juilliard, which is so incredible now, was not nearly as integrated into the like mainstay of the curriculum. Yeah, I remember when I came to visit, I went to a reading and it was no one was there. Jim Houghton really made it a thing when he arrived. Yeah, and God bless him. I mean, uh the readings used to all be on Saturdays and it was or Sundays or whatever everyone's one day off was. So, like what what not nonsense is this? And I went to all of them, and I would like go up into the office and take big stacks of plays. I just um I fell in love with acting because of story and because of participation in story, and I just really I love plays like a big geek.

And um, it was really exciting to me to get to read these pieces and then be like, oh my god, you wrote that because I'd spent my childhood reading, reading, reading, and having the people who wrote be these remote figures. And so getting to kind of flesh and blood it up with them was really cool to me. Um, and I found, I have found that most of my best friends and closest collaborators are writers.

[19:13] Anna O'Donoghue: Um and there's something about being able to kind of be part of the stew as something is becoming itself. There are a lot of people that I met as an actor and still collaborate with, but even if I'm not in a play, even if I'm there's no chance of me being in it, I'll still send me their script and we'll still like work pretty intensely um on it and about it. And I've just done so much new play development that I feel like I have a sense of kind of bones of what work wants to be. I think that my I'm not really a creator, I'm an editor.

[19:51] Leah Walsh: So I was gonna ask, do you write it all yourself?

[19:55] Anna O'Donoghue: I do. I mean, most of my like I feel like I'm I've been resisting writing my entire life. I mean, talking about my parents, their relationship to my artistry, they have been obsessed with the idea. Like all they want is for me to go to grad school to be a writer, and I'm like, guys, don't you realize that's not a better idea? But um, when I was at Juilliard, I wrote a lot of articles for the Juilliard Journal because it was the best paying work study job. You got paid like a hundred and fifty dollars per article, which was so much better than working at the Juilliard Cafe making grilled cheese sandwiches, which I also did. Um, and then they gave me at some point the Juilliard Journal Award. Oh my goodness.

It was very exciting. Um, I didn't even know it existed. They like called me into the office and I was like, oh no, I'm late on a deadline. And they gave me the certificate and a check. And I don't think I honestly don't think my parents have ever been prouder of anything in my life. But yeah, I've written since I was a kid, and it's how I've made a lot of my money. But unless I'm writing for someone else or for a very specific purpose, I kind of don't care enough to. It's much easier for me to get invested and um kind of to put my heart into something if it's someone else's idea.

[21:19] Leah Walsh: That's I mean it makes sense because actors are usually interpretive artists.

[21:25] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot of people do a lot of different things all at once. But um I feel yeah I feel that I am the best I am my best self when I feel very clear on what my job is and what I feel like I'm being of service to kind of a larger thing and I very rarely feel that my own idea is the larger thing. So I do write I've written a number of plays um and I've I write short stories kind of for myself but usually only for other like I'll I write them as gifts for other people sometimes I write them because I'm like oh this is some this is in so and so's voice and right now I'm starting to work with a sound designer friend to maybe like make a audio project of some of these stories etc but unless it feels like a gift or service thing I'm kind of like who cares?

[22:23] Leah Walsh: I love that that you write them as gifts.

[22:27] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah it's hard for me to finish anything otherwise um I'm very very audience focused. I mean one of my earlier writing jobs that I did to make money was speech writing and that was a really uh great got kind of perfect exemplification of this because you're writing for a specific person for a specific date for a specific audience for a specific like line of show. I mean it's it's what kind of speech writing. I worked for, and this this was just a completely random thing, but I worked for um the city university of New York. So I wrote a lot of speeches for ribbon cuttings, press conferences. I wrote when it would be graduation season, I would write like 10 commencement addresses per year, which was wild. I c I wrote a couple of keynote addresses for academics.

[23:23] Leah Walsh: No! Come on, guys.

[23:25] Anna O'Donoghue: The thing I have learned as a like freelance writer is that all the things you think people are doing themselves, someone else, probably an intern frequently, like people don't tweet themselves. People don't do this thing. People don't do their own talking points, they just don't have time.

[23:41] Leah Walsh: Well, that's great that you've been able to turn that into some of your day job work though.

[23:45] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, it was just to enjoy it, and it's something you have skill at, you know. I feel deeply underqualified for it, but I've just kind of fallen into it, and um, I don't know that I enjoy it as much as I it's a it's problem solving, you know?

[24:00] Leah Walsh: Yeah, and that's cool, and that is a lot of what I like about new play development, also.

[24:06] Anna O'Donoghue: It's you sort of see like uh this thing wants to be this. Here's the here's the gap. What are some ideas? Like, let me my dramaturgy process is usually that I'll say, like, I see this issue, I don't know how to solve it. You could solve it a million ways. You could do this, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this. I just kind of spin and say, whatever is helpful, use it. And it's really fun to see how and if that stuff gets implemented, and that's a really cool part of being um of being part of the new play development process.

[24:46] Anna O'Donoghue: And then you're helping now my dear classmates with Arts in the Armed Forces.

[24:52] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[24:57] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, it's been so intimidating and so fun. I saw your post on Facebook that you're about to finally announce the winner.

