Embracing inventiveness, providing opportunity at Shark Eat Muffin

Starting her own theater company is something Catie O’Keefe says she’s always wanted to do. 

“There’s that internal drive where you want that control for what’s being put on, or you want to see new things being developed,” O’Keefe says. 

Though that drive is nothing new, O'Keefe's playwriting ventures didn’t begin until she found she was getting bored with the characters she played in her high school’s musicals. So, she wrote new characters, and, at the age of 16, started turning them into plays.

From 2006-2010, when O’Keefe was living in London and pursuing a master’s degree in playwriting, she started formulating ideas for her future company. And when she moved to Cincinnati, she decided it was time to move forward with her vision and make something happen.

That something is Shark Eat Muffin Theatre Company. 

“Cincinnati has a big theater scene, but it’s mainly well-established companies, and there’s some new companies doing some well-known works. I wanted to give a focus to new playwrights and make it a learning experience in a professional environment,” O’Keefe says. 

Shark Eat Muffin’s first production enabled a McAuley High School student—now graduated—and an older gentleman whom she says had been writing a while but who had missed opportunities to take her class at New Edgecliff Theatre, to present their work on stage for the first time. 

“It’s really difficult to fill the gap of you having a reading of your play, but then what happens?" she says. "How many readings do you have before it’s finally put on stage?”

Shark Eat Muffin’s second production this season, The Space Between my Head and my Body, made its United States debut Thursday at the 2013 Cincinnati Fringe Festival. O’Keefe wrote the play about six years ago, and it opened in London, transferred to the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was then published by an American company in 2011. 

“We did a lot of workshops about identity and that feeling of finding yourself—what you look at might not be what someone else sees when they look at the same thing,” O’Keefe says. 

Bringing her play from Europe to the U.S. is the first step in creating a company that fulfills O’Keefe’s goal of international fluidity for Shark Eat Muffin. 

“We’re kind of starting the beginning of a project where we bring a couple of actors from London to perform in Ohio and move in that direction of connecting different cultures and different people from different places,” O’Keefe says. “Bringing them together to perform great theater is our ultimate goal.” 

Do Good: 

• Like Shark Eat Muffin Theatre Company on Facebook, and tell a friend.

• Attend a showing of The Space Between my Head and my Body at the 2013 Cincinnati Fringe Festival.

• Support Shark Eat Muffin by making a donation.

By Brittany York

Brittany York is a professor of English composition at the University of Cincinnati and a teacher at the Regional Institute of Torah and Secular Studies. She also edits the For Good section of SoapboxMedia.