About ten years ago, Rosie O’Donnell got together with Dick Scanlan, “a wonderful writer and a really great guy” whose numerous credits include the Tony Award-winning musical Thoroughly Modern Millie, and started to write an autobiographical show. They were able to do a few readings, but there was an issue, O’Donnell recalls: “I couldn’t get through it without crying.”
Eventually, the famously funny entertainer learned to embrace the poignance of her story, and so have audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in Ireland and Australia, where Common Knowledge, her new, deeply personal one-act play, has already won rave reviews. Now the show has arrived Off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth Theatre, where it’s scheduled for a dozen performances between July 22 and August 8.
As her fans know, O’Donnell, who has long championed theater in numerous capacities—with her hugely popular talk program, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, as a Broadway performer, and as a producer—moved to Ireland last year with her youngest child, Clay, and it was there she first performed Common Knowledge, “in a little club.”
O’Donnell notes that her new Irish neighbors initially “weren’t as familiar with me as the American audiences were, so I tried to tell them my origin story, which starts with my mother’s death. So it’s a very sad opening, and the closing is sad as well, because it’s about the last time I saw my mother alive. But most of it is about our move to Ireland – that’s Clay and myself, and how different it is to parent a child who’s an only child in some ways, because all of their siblings are much older; they’re in their 20s and 30s.”
Raising Clay, who identifies as non-binary and is autistic, has brought other challenges. “When you have an autistic child, they’re so vulnerable, that the connection to them is more intense in some ways, your desire to take care of them and protect them. To know that they’re safe and understood and have good self-esteem is of paramount importance.”
Clay has inherited their mother’s creative nature. When O’Donnell asked why they wanted to change their given name, “They said it’s not that I don’t want to be [given name], it’s that I don’t feel like it fits me. I’d like everyone to call me Clay, because Clay is an art form, and I’m an artist. They draw, amazingly well. They draw animated cartoon figures…It’s interesting, autistic children often give the same amount of value and attention to inanimate objects as they do to humans. They feel that everything has a soul.”
O’Donnell muses, “Some people accuse me of looking through rose-colored glasses at the autism spectrum, but I don’t. When you meet one kid with autism, you’ve met one kid with autism, because they’re all different. This is my experience of my kid, and I try not to harp on the challenges; I harp on the success.”
Nonetheless, she wryly admits, “Clay is not thrilled that I’m talking about them,” and in fact hasn’t seen Common Knowledge. “They did not want to see it, but when I would rehearse it in my house, just by myself, trying to get the lines down, I would hear them in the other room going, ‘That’s not true.’ ‘I don’t think that’s particularly funny.’ ‘That is not accurate, Mom.’”
The show has been tweaked for American audiences: “It’s very much a love letter to Ireland, so there were many references to Irish things that I didn’t think America would get. So I took out some of the Irish stuff, took out a chunk of (the material about) Scotland. And I put in some more stuff about my children.”
O’Donnell has made it no secret that her choice to relocate to the land of her ancestors was prompted by the re-election of President Trump, of whom she has been both a critic and a target. “I have felt a peace and serenity there, because he’s not on the news 24/7. I took all the American channels off my television, so I watch only Irish or British news, and that has been helpful for my mental health. I knew I had to be the best me I could be, for myself and for this child.”
Returning to New York has been “glorious and overwhelming at the same time” for the Long Island native. “New Yorkers are very bold and forthright and they tell you to your face what they think. That’s why I do that—I lived my whole life here and I’m a New Yorker through and through. There’s a bluntness to us that some people find obnoxious and others find refreshing. When I got here, I stopped at the first bagel store I saw and got a bagel, and then I got a hot dog on the street, and was very happy about both.”
O’Donnell is also looking forward to spending time with her new grandson—“My 26-year-old boy had a little boy back in March,” she proudly reports—and, naturally, to catching up on theater. “I’m only doing four shows a week, so I’m going to see as many other shows on Tuesdays and Wednesday matinees as I can.”
She’s already caught CATS: The Jellicle Ball, “which I loved,” and Joe Mantello’s acclaimed revival of Death of a Salesman starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf: “Wonderful. Nathan was fantastic and so was Laurie, and the men who played their boys.” She also has enthusiastic praise for Schmigadoon! and Death Becomes Her, and TJ and Dave, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi’s improv act downtown.
O’Donnell is excited to see another Off-Broadway production, her old friend and The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg’s reimagined The Whoopi Monologues at Lincoln Center Theater—directed by the “wonderful” Whitney White—and looks forward to catching Rachel Zegler in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Evita, which she saw in London, when it transfers to Broadway next spring: “I think she’s a genius and brilliant and stole the whole thing,” O’Donnell says of Zegler, adding, “Everything about the show was spectacular.”
Might Common Knowledge also make the move uptown? “It’s going to be up to Daryl,” O’Donnell says, referring to Roth, the producer and the theatre’s namesake. “If we are successful, which we have been so far, and Daryl thinks it has the potential, we’ll probably do it next year on Broadway. But that’s all a pipe dream for now…I just hope everyone comes and sees it and enjoys it. And if they could let me know what they think about it, that would be very helpful.”