[25:05] Anna O'Donoghue: Dude. For those who don't know, it's it's uh playwrighting competition for veterans. Veterans or people currently serving. Okay. Or in um military academies, which we didn't we don't really get those because they're busy. But um, yeah, it's it's been pretty incredible. And the anytime you do something for the first time, I mean, you know, this making a podcast, everything is an invention. So what to call it, like what to how to write the rules, how like the evaluation process. Like, how do you even talk about what makes a good play? Like, what is a play? And a lot of the people who are submitting are first-time playwrights. So then it was um, then I was like, well, we need to provide some resources on our website or whatever for them, and then you start to think about like, well, if you'd never even heard of what a play was, yeah, what would you say?

How would you define it? So it's these great basic, basic questions. And moving forward, now we'll get to refine now that all the sort of templates are written and created, but the birth of something new is really cool. So I was deeply I was super freaked out and um and really happy to get to be a part of this birthing thing. It's been nine months, so um, but yeah, we're gonna announce we're gonna announce it on Tuesday, May 1st.

[26:38] Leah Walsh: Okay.

[26:38] Anna O'Donoghue: I don't know who the winner is going to be.

[26:41] Leah Walsh: Oh.

[26:42] Anna O'Donoghue: It's not just an announcement, it hasn't been decided yet. Um yeah, it's all very secret. And then I know that there's there's like a monetary prize. There's is there like a reading or something to it?

[26:54] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, there is a $10,000 prize, which is not nothing. And then there is an ATAF, Arts in the Armed Forces produced reading of the play. We're still ironing out the details of exactly how and where that's going to be. Um, anyone listening, like, check our website. But um, it's going to be cast with professional actors, and ATAF tends to use, as you know, like unbelievably professional, fancy, like amazing people. So I think that's gonna be really exciting to the writer. And um we'll see what the rehearsal process is. The reading won't be for a while, so the writer will hopefully have some time to work on, develop the play, maybe in consultation with um Susan Larry Parks, who is our final judge.

We'll see how it all kind of shakes out. But the plays that were submitted were really amazing. Um and just the life stories of everyone. It was it, I I'm a reader for a number of submission processes and awards, and this is felt fundamentally different in just that um a lot of professional playwrights submitting is their job, the way auditioning is our job. So it's as if like there was a casting call for there was just a one-time casting call for people who happen to be missing a limb, you know. Not that being a veteran or is missing a limb, but a very specific, or people who like had a medical degree or something, right? And so they were like, oh my god, they're finally asking for me. This is my time. And so the way they would show up in the audition room is so much more loaded and personal. Um it feels really daunting and cool to be gifted with all of those like hearts, you know.

[28:51] Leah Walsh: That's so exciting. It's really great involved. I'm I'm interested to see how it goes and where it ends up.

[28:57] Anna O'Donoghue: Me too. Um me too. Yeah, it's interesting, like reading a play, and you said you got into be involved with a number of those different submission processes. It's a skill for sure. You've definitely cultivated this whole side of yourself. Like it I know for me, like sometimes I might read a play the first time, and I don't necessarily get the tone of it, or I don't like I need to spend more time with it, or I need to think about it for a while. And like one of my best friends, Lori, who's now the artistic director of the New Harmony Project, like has done so many um has been a part of the submission process for a long, long time. And I you know, reading one section of a play that they send in for submission and stuff like that, it's just you I would just be so worried about missing something.

[29:47] Anna O'Donoghue: That's always the fear for sure. Like, what if that was the one and I just didn't get it the first time? Well, the thing is there is no the one, you know, like that that, but that is the other that's the thing that when you read so much, you kind of and that and prizes are you know faulty in that way.

[30:03] Anna O'Donoghue: Oh my god, of course. Because it's exciting to reward someone, but there will always be people that you miss. Oh my god. No, the thing that's ironic is that I actually hate awards. I think they're like wrong headed and stupid because they try to make something codified that is uncodifiable. However, when I'm working with these processes, I try not to think of them as like winning a prize. I try to think of it as like an opportunity to again give the gift of recognition. The way I'm thinking about it for this particular award is like while there are so many writers and plays that would have been gloriously justifiably moved forward and recognized by this award, we get the opportunity to like change someone's life, and that's incredible.

And no, we can't change everyone's life, but such is the nature, you know, you can't marry everyone. Like anytime there is an opportunity some people miss, some people miss it, but like, but is that it's better to give somebody the chance than nobody? Yeah, I mean, like, should we get rid of organ transplants because not everyone gets the heart, you know? Um, that said, it's really devastating to see someone fall down on the list of like, you know, that they need a donor too. So it's agonizing, but um, I still think it's a really, really worthy endeavor. In terms of missing something, in the most of the playwrighting things that I read for, I've become less precious about that because I've seen things come across my desk in so many different capacities and through so many different vehicles and forms, that I sort of feel like there's a right fit, you know.

Like, I'm a reader for the Rattlestick, and like not every play is right for the Rattlestick, but it would be right for like seven other theaters, and if it's really good, it's gonna eventually not again, good is a bad word too, but like someone will just the right person and the right fit and the right moment need to find it. With Arts and the Armed Forces and the Bridge Ward, it's a little bit trickier because this is so specific and there aren't a lot of opportunities for this particular community. But I'm hoping that by offering this one, we're getting people kind of motored to think of themselves in this way and submit to other things and claim their artistry. I'm getting feedback from a lot of the submitting writers that that's happening.

