Megan Riordan

This year will be Megan’s fifth Fringe Festival, making her a Fringe veteran. Born in Las Vegas, a graduate of NYU, the blue-eyed thesp came to Dublin as part of an exchange program and never left. Megan now works as an actress and as a theatre maker and producer for her theatre company Making Strange. Together with Dodd Loomis, the current show is entitled You Remember The Stories You Wish Were True and here she gives us a little taster of what to expect.

Your piece seems to be about memories and the objects that prompt them. Would it be accurate to describe it as dealing with nostalgia??It’s not so much that I picked the theme as it picked me–it’s based on a real event that happened to me, which was losing everything I owned after putting it in a storage unit (as for how that happened, you’ll have to see the show). The piece touches on nostalgia, but also pulls back to look at bigger issues and phenomena of memory and forgetting. What it’s really about is looking at the resonance and lasting effects of that event in the ten years since it happened.

Explain the title.?The title came from wondering why we remember what we do, and the idea that maybe what we remember is what we wish was true–whether that’s positive or negative. That is, even if something bad happened, we remember it because it fits into a narrative about how we think the world works or what our place is in it. Now, I’m not sure I really believe that entirely…it’s just one way to frame our experiences.

Story-telling seems to be a big part of the piece – you talk about ‘necessary fictions.’ Explain what you mean by that.?We need stories to make sense of our lives and journeys. It’s innate to humankind. Our brains do it automatically and subconsciously as part of how they interpret the world. But stories can’t capture the whole truth of an event – who we are or what our lives are, and they can be dangerously limiting. But we still need them. I’m interested in how the stories about ourselves change and grow, and even more fascinated by what happens when we drop them, move beyond them and how we can do that.

You Remember The Stories You Wish Were True is on at The Project, Cube at 1pm Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.

To book see here.

Roisin Agnew @Roxeenna