Cork sisters’ first fully-staged show sells out

Cork sisters Megan and Shannon Haly are flying high.

Their first fully-staged play Cortisol had its world premiere at Smock Alley Theatre as part of this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, and comes to the Cork Arts Theatre from October 2 to 5. Both runs completely sold out.

“The play, a queer coming of age story, interrogates the myth that we are fed that your 20s are the best years of your life. We wanted to write something that we could both relate to,” says Shannon.

Cortisol had its first public outing, a rehearsed reading, in September, 2023, as part of the Catalyst programme, run in association with The Everyman, Cork Arts Theatre and Cork City Council. The reaction to the two sold-out shows was phenomenal and seemed to touch a chord.

Determined to realise a fully staged version of the play, the girls had initially hoped to secure funding through an Arts Council application. However, Arts Council funding is so competitive in Ireland and they were unsuccessful in their bid.

“So, we were looking at ways in which to raise the monies required. We wanted to think of ways outside the box of getting funds together that hadn’t been done before.”

They reached out on social media and discovered a genuine loneliness in people their own age.

“We are all so hyper-connected,” Shannon says, “but it’s purely on a surface level. Our friends, like us, admit to being addicted to their phones, yet are looking for real connection. 

All of us are leading separate lives.

The simplicity of making a call, writing a letter, eludes them.

“Social media is a major contributing factor,” she continues. “People are so crippled with social anxiety, that they don’t or can’t even make phone calls. People don’t see that from our generation.

“Everyone feels a little bit lost and overwhelmed,” says Megan. “When people look at our generation, in our 20s, they see the possibilities are endless for jobs, travel, but with this privilege is also a pressure to figure out what it is you want.

“The world is changing drastically and everyone is trying to figure stuff out against the backdrop of what’s happening in the world.”

At a time when some of her friends seemed to have got the life-challenges under control, Megan admits that sometimes her horizon can seem a little daunting.

If I didn’t have so much belief in what I was doing, and if Shannon wasn’t also in the business, it would be very difficult to keep going.

“While we have great support from our family, they don’t fully understand the depths of the disappointment when you don’t get an acting job or funding.”

Last spring, the sisters were in LA filming a short that Shannon had written called Dollar Baby’s. While there, they became friends with Remi (from LA) and Galwegian Erris, both of whom had co-directed and produced the film.

“We all agreed it was rare to meet people and make genuine connections with them in our 20s,” explains Megan. “It is much harder to make deep, meaningful friends when you’re older.

“As we chatted about it, all of us agreed that the friends that we did have were from our childhood. We also all had had pen pals growing up.”

Out of that conversation, came the idea of the Penpals by Cortisol website.

“Between Shannon and my own TikTok accounts, we have amassed 33,000 followers, most of whom are in their twenties. We were thinking about how we could reach these people, many of whom are really lonely, screaming for real connection.”

When they first mooted the idea of setting up a Penpal website on TikTok, they were not at all prepared for the staggering 500,000 online interactions the proposal received.

The response seemed to suggest the girls had plugged directly into the heartbeat of an entire generation.

They launched their Penpals by Cortisol website during the summer, and in just a few months, have more than 2,000 signed up. And more are coming on board every day, from places as far afield as the US, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Taiwan, UK, Italy, and Germany.

It costs just £7 sterling or €8.50 to sign up and, currently, Shannon, Megan, Remi and Erris manually pair people, taking care to maintain is geographical space between signees in order to ensure they get a different life-perspective.

“It seems we have so much and yet we have so little,” says Shannon.

“Fundamentally, all we want with this webstie is for people to have someone to share things with, not necessarily physically, but a basic life friend. Many have no-one in their lives that they can chat to.

“We set it up so that it was only aimed for people who were between 20 and 29. Yet there has been a lot of people in their thirties and younger than 20, saying ‘Oh, I’d love if there was something like this for us, too.’

“We would love to have it more accessible to everyone but, for safety reasons, we can’t be pairing up an 18-year-old with someone aged 30-years-old.

“Once they’re comfortable doing the basic connection, they can share PO boxes, write letters.

“All funds we have made from Penpals by Cortisol have gone directly into the Dublin and Cork production costs for Cortisol the play, so it definitely has helped us immensely,” says Megan.

“It has also helped us gain a larger audience for the play and to connect with other people in their twenties.”

19-30 year olds are a demographic that aren’t going to shows as much anymore so it’s been very exciting to see that we are luring that audience back into the theatre!

Not only do Penpals by Cortisol signees make new friends, they are also welcomed into the broader Cortisol family, and will be invited to ‘meet-ups’ when the production goes on tour next year.

The Haly sisters are already planning to tour their play around Europe and the States in the near future, and have just finished writing the film version. It is a win-win for all concerned. And while the financial return is very welcome and made the current productions possible, neither Megan nor Shannon is motivated by commercial opportunism or greed.

These incredible young women seem to be genuinely advocating for the mental wellbeing of an entire generation.

Once-Off Productions presents Cortisol by Megan and Shannon Haly in the Cork Art Theatre, October 2-5.