Um, they're like, I I'm a writer, but I've never written a play before. But through writing for this, even though I didn't win, I've awakened this new passion for myself and I'm gonna keep going. That's wonderful. It's so nice.

[33:00] Leah Walsh: Shifting gears. Is there anything that you've learned along the way about auditioning that's um is there any way that you've changed the way you approach it or things that you've feel like you've figured out or let go of?

[33:14] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes. Um, and this may I'm like any anyone listening, take this with a massive grain of salt because I don't know that this is good advice. Um, and I don't audition that much, actually. Um, however I I'm coming from I'm coming from an audition today, which was like one of the more high profile, I mean, whatever. It was like a bigger deal audition than I frequently have. And um it was like 11 pages of straight TV text, and you know, um and the way I used to go into auditions was very like I think young person, female, charming, hungry and eager, and um I go in with less adrenaline now, and what I my goal really is pretty pretty low bar. It's if I'm able to feel in the room like an actor and like a human being, that's a that's a win for me.

Like that's all I'm really aiming because I've come out of so many auditions being like, what did I just do? I understand that. Like, what was that? And so I walk in now and I sort of think, even if it's just the casting director, I try to be like, well, what would I be like on the first day of rehearsal? Like, how would I talk to you? What questions would I actually ask? How would I respond to whatever you're saying to me? Like, let me, I think that the way that we audition actors in America, Europe is not like this, and I think it shows in the work, um, is so like dog and pony show, and we train actors to be so endlessly grateful, and like that much gratitude is not healthy for creation. Like it's that just puts you at a disadvantage.

Like it teaches you to make the power structure so much more extreme. And it teaches you to be ingratiating, and that's not useful. Like actually, the actors should be protecting their own character, their own integrity, their own values of what they're doing. No, and fighting what for what's important to them. It doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean that the person on the other side of the table has all the right answers. And I've been an audition reader enough, and I've been an audition reader a lot to see people come into the room do like extraordinary stuff. I'm like, that's that's incredible talent and incredible rigor and work. And they walk out, and the team, for whatever reason, maybe they're hungry, maybe it's something about like the way that person looks, maybe it's who they saw right before, whatever.

They kind of go, I don't know. I thought she was boring. And it's maddening and heartbreaking to sit there as the person in the chair, being like, you guys are so you're so wrong. And also sometimes someone will come in and be like awful, and they'll be like, I liked her. You know? What? And yeah, yeah. So I really I've I've realized that whether or not you like get get it, or whether or not they're like, great job, is not the rightation metric is is meaningless.

[36:38] Leah Walsh: Well, that's what when you talk about the baseline of wanting to feel like an actor and like a human being, very important. Sometimes I feel like it's more difficult than others because they're not behaving like human beings.

[36:50] Anna O'Donoghue: Uhly. And like either they're completely silent and they're not engaging in the like five percent small talk, which can make you feel so much more comfortable and like a person. Have you auditioned for British directors?

[37:04] Leah Walsh: I mean, I'm sure I have in the past, but the first couple of jobs that I were the first couple of jobs that I got, and I got a couple of like really big crazy jobs when I was coming out of school and then like didn't work forever. But they were four British directors and they have a different and I've been an audition reader for them. They have a different way that they do it, which is you come into the room and you immediately go and like sit down at the table with them and you just chat for a while. Not about the play like maybe about the play but about like current events or like how's it going or tell me about yourself or whatever. And then they're always like she got a chance to read the play and you're like yeah yeah yeah I did and they're like all right well we're just gonna look at and it's so casual and usually their reader either they read with you or they have the audition readers like get up and play with it's a work session.

[38:01] Anna O'Donoghue: That sounds lovely. It's amazing and it is so much easier to they they lay the groundwork for you to be a human being and it's so helpful. But I I totally agree like many people don't do that so what I've started to try to do is when they don't to do it myself. Um but like I think this audition today even I'm sure I won't get it but the casting director is just a total gem and she's a great reader. And I audition I I audition entirely based on how good the reader is um and that's a thing that I still haven't solved. Right. But you know. But I have learned I I have learned that the sense of um I won or I lost based on an audition is so useless. And the only thing I can do is is try to satisfy myself on some like very low. I think that's so sweet. Low basis.

[39:08] Leah Walsh: No, I'm just thinking over faster. What have you, I mean, what have you learned?

[39:13] Anna O'Donoghue: I I mean I'm not auditioning right now because I'm working this day job. I'm kind of taking a break. But I think it's something similar. I don't know if I've exactly accomplished it, but it's really hard. Yeah, trying not to. There was a long time there right out of school where I would go in like big smile, trying to like s make them like me or sell something like in the moments around the acting, when the acting's the most important part, like that I somehow had to be something. God, what a nightmare. I don't know. Marketable or what they were expecting. I think though there is that terrible and so the alien and the enemy of art to try to please, right?

[40:02] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[40:03] Anna O'Donoghue: Because the most exciting thing always happens when someone comes in and and surprises you.

[40:10] Leah Walsh: That's a good way to put it, to try to please.

[40:12] Anna O'Donoghue: Ugh. And I don't know if male actors feel this. I'm sure they do, but just even saying the phrase try to please is like that's something that's forced on women so female in everyday life, their entire lives. So to have it magnified by the audition process is kind of terrifying. And also just like, I mean, I there is no universe in which men spend as much time thinking about what to wear.

