“I have been witness to and an eager student of great acting. I watched David Warrilow give hundreds of performances of The Lost Ones; every one was different. David, Fred Neumann, Bill Raymond, Ron Vawter, Ruth Maleczech: They taught me that Art arises from Life, not from Theater, and I’ve never liked that theater bios omit life experiences.  Put down that I’ve been a night watchman, night janitor, high rise window washer, zookeeper, lifeguard, a Cajun short order cook; I’ve managed Polish cleaning ladies and a moving company staffed entirely by artists, worked in a frame shop, sold toys (retail!), helped cut a Jersey house in half with Gordon Matta Clark.  Right now I’m doing online research for a company looking after America’s money on Wall Street that job trounces all expectations. I never drove a cab.”

O’Reilly’s original plays for Mabou Mines began with The Bribe in 1990, an adaptation of radio plays originally commissioned by WGBH/Boston. Directed by Ruth Maleczech, with music by John Zorn, and performed by O’Reilly, Black-Eyed Susan and Lily of the Valley, The Bribe was presented in New York at the Ontological Theater and Theater for the New City, and at Singapore Arts Festival 94 and Cena Contemporanea 95 Brazil.

During the 1990s, O’Reilly appeared as Henry Miller in an adaptation of Miller’s Into the Nightlife, and adapted (from Mary Shelly’s novel) and directed Victor Frankenstein, both at Coney Island USA; directed The 14th Ward with Bill Raymond and Carter Burwell at LaMama, The Water Buffalo Does Not Want To Eat Grass, a puppet show with Thai children performed in Bangkok; staged Arch Oboler radio plays for Hal O’Ween, the then-annual Hal Willner project at St. Ann’s. In 2003, O’Reilly directed Voice of the Dragon II, with music by Fred Ho, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, NY, opening a connection that led to Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s Gospel at Colonus being presented at the fabled venue.

Other memorable Mabou Mines roles include Pat Manky in In the Jungle of the Cities, Brecht, directed by Anne Bogart; Charlie in Help Wanted by Peter Handke, directed by Joanne Akalaitis; Regan, a role he shared with Ron Vawter, in Mabou Mines Lear, directed by Lee Breuer; Michael in Pretty Boy by Greg Merhten, also with Ron Vawter.  Along with Barbara Pollitt and Basil Twist, O’Reilly was a puppeteer for Rose the Dog in Lee Breuer’s An Epidog; the puppet won an OBIE. He was the tango puppeteer/enabler in Lee Breuer’s Ecco Porco, and so many other vivid and incautious Breuer figures – offers he couldn’t refuse. Outside the company, O’Reilly’s acting turns include half a dozen Jim Neu plays, roles for Susan Mosakowski and Matthew Maguire in Creation Company productions, and a few dozen characters in the long-running late-night cabaret soap opera, HOT KEYS by Jeff Weiss.

Animal Magnetism (A Live Cartoon In Animal Drag) written by Terry & directed by Lee Breuer with music by Eve Beglarian, arose from O’Reilly’s wondering, as an erstwhile zookeeper might, What would happen if a monkey could talk? “I began writing about a monkey who is attracted to a rhinoceros with a secret. Animal strength has always fascinated me.  Contact with animals is a spiritual experience.  If they could speak, could they lie?”  The piece had workshops at Sundance, Arizona State West and University of Texas, Austin before it premiered at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY in 2000.  In a wholly enthusiastic review, The New York Times described the work as “such a rapid-fire mixture of acting, dance, aerial acrobatics, big-screen cartoons and elaborate musical jokes …  that it could be said to be about everything.”  Animal Magnetism enjoys the further distinction of being the only original work Breuer has directed for Mabou Mines that was not his own.  The production toured to Poland and the Czech Republic staged in circus tents.

Violet Fire, which O’Reilly directed, was an examination of the life of the visionary physicist Nikola Tesla, a proponent of peace through science dispirited by the co-opting of his world-changing inventions (the electric motor, alternating current and more) for weapons manufacture. The work, composed by Jon Gibson with libretto by Miriam Seidel, debuted at BAM in fall 2006, and in Europe at the Belgrade National Theater.

“Sometimes,” O’Reilly says, “I do a piece just to astonish myself. I’m very attracted to the idea of making a bridge between cultures. For a while I was very involved with translation, trying to create pieces where the imagery was so strong that the work could be understood in any language. Then I did the opposite, pieces that could not be translated because they were so specific to me, my street, someplace that was or never was.”  Driven by “nostalgia for the new”, the anything-goes feeling he had when new to New York, O’Reilly has become an “internationalist,” a badge he quietly loves.  Much of his work outside Mabou Mines has been markedly cross cultural, directing Harold Pinter (Party Time, New World Order) and David Ives (All In The Timing winner of best director 1999 IBEU prize) in Portuguese in Rio where he lived for two years, Beckett’s Endgame in German in Vienna; and Violet Fire, a grand opera in English for an audience of ESL speakers at the Belgrade National Theater.  He is currently at work on a new show for Mabou Mines, Brer’ Rabbit In The Land of The Monkey King, a puppet theater work for family audiences featuring an American-born Chinese narrator and animal characters – fox, rabbit, monkey, turtle – from folkloric traditions across Asia