BIO

Catie O’Keefe holds a BA in Theatre from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon USA and a Masters in Playwriting from Royal Holloway University of London, UK.  Her work has been performed in London at the Jerwood Centre, Southwark Theatre, Henley Fringe Festival, The Royal Court Upstairs, Theatre 503 and The Bread and Roses Theatre. She has had productions at both the 2008 and 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festivals in Scotland. She participated in the Fall 2007 session of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Program and also the 2008 Invitation Class back at the Royal Court.  The Space Between My Head and My Body premiered at London’s Theatre 503 and then transferred to the Underbelly Baby Belly 3 in Edinburgh  (Original Works Publishing). Deception, Illusion and Nate has been performed in the US and as part of the Dyssing Monday’s Dyslexic festival in October 2008 and again in the Henley Fringe Festival in July 2009 in the UK. Extraction was produced in March 2010 at the Camden Etc. Theatre and then in June 2011 in New York City with Davenport Theatrical.   An Apartment with Grace was one of six winners to be produced for The Louisiana State University Outworks Festival in April 2010.
She served as Playwright in residence at  New Edgecliff Theatre 2010-2013 during which they produced Darker (Original Works Publishing) in the 2011 Cincinnati Fringe Festival,  Poe-ssessed in Oct 2011, The Canterville Ghost in Oct 2012, Slow Descent From Heaven in Feb 2013 and Frankenstein in Oct. 2013. She wrote and directed Welcome Home: The Waddie Welcome Story at the historical Emery Theatre in May 2012. Flight 212 debuted in Cleveland OH and then transferred to Cincinnati and finally Portland Oregon, it was her first show for a puppet and a human. She has been part of an on-going workshop project, Fantasies and Nightmares, taking place in New York.
In 2016 she created a new piece of work in collaboration with Amy Fritsche and Courtney Brown (both professors at Kent State University) which toured through London (Bread and Roses Theatre) and Edinburgh (2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe) called Best Intentions.  In 2016-2018 she was a member of the Playwrights GYM at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland and is taught workshops with Dobama and Lake Eire Ink.
She is Artistic Director of Shark Eat Muffin Theatre Company and a recipient of the Peggy Ramsay Grant and was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY 2018. She is a member of The National New Play Network - New Play Exchange and The International Center for Women Playwrights.

INSPIRED BY

Dennis Kelly / Adam Rapp / Charlotte Jones / Laura Wade / Howard Korder / Caryl Churchill's adaptation of Strindberg's A Dream Play / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind / Donnie Darko / American Beauty.

Monica and Phil have the chance of a lifetime; the opportunity to do something really noble for all of human-kind and they're honored to do it - sort of. As respectable biologists and engineers, they find themselves part of a 520 day simulation to study many of the challenges and effects on humans that would arise on the long journey to Mars. Though they are isolated to a small mock-up of a space station they carry out their days doing research projects and attempting to keep their minds sharp. While on the outside (a.k.a down on Earth) Monica's mother Birdie and Phil's wife Heidi start meeting in secret outside of the allowed family visits in search of their own comforts. Based upon the Mars 500 mission experiments from 2007-2011, Monica and Phil find themselves not only in an experiment in food rationing, living in tight living quarters, or lack of proper exercise, but also dealing with the pressure of waiting and watching for the inevitable psychological side-effects to set in.