[40:40] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[40:41] Anna O'Donoghue: Or like they're gonna get them or not get them the part. Yeah. But I think um I the to be completely generalizing and horrible, the the men that I know I know a lot more like guys who think of auditions like sports, like booked it, nailed it, you know, like there's a sense of like I crushed it. I I've never heard of a female come out of an audition and be like, crushed it, you know? But I know bros who do that all the time, and there's a lot of guys who get into acting because they got like injured on the hockey team. And they get a lot of the same things out of it. They get the sense of like teamwork, but also individualism and like working towards a goal and like that kinetic body thing and right going on a ride and practicing, practicing, practicing, but then the performance being the game being all that really counts.

I think there's a lot of sports and performance that go together, but what I've found for me is that I it's so much more useful to think of it like yoga. Like I'm I'm doing the setup, I'm like doing my handstand today. Okay, I fell out of it. Well, I still did it. I still did it, and like I'll try again tomorrow, and it isn't about like, did I get it or did I not? You know, like oh, I love that.

[42:07] Leah Walsh: Oh, what a nightmare. I mean, I I do I am not particularly ritualistic, but I do a handstand every day in the morning and at night, and I do, and I'm I still I can do it like away from the wall for like 10 seconds, if that. Um, and I've been doing this for like six years.

[42:30] Anna O'Donoghue: That's great.

[42:35] Leah Walsh: It's slow.

[42:36] Anna O'Donoghue: No, but that's how you get better at something. It's like a slow repetition. And it's also kind of a check-in. Like, there will be some days where I'm like, whoa, how you're feeling. My balance is super off, but if that were an audition and I was like, I I I law, I I couldn't do it, that would be really um, like another magical thinking type thing. Like you are separating into good and bad, like the kingdom of heaven or hell. Like, no, no, no, no. Um, but yeah, I think men are trained to have other bad habits about auditioning. Yeah, we all have our own baggage. It's a terrible process. Um this sounds like kind of a similar question, but I don't mean it to be. Is um are there any lessons you've learned the last couple years that you're really proud of that you want to tell me about?

[43:28] Anna O'Donoghue: Not really doesn't have to be related to auditioning in any way. Yeah. Um I think what I've learned, like the things that I'm proudest of are really relationships that I've built and the surprising ways that those come back to you. And this is a lesson that I keep re-learning over and over. I'm not a very goal-oriented person. I'm not very like, you know, I don't vision board or whatever, but I I not that there's anything wrong with vision boarding, California. Um I like to believe, and I have found mostly to be true that the greatest things, the greatest gifts that happen are things I never would have anticipated, and that I I am not good enough at imagining or planning to try to control the like delights that will surprise me. Like I um and and just the invest in people long term. Um I recently I got a call kind of out of the blue to help cast a film. Um, and I do a lot of people call me for like, hey, I'm trying to fill this part.

[44:50] Anna O'Donoghue: Do you have any ideas? And I do a lot of that, and it's really fun, and it's another like puzzle solving brainstorming. You could try this, or you could try that. You're also just involved with so many different groups, and yeah. And I'll throw all your new playwork and everything, like you just know a lot of people. And I also think of it as sort of a service professional type thing. I'm good at matchmaking. But I got a call from a film guy that I met maybe five years ago. He was working on something I was shooting with Nick Choxie, actually. Um this like funny little two hander film about a date gone wrong. Um I've helped him with some projects over the years, and he called me and was like, I'm doing this movie.

Do you want to be an official like casting person on it? And I was like, sure. And it was so unexpected and so fun. And someone forwarded me an email the um the other day being like, You're on IMDB as a casting person. I was like, oh my god, that's crazy. But over the course of that second. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I got to like there was um there's a young woman named Rachel Saknoff, who I've seen in a bunch of stuff. I've worked with her briefly. We're not like good friends. She's lovely, but we're not like close. I just think she's so special and so talented. She works a lot with a writer named Will Arbory, who I also just think is a genius, and they're an amazing collaboration. And there was a role in this movie.

I was helping to cast 27 parts, and I was like, and Rachel doesn't, I mean, maybe things have changed, but like she came to New York from Northwestern with no agent or grounding or like credits or whatever. And I was able to like get her a job on this movie, who and Beth Marvel is starring in it, and like Reed Bernie and all these cool people. It's really fun. Um, and it's fine, you know, whatever. But like I was able to like get her a no-audition offer to do this thing that I think they are lucky to have her for. And I was like, wow, how incredible to be in a position to do that. That always feels wonderful. It felt so good. And um, those are the most rewarding moments I'm fine. Like when I'm I'm just I've been chatting with a writer about something, and then I like see their pitch that they've just sold, and they like incorporated a scene we spitballed about. Like it's so amazing. Um I think the lesson is just that you don't you just don't know how those things are gonna happen.

[47:42] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[47:45] Anna O'Donoghue: And when I try to strategize, it's always a disaster.

[47:51] Leah Walsh: That is a good lesson.

[47:52] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes. I mean, for me, for other people, it's really different. So no, I'm such a planner that that's one thing about being an actor that drives me crazy. But it's you know, it's probably why I chose it in a way.

