If you think it went unnoticed that you were sobbing into your palms during 4th Line Theatre’s staging of Megan Murphy’s Wild Irish Geese this summer, you are sadly mistaken.
Young actor Darragh O’Connell, who appeared as Patrick Hickey in this year’s remount as well as last year’s world premiere, played a game with himself during the play’s 21-show run, which wrapped up Saturday night (August 29) at the Winslow Farm in Millbrook.
He counted just how many audience members were wiping away their tears during the play, which tells the story of the hardships faced by Irish families who left their homeland to settle in the Peterborough area during the Peter Robinson emigration of 1825.
That, O’Connell says, helped him understand the impact he and the rest of the cast and crew were having on their audience.
“As much as it’s a bit scary and it can cause adrenaline to go in front of the audience, once we’ve taken the audience’s hand and said ‘Come with us for this journey,’ it’s so fulfilling to see how impactful we are on this group of people, some who might not have ever watched theatre before or were just forced to come there with their family,” he explains.
“There’s such a range of people that come to this show, but we get to give them that same performance. I just think that’s something really special about what I get to do.”
It’s a good thing the 14-year-old actor is fuelled by the audience before him, because he has no intention of getting off the stage anytime soon.
Now partnered with a Toronto talent agency, O’Connell has his sights set on landing more and more acting gigs, whether it be more stage work, commercials, television shows, or whatever else comes his way.
“Everything is the dream,” he says. “If I get to act, getting paid for it is just an extra bonus at my age. That’s the dream — everything.”
From a very young age while growing up in Toronto, O’Connell was told by everyone around him — family members, camp counsellors, babysitters — that he was funny and should be an actor. But it wasn’t until O’Connell’s family moved to Peterborough and he began taking improv classes with Linda Kash that he began to develop his own real passion for it.
When he stepped in front of an audience for his first time in the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s production of The Little Prince in 2022, there was no looking back.
“That was big — it showed me this is actually fun and I do want to do this,” he says about the improv classes. “The Little Prince just made me know for certain that this is what I wanted to do. I didn’t know at all how I was going to do it, but I knew that this was too fun to pass down.”
O’Connell was only 10 years old when rehearsals for The Little Prince began, but says he remembers the energy he would get just from being surrounded by other creatives.
“I got to meet new people who were both my age and older. The directors were great and they would push me to work harder and harder and just see what I could do. I remember stepping out on stage, nervous — I was terrified because it was a 200-something seat theatre. When I walked out there, any feeling of dread just left my body. I felt so happy when I took the stage for the first time, which was able to reassure me this is what I want to do.”
While O’Connell guesses he’s been in around 15 or so productions locally, including having worked with 4th Line Theatre since 2023, he says he still gets a bit nervous before taking to the stage each time, and yet it pushes him even more.
“I love the feeling of being nervous before a show,” he says. “It has slowly declined as I get more accustomed to being in front of an audience, but having that little bit of adrenaline before going on makes it so much more fun and the stakes are higher. It’s much easier to act with high stakes because it just keeps you going. You feed off the adrenaline.”
One of the things O’Connell prioritizes when stepping into a new character is “finding what makes this character’s performance special and impactful on the audience.” He says he does this by studying the script carefully while also connecting with the rest of the cast.
“At 4th Line, we do a lot of beat work, where you break down a scene beat by beat to fully understand and then make decisions on what is happening in those individual parts of the scene,” he says.
“Assistant drector Mandy (Roveda) helped us so much with diving deeper into our characters,” O’Connell says of Wild Irish Geese. “She would always come up to us after a scene and ask us things we hadn’t thought about before. That’s why I think, and as we’ve heard from so many audience members, that the show this year is so much deeper. It’s because we went so much more into depth of their characters than we did last year when we were doing it for the first time.”
VIDEO: Darragh O’Connell in “Back to School 2026” for Staples Canada
Though O’Connell wants to keep doing local community theatre, he’s been spending more time auditioning for other things as well now that he has an agent.
He’s done commercials for Staples Canada, Ontario Power Generation, and AAA Auto Insurance, has gotten a callback for an Ed Mirvish Theatre production, and was shortlisted to star in a TV show shot in Dublin.
“I can’t even describe the feeling that you get while being on set — it’s so different than being on stage or being at rehearsal,” he says.
He adds that he loves auditions where he gets to be creative, like when he had to choreograph a two-minute dance to the song “I was Made for Loving You.”
“The auditions where you get to be creative and then do your own choreography, your own dance, or your own improvised scene, those are really, really fun auditions,” O’Connell says. “I love doing the creative ones where I get to really make mostly my own decisions.”
While so many auditions — before his summer performances at 4th Line Theatre, he was doing 12 to 14 per week, he says — would burn out anyone, it’s clear O’Connell keeps himself grounded by remaining positive and focusing on his love of the job.
“It’s all about the mindset, he says. “If I have the mindset of ‘I’m going to book this audition every single time,’ that will definitely make you want to quit because you’re not going to book every one.”
“So much is out of my control. I might be too tall, too short, my eye colour might be wrong, my hair isn’t this (or that). There are so many factors that come into play that is away from talent that you can’t have the mindset of being disappointed. It’s okay to be disappointed if you don’t book a job, but if you really let it get to you, you won’t be able to sustain yourself.”
As O’Connell goes in search of his next gig, he remains grateful for Peterborough for helping him get to where he is today. While Toronto should have more opportunities, he finds it can be more competitive or cost more to be an emerging actor in the big city.
“What’s amazing about Peterborough is it’s still competitive, it’s still hard work, but there’s so much more opportunity to be a local performer, which then opens up the horizons, and, of course, helped me get the agent in Toronto and then got me working in the industry,” he says.
“I would not be where I am now if it weren’t for the move to Peterborough.”
