Marin Ireland Went Deep With Pre-Existing Condition

Originally published on Vogue.com
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Photo by Austin Ruffer

Marin Ireland’s debut play, Pre-Existing Condition, is receiving its second production in New York, at the Greenwich House Theater. The rotating cast of Ireland’s powerful drama includes Lupita Nyong'o, Phillipa Soo, and Edie Falco, with a fleet of veteran stage performers in supporting roles. But Ireland doesn’t feel comfortable calling herself a playwright. She even finds it “funny” calling Pre-Existing Condition a play.

“I spent so much of my career in service to playwrights and new plays,” Ireland says. “I have so much respect and awe for what they do—people whose lives are dedicated to that craft. I was like, well, I’m writing a thing, and I don’t know what to call it because I don’t have that training and that lifelong dedication to crafting a play.”

Ireland has been working on the play, which explores the impact of domestic violence, for more than a decade. After a woman’s partner blackens her eye, she ends the relationship—but the fallout bewilders her. The legal system dehumanizes her, the support group confuses her, and one of her friends painfully disappoints her. “I want to do the right thing,” she says in a moment of frustration, “and I can’t fucking find it.”

Ireland, who named the woman A, recalls writing in fits and spurts as she explored her own trauma, before sharing small sections with her friends for feedback.

“A lot of it was about hearing what resonated with people in the room, and I think there is such a vulnerable thing as a writer that I’d never experienced, of feeling, Does anybody else understand this at all? Does anybody relate to any of this? It’s so private and so vulnerable and exposing, hearing actors that I really love and respect talk about what resonated with them.”

The play resonated so strongly, in fact, that it sold out its 2024 premiere at the Connolly Theatre. Directed by Maria Dizza—who also helms the new production—the performers then playing A included Tatiana Maslany, Tavi Gevinson, Deirdre O’Connell, Julia Chan, and Dizza herself. Sarah Steele, Greg Keller, and Dael Orlandersmith were in the supporting cast, as they are for the Greenwich House Theater run.

It didn’t hurt Ireland’s creative process that she’s been an active member of the theater community for decades, working on and off Broadway. She received a Tony nomination for her performance in Reasons to Be Pretty in 2009 and starred last year in Martyna Majok’s Queens at New York City Center. Known for the steely strength she brings to her characters, Ireland has also recently appeared in the TV series His & Hers and The Devil In Disguise.

Actually staging Pre-Existing Condition was not a priority for Ireland. “I kind of gave up on it 15 times along the way,” she says. “I always thought that even if I did finish it, it felt so presumptuous of me, after working with the writers I worked with over the years… That wasn’t ever part of my fantasy. I didn’t actually have an endgame for it. It was always like, I just think I need to keep writing.”

While Ireland drew upon some personal experiences for the script, much of the play is fiction. She says the response from her friends helped her to see the play as a piece of art, rather than a reflection of herself.

“It would make me feel like, I can think of this as something outside of me, and I can think of this as something that might be useful in the world, as opposed to something like: How does this relate to my own sense of fragility or exposure or anything like that?”

In Pre-Existing Condition, one actress plays A as four other performers fill the various roles of the other people in her life—her oblivious mother, a self-righteous friend, her therapist, the leader of a support group, and a date she attempts to be intimate with. None of the characters are named beyond a letter, and their age and race are not specified—a deliberate choice by Ireland to avoid validating people’s preconceived ideas regarding victims of abuse. She also strove to avoid certain gender stereotypes, writing a female friend of A’s who sympathizes with her ex. “You don’t want to ruin his life or anything, right?” she asks A. “I guess I’m just surprised you don’t have more empathy.”

“I knew that I wanted the most frightening and villainous person we hear to be a woman’s voice,” Ireland says. “Even though we’re aware of it, I think it still feels shocking to us when women turn their backs on other women in the world at large—when we see women in positions of power politically, and we are like, ‘How could they be voting against their own self-interest?’”

Ireland and many of the women she spoke with had also witnessed that behavior in their personal lives. “Working on this play brings out a lot of conversations with people, and I had some of the most shocking conversations I’ve had in my life with women, including around this particular topic,” she says. “I felt like it was important to sort of call that out. I hope it also underlines the point that this is not a play [in which] all men are bad and all women are amazing.”

Its title refers to the health insurance term frequently used to deny coverage before the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act. Such conditions could include “things relating to periods and menopause and all these things that were very specific to our childbearing and reproductive systems, and domestic violence was also one,” Ireland says. “So, in that moment, almost in anger and rage, [I thought], I guess this has to be called Pre-Existing Condition, because she’s a woman and this thing happens to her.”

Ireland knows witnessing that rage can be an uncomfortable experience for the audience, but she also thinks it’s important. “Writing about something like this, there are so many pitfalls, and there are always moments when I watch it when I wince or I worry how the audience hears it,” she says. “But I have always heard that if you don’t feel embarrassed about something, if it doesn’t make you feel crazy, like nerve endings exposed, you didn’t go deep enough.”

She hopes that feeling will be a communal one, and a productive one. “I think to make sure that people in the audience don’t feel like it’s particularly directed at them, but to make it feel like it’s something they can then feel some kind of catharsis through, no matter who they are. That’s what the point of gathering in a room together feels like to me. Let’s sweep everybody up in this. Let’s give everybody a way to feel like they’re being heard and getting to express something by sitting in this room.”

Pre-Existing Condition is set to run at the Greenwich House Theater through January 8, 2027.