[48:06] Leah Walsh: Yeah, the other side, yeah, like negative space. Probably good for me to not be able to plan, but it feels excruciating.

[48:14] Anna O'Donoghue: I know how one of those things it's so the lack of agency and the lack of control as an actor is like so painful for so many of my dearest and most talented friends. I really kind of like it because I just get to I I like the feeling of surrender and the feeling of being like, great, you do like you take care of it, not my job, you know. Like I I find that really maybe it is a little bit like I am the child of two people who like run things for a living, and that is terrifying and exhausting to me. So I I want to go in the other direction and be like powerless. Let the universe take care of it. Please. I mean it won't, obviously, but like who knows.

[49:07] Leah Walsh: Do you have any artistic mentors that have become important to you over your career?

[49:15] Anna O'Donoghue: Well, I mean, I I always say that my Brian Murtis is one of the most inspiring, uh important to my sense of again, like chaos and powerlessness and who knows in art. I don't know that I mean I've worked with him a few times across different mediums. We're not close. I'm just obsessed with him.

[49:36] Leah Walsh: Um as am I.

[49:38] Anna O'Donoghue: Totally obsessed. I would do anything he says, and I have. Um most of my important like long-term things. I wouldn't call mentorships exactly, but my long-term collaboratorships have been incredibly important to me.

[49:56] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[49:57] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, and a lot of those have been writers. I mean, I I go back to working with a lot of the same people over and over, and it's just incredible to watch their careers ascend and to get to be sometimes a direct part of it and sometimes just kind of on the sidelines being like, yay! But yeah, those uh like m I'm I'm a member of a couple of different companies, and it's so hard to be all alone in the expanse of New York. So I'm yeah, I'm really grateful for for those.

[50:30] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[50:31] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, let me see how long I've kept you.

[50:33] Leah Walsh: Oh my gosh.

[50:35] Anna O'Donoghue: Were there any specific things that I haven't touched on that you really wanted to talk about?

[50:42] Leah Walsh: Oh gosh.

[50:43] Anna O'Donoghue: Again, things you're really excited about right now? There's no Yeah wrong answer to that.

[50:48] Leah Walsh: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[50:49] Anna O'Donoghue: Um well I mean, I thi there's this is two different two different things. But um something that I think is important just like navel gazely for me is that I've had a lot of issues with my voice over my career, like um and medical issues or more like I think confidence issues? I think both actually. I mean, um I before I was interested in in being an actor, I was this I was a little singer. Um I was I knew the entire canon of Sontime by the time I was like eight. Seriously, I could still probably I won't I won't do it. Um then I got a couple of like uh cysts on my vocal cords at a certain point, which I didn't treat for a long time because I'm bad at self-care and I was like, oh it'll probably go away.

And it's just been really interesting to me to I'm probably in as good vocal health right now as I will be for the rest of my life and career, and that means that I'm working with a compromised instrument. It's better than it was, but it was a really interesting thing for me to kind of lose the voice that I once had, which was this very like right, high like people would say that I should do like Disney voiceovers or whatever. That's gone. And the way that that has changed my like my identity both internally and also my type, I think for acting has been really interesting.

[52:35] Leah Walsh: When do you think that chang was a really gradual thing? Or it was you remember like a change?

[52:41] Anna O'Donoghue: I mean, I remember just being like, Wow, I can't sing anymore. Um, I I'm reaching for, or even like speaking. I'm re I'm reaching for certain like melody notes that aren't there. And I thought it would get better. And it is the thing where like we all have different places in our bodies that manifest difficulty. Like some people when they're upset or stressed or whatever, like they have indigestion or headaches, or mine has always been my voice. And I don't think I I think there is probably some like metaphor there. Um and it got really bad while I was in like a tricky relationship, and you know, but there were actual cysts which needed to be taken away.

[53:25] Leah Walsh: Um imaginary.

[53:27] Anna O'Donoghue: It wasn't, it was deeply real, and no one and it wasn't a like polyp or node thing. It was just like the body, the body's crazy. The body just decided to be like, we're gonna put some extra fluid in this little sack here. And the vocal cords are so delicate and precious and mysterious, and who kind of knows why they do what they do? They're both like very medical and very mystical. So that whole odyssey through realizing that something is like fundamentally different about your instrument and mourning the loss of that and also kind of like trying to see how it can newly inform you has been really I'm still on the path of it, but it's been really interesting. Like I'm super nervous to hear this because I'm gonna be like, oh my god, that's what I sound like now. And I'm sure I don't sound that fundamentally different to other people, but the it's right, it's it's crazy to me. Like one of the most intimate things.

[54:34] Leah Walsh: It's like what your voice is doing.

[54:35] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I'm sure I mean the feeling like you've lost the ability to sing, I'm sure is a whole different thing.

[54:41] Leah Walsh: That's a whole like specific it's really hard.

[54:45] Anna O'Donoghue: I can I I'm getting some of it back, and like that's one of my long-term like the dark side for me would be the futility of it, would be like, well, it's gone, it's lost, why bother? But in fact, people cope with huge difficulties, medical and otherwise, and they they restore. I remember um David Caudell, our mutual friend, who has been beautifully featured on this podcast, um, wrote a play that I was going to be in, and then I had to get out of for a scheduling reason called Downward Facing Debbie, which was about a yoga class, and there was a guy in the cast of it who had been the person in that um Spider-Man accident. Do you remember that?

