This week New York's first ever Irish theater festival will take to the stage, featuring nine exciting new plays by Ireland's most celebrated playwrights. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the festival's artistic director George Heslin about how and why he made this extraordinary new festival happen.

THIS weekend New York's first ever Irish theater festival, called 1st Irish 2008, will begin at the Theaters. And already it's the biggest thing to ever hit the Irish theatre scene in New York- an unprecedented rollout for such a fledgling festival. The festival is the brainchild of Irish actor and director George Heslin, 36, whose Origin Theatre Company has introduced the works of over 26 new European - most of them Irish - writers to America since 2002. With unusual nerve, Heslin has programmed the entire festival as though it's been running for years, and in the process he's attracted the biggest names in Irish theater.

"What inspired me to do this is that I've worked on a personal level with a lot of these great new playwrights in Ireland and I never saw their work being produced in America. That was the first spark behind it," Heslin told the Irish Voice.

A graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, and an actor, director and producer in his own right, Heslin has starred on the West End in London and off Broadway. Back in Ireland he cut his teeth working for the all the major theaters, including the Abbey, the Gate, the Lyric and Galway's Druid before coming to New York to study with the legendary theater coach Uta Hagen, until he eventually decided to stay.

"I'm from Limerick originally and I moved to New York full time in 2000 - I studied for two years prior to that as an actor. As a new arrival here the writers like Enda Walsh and Mark O'Rowe were the playwrights I knew from home, and I saw they hadn't been presented here before," Heslin recalls.

"So one of our first Origin Theatre Company shows was a production of Enda Walsh's Mister Man. That ran off Broadway for five weeks and then we took it back to Dublin for the theater festival. That was our second play project and the rest just followed on from there."

Along the way Heslin's New York-based company has created strong links to some of the city's finest Irish institutions, including the Irish Consulate, NYU's Glucksman Ireland House and Fordham University's Irish studies program. That's why the new festival will be underwritten with help from Mutual of America (the official launch party is at the insurance company's Park Avenue office this week) among many other sponsors.

Says Heslin, " has been a home for Origin for the last three years. 1st Irish was an initial idea between Origin and . One day about eight months ago Peter Tear and Elysabeth Kleinhanf of and I planned it out.

"They had already presented the Brits Off Broadway Festival successfully for many years so we came up with this Irish idea. Initially the festival was due to take place just at that theater but it kept on growing. Soon we were inviting the top Irish theater companies on the East Coast, including Washington's Solas Nua and Keegan theater companies and the Tir Na Theatre Company from Boston."

With Heslin's focus on contemporary Irish playwriting he already knew all the main players on the Irish theatre scene while still at college. It was his familiarity with the writers and their work that eventually led to an unprecedented series of new Irish plays receiving their American premieres courtesy of Origin.

"I've worked with a lot of the emerging playwrights in Ireland, and I got to know them the way you do," says Heslin. "Back in 1997, for example, I was in an art gallery outside of Dundalk when I met a guy at a wine reception who said he'd like to be a playwright.

"I said, 'Well I'm setting up a theater company.' He was very shy. He said, 'I've never shown them to anyone.' I read them and said we needed to produce this one right away, it's amazing. That was the very first production of a Mark O'Rowe play. That's where Mark O'Rowe began, with help from Origin."

What's remarkable about the festival is that the organizers seem to have taken Oscar Wilde's advice about success to heart - just start at the top and then sit on it. Heslin has curated a major international festival - bringing together the most important Irish theater makers in the U.S. and Ireland - and he's pulled it together on his first attempt.

Alongside the plays, the festival will also feature talks held at New York University's Glucksman Ireland House, Lincoln Center, the American Irish Historical Society and the New York Public Library.

Says Heslin, "I thought we had to be inclusive from the start, so we sent out the invites, and we ended up with something on this scale from the first time out. Niall Burgess at the Irish Consulate was instrumental, as was Brendan O Caollai, and we got terrific help from Ruth Moran at Tourism Ireland and Eugene Downes at Culture Ireland - and from Lorraine Turner at the Northern Ireland Bureau, and of course from Tom Moran at Mutual of America who came on board to host the official launch party."

It's equally remarkable that a festival on this scale has been curated from Origin's cramped offices on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. There has been talk on and off of housing the company in the much-heralded new Irish Arts Center, but the foundation stone has yet to be laid.

As for the plays being staged this year, Origin took an imaginative approach to the festival's first show, End of Lines, by inviting five prominent new Irish playwrights to come to New York, ride the local subways, then write five 25 minute plays inspired by their experiences.

Says Heslin, "All of the writers we invited are award winning, and I wanted to be very strict on including women writers and writers from all four corners of Ireland. So we have one from Derry, Belfast, Dublin, Cork and County Claire. That project opens the entire Irish theatre festival."

Other shows at the festival include new productions of Rum and Vodka by Conor McPherson, When I Was God by Conal Creedon and Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh. And one of the most distinctive and promising new voices at the festival is that of Ursula Rani Sarma, the celebrated new Irish playwright who is of Irish and Indian heritage, via the tiny village of Lahinch in Co. Clare.

"It's my first production in New York and I'm very excited about it," said Rani Sarma. "It's a nice way to be introduced to the theater scene over here, and since it's five Irish playwrights it's a shared pressure.

It's also a great opportunity for all the Irish playwrights whose work doesn't usually get to the States. There really is a sense that this is just the beginning. Next year and the year after more Irish playwrights will have the opportunity to have their works staged at the new festival."

For more details on showtimes and tickets to 1st Irish and the discussion series, visit www.1stirish.org.