[55:34] Leah Walsh: Yeah, whose entire body had been like completely decimated, he'd been paralyzed.

[55:40] Anna O'Donoghue: Oh my god. And it was wrenching, and he was in this cast. I went to the first couple of rehearsals, and he was sitting next to me, like looking like the Bastion of Health in a play about yoga, and he was almost I mean, he seemed to be completely recovered, and so much of it was that he had had all of this amazing positive energy and like belief, and he was sending all of that to his cells. And I mean, we are our like our bodies, we're doing it. Like, like even if our our we're not in consciously in charge of our immune systems, like no one else is controlling that. It's it's our ecosystem.

[56:23] Leah Walsh: The human body.

[56:24] Anna O'Donoghue: The human body is nuts. Um, so that's a thing that is just has been interesting to me. And I think we all have some version of that.

[56:33] Leah Walsh: No, and it's something that we're all going to have to deal with as we age.

[56:36] Anna O'Donoghue: That alone will change our instruments in certain ways.

[56:40] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[56:40] Anna O'Donoghue: But it's it, I too, like, I haven't had medical issues, but the voice for me has always been a hang-up.

[56:48] Leah Walsh: Huh.

[56:49] Anna O'Donoghue: In undergrad and then at Juilliard, where teachers were just always writing me about it. I had to work super hard, that my voice just wasn't big. I had to always, you know, warm up for an hour. Two hours.

[57:01] Leah Walsh: So wild.

[57:02] Anna O'Donoghue: People always just giving me shit about it. And so doing the podcast has actually been strangely therapeutic to have people tell me over and over that they're like, I love your voice. Your voice is so calming, it's so soothing, it's perfect for like to have in my headphones. I'm just like, ha ha forgive me.

[57:22] Leah Walsh: Take that teachers.

[57:25] Anna O'Donoghue: Not that I didn't know. Not that I didn't need the things that they were trying to teach me, but at the time it was so sensitive for me to hear that it was like arrows of my heart.

[57:36] Leah Walsh: It's such an intimate thing.

[57:37] Anna O'Donoghue: It's such an intimate thing. The voice, I mean, it's uh it's how the internal becomes external, right? I mean, but I that's crazy for me to hear because back going back to school, I have always felt about you, and forgive me if if I've said this before, but podcast listeners, there was a there was a performance that Leah Walsh did that I saw when I was like, I don't know, 20 years old, that I will be forever changed by, which was a production of um Ellen McLaughlin's incredible adaptation of If it's and I and other daughters, and Leah played Chrysophamous, which is the kind of unseen, unsung daughter in the traditional Greek myth that Ellen McLaughlin has put at the front and center as like um as as the example of the unsung, unseen woman who keeps the clocks wound, and it is the kind of like grounded cynic of the world. And I will never forget you just standing on that stage. Like I think the place started with you sweeping in silence for a long time. I that I'm saying I think, but I know it did.

[58:51] Leah Walsh: Second year, first year, yeah, no.

[58:54] Anna O'Donoghue: It was early. And you had this quality, the way that you relate to the ground is so majestic and um rare. And it the first line that you spoke, it felt like sound was just channeling up through the earth, through your feet, and like coming unbidden out into the world. And I was like, there's just a purity of ease and communication and channel is the best word that I can use. And I was like, that is really that's really hard for me. I'm a kind of air, I I live in air and up, and finding finding my feet was always really hard for me.

[59:41] Leah Walsh: You are so sweet to say that because to from all the impressions I've ever gotten from voice teachers, I would never think anyone would say that about me.

[59:49] Leah Walsh: I remember it really feeling like, oh, this is this is what I'm after. I might not be able to do like that that might not be what I can do, but god damn it. Like that is so sweet of you. So I I have always thought of your voice as being this kind of like anchored pure elemental force. And then we wound up to be two halves of the same person.

[1:00:15] Anna O'Donoghue: It's true. It's true. Anna played Iphigenia in I don't what was your section called?

[1:00:21] Leah Walsh: In Taurus.

[1:00:23] Anna O'Donoghue: Um in Iphigenia in Alice. But our we were part one.

[1:00:28] Leah Walsh: The wars.

[1:00:29] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes. And then we did my fourth year at Juilliard, we did the Greeks part three, the gods.

[1:00:34] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I got war, you got God.

[1:00:36] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah. You were sacrificed.

[1:00:40] Leah Walsh: That's right. I was found again.

[1:00:42] Anna O'Donoghue: Great, Leah.

[1:00:43] Leah Walsh: Yeah, no, it was just rub it in. It was special. Then we got to play the same part.

[1:00:47] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, it was really amazing. In a Brian Murdy's play. And I was like, this has always been my dream to grow up into Leah Walsh.

[1:00:54] Leah Walsh: Thank God.

[1:00:56] Anna O'Donoghue: Um so I'm pregnant.

[1:01:00] Leah Walsh: What?

[1:01:02] Anna O'Donoghue: I'm acting surprised, but I knew, and I'm so glad we get to talk about it.

[1:01:06] Leah Walsh: Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. This is the best honor to be a part of the first also also.

[1:01:12] Anna O'Donoghue: Podcast announcement.

[1:01:14] Leah Walsh: Podcast announcement. Leo Walsh is making a new human inside herself.

[1:01:19] Anna O'Donoghue: Crazy things the human body can do.

[1:01:22] Leah Walsh: So insane.

[1:01:23] Anna O'Donoghue: Insane. I have a human being growing inside me, right now. Like, there is nothing more sci-fi than pregnancy and birth. Um Frankie and I are having a baby in August. So I'm a little over halfway there. You all know I've talked about it with so many people who have had kids. I've obviously made it clear I want kids. So I'm excited that we're finally doing it.

[1:01:46] Leah Walsh: Oh.

[1:01:47] Anna O'Donoghue: So I'm gonna learn what that's like to be a parent and attempt to continue my creative. And to keep from going to the dark side as an artist. Even in me. I'm learning from all the other wonderful people who've done it. So there is a rich tradition.

[1:02:03] Leah Walsh: It's true. There is.

[1:02:04] Anna O'Donoghue: It always makes me hopeful when I see people pulling it off.

[1:02:09] Leah Walsh: It can be done.

[1:02:10] Anna O'Donoghue: I mean, my childhood best friend is a director living in New Orleans who just had a baby several months ago. And like, she went into rehearsal for a show like three weeks late. I mean, she's a superhero. She's a four foot ten superhuman. But the things people are able, like this goes back to the body can do whatever. The things people are able to accomplish when they kind of decide that it's possible is amazing.

[1:02:42] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[1:02:43] Anna O'Donoghue: I was telling Frankie that I feel probably undeservedly calm about it. And um I told that to my brother this weekend we went to see them, and he was saying he thought it was probably because we like agonized over this decision for so long. There's a relief in having made the decision, and we can't go back now, and it's decided.

[1:03:06] Leah Walsh: Well, it's great that you did all of your you did all of your anxiety in advance, so you aren't doing it now. Like I think I'm sure it'll come at some point.

[1:03:11] Anna O'Donoghue: Well, the thing that always kind of gets to me is when people do a lot of anxietying about something and then like in advance of it, and then they do it and they keep anxietying about it. And I'm like, well, you did that before. Like if you were gonna do it now, you might this whole time. Don't like pick a pick a moment, you know. Pick a step and a stage.

[1:03:32] Leah Walsh: But I'm I'm super excited to meet your small person.

[1:03:35] Anna O'Donoghue: Thank you. We're excited too. Whoever they may be, wherever it may be. Um okay.

[1:03:41] Leah Walsh: End pregnancy section. Um so the two more ending questions.

[1:03:47] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes, and then I will let you go home. I will release you. When you are feeling really uninspired or inhibited with those kinds of useless feelings, um, are there any concrete things that you reach for again and again, like books you reread or music you listen to or stuff like that?

[1:04:05] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes-ish. Um I am a there's a couple of things. There are uh I am a like obsessive completionist with writers. So when I find a voice that I love, I'm like, well, now I must read everything you wrote. And I find that finding a new person like that, finding a new uh mental philosophical auditory voice to live inside, that really helps me.

[1:04:36] Leah Walsh: Um the excitement of knowing you get to read everything you've done.

[1:04:40] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes. The both the pressure, the like, oh well, god damn it. Now I'm now I know what the next like six months of my life is gonna be. Um and but there are a bunch of like required reading people that I do return to. I don't tend to reread books as much as look for the next one, but like um I'm obsessed with Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree.

[1:05:07] Anna O'Donoghue: Um Andrew Solomon's writing in general, I think he's an incredible write that down. Oh my god, and I'll like if you cut the pregnancy section out, this will be less relevant. But um, Far from the Tree is really an amazing book about um about parenting, about parents who have children who are fundamentally different from them in some way. And I think it's really about the nature of identity, illness, otherness, um, and parent and love. And it's so beautiful. He also writes a lot about anxiety and depression, and um he's an incredible writer and thinker. Uh great at both the the humane micro and the human macro, which is the thing that kind of like I'm always attracted to.

[1:05:52] Anna O'Donoghue: Um I'm also obsessed with Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, even though he is in fact a psychologist. Uh he wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. I go around talking about it all the time. So I go back, I like read his studies. I'm that geeky. He's amazing.

[1:06:14] Anna O'Donoghue: Um Maggie Nelson, Anthony Mangela, oh, who has a bunch of radio plays that I just love so much. Um Ann Carson, um they're just writers and and voices that I I that I find both invigorating and soothing.

[1:06:37] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, and they're all pretty like they're they're they're pretty bleak people, a lot of them. Um, like Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty is a book that I love. And then the other thing I go to is that I I have found to be really useful is memorization. Um when I find myself getting uh kind of futile or self-hating or anxious, I need to fill the space with a project. So sometimes I will be like, I'm gonna write a fairy tale for so and so, or I'm gonna I'm gonna finish something so that I feel less like a lug.

[1:07:18] Anna O'Donoghue: But um I've found that putting long pieces of text into my body is really, really helpful and healing for me because I can sort of one, it gives me a thing to return to, and I own it. You know, if there will be if the apocalypse happens tomorrow, I will not have any objects, but I will have the things that I have learned and just sound and repetition and having a like I'm walking down the street.

[1:07:46] Leah Walsh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1:07:47] Anna O'Donoghue: But also, I mean, like the the longest one that I think I've learned, I'm still sort of working on a Jonathan Saffron Four story called And There We Weren't So Quickly, but prose is harder than poetry. There is a Bob Dylan prose poem called Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, that is probably like 10 minutes long that I spent all of 2016 learning.

[1:08:12] Leah Walsh: I love that.

[1:08:13] Anna O'Donoghue: And whenever I start to kind of spiral a little bit, I just sort of like go into the and then there's a couple of pieces of text that I have that that are useful to me, and they're also just reminders of like, hey, I I have this and I did that.

[1:08:26] Leah Walsh: Right.

[1:08:26] Anna O'Donoghue: And you I mean, that's a skill that you use constantly as an actor, but it's nice to use it for something that doesn't have any of that pressure associated with it.

[1:08:37] Leah Walsh: Yeah, and even when I'm learning, like even when I'm doing a show and I'm like learning lines, and I sometimes I'll feel like it's an indulgence to learn something else because I'm like, Anna, let me learn some space left. But it's just a it's a tool that I've found to be really uh I like that. It's my it's better, it's a moving meditation, it's a moving like mental meditation, and you really cannot be um when you are memorizing, it forces you to go piece by piece and slow down.

[1:09:06] Anna O'Donoghue: Yeah, you can't skim memorization, you know.

[1:09:10] Leah Walsh: Right, you either have it or you don't yeah, and you have to go like you have you you you can't cheat it, you can't jump it.

[1:09:16] Anna O'Donoghue: Right.

[1:09:16] Leah Walsh: So that's something. Is there anything that you've seen lately of any art form that you want to recommend?

[1:09:24] Anna O'Donoghue: Um I'm reading I'm like most of the way through Elia Kazan's on directing right now, which I just sort of picked up, and it's not quite it's not a book that he wrote, it's an editor going back and piecing together all of his notebooks and letters and all of his thinking about directing and these great he he directed everything.

[1:09:50] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I didn't realize that like he directed all my sons and um uh Tennessee Williams, Jesus Christ.

[1:10:00] Anna O'Donoghue: Um Canada Hunted Roof, Cat on a hunting roof, but also uh not Glass menagerie, but um Vivian Lee, Jessica Tandy, Street Carname Desire.

[1:10:00] Leah Walsh: Street Carname Desire.

[1:10:13] Anna O'Donoghue: Yes, he was Miller and Tennessee Williams's guru and go to. And I didn't realize that that same person did like all of that work. And it is, and all my sons, he was the original. Like, it's incredible to read his notes on these plays and to read the way that he thinks about direction.

[1:10:36] Anna O'Donoghue: But again, it's he's an amazing micro macro person. Everything is super personal. He's like obsessed with locating his own father and his own lovers and mother-in-law and himself in all of these characters. And unless he can sort of figure out what his own personal like therapy type thing to work out is, he can't do the play. At the same time, he's always really interested in what the social movement and the kind of larger metaphoric sweep is.

[1:11:07] Leah Walsh: And I he's just amazing.

[1:11:09] Anna O'Donoghue: And like getting to kind of immerse in that mind is so cool, and it's also making me want to go back and like revisit all of these works and like play all these parts right now. And it's also refreshing how intensely seriously he takes his work, and I feel like and himself, and I feel like a lot of times it can be hard to feel permission to care that much. We're sort of in an irony Instagram age of like hashtag sorry not sorry, and like there is it's all blood and guts and like id for him.

[1:11:48] Anna O'Donoghue: Um, so I'm really into that. I this is a little bit of a cheat. I haven't seen it, but my friend Leah Nonical Winkler has a play called Two Mile Hollow, which I have read and seen readings of, and I think it's the funniest play in the world. And it's having a um, it's having a like workshop production at Pipeline Theater, the women's project thing that's happening through the end of this weekend and I'm going on Saturday.

[1:12:21] Anna O'Donoghue: And Morgan Gould, who is one of my like most treasured collaborators and a true comic genius, is directing it, and I just cannot wait to see it, and I know it's amazing, even though I can't endorse it yet, but I will. I will. What else?

[1:12:39] Anna O'Donoghue: Uh I'm also reading Eleanor Roosevelt's like book called It's Up to the Women, which is so funny, um, because it's just thoughts about like what women should do during the depression. And I just I I just enjoy it for what she thinks about um the things that young wives should know how to do. She has a lot of instructions for you in starting a family.

[1:13:05] Leah Walsh: Oh good.

[1:13:06] Anna O'Donoghue: Every young, every young mother should know how to give an enema.

[1:13:12] Leah Walsh: Swear to god, Leah.

[1:13:13] Anna O'Donoghue: Swear to God. Um, so I'm having fun with that. There are a million things, but those are the three, those are the three that come immediately to mind.

[1:13:23] Leah Walsh: Liana, thank you so much. This was magnificent.

[1:13:27] Anna O'Donoghue: I'm so happy we got to do this.

[1:13:28] Leah Walsh: Well, thank you for having me. It's an honor.

[1:13:33] Leah Walsh: Um thank you for listening to the Compass Podcast. If you find these conversations valuable to your life as an artist and would like to support the ongoing production of The Compass, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash The Compass Podcast. Pledges start at as little as one dollar a month. You'll get access to bonus content, and anything you can give would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you have a moment, please rate or review in iTunes. Every little bit helps other listeners to find the podcast.

[1:14:23] Leah Walsh: See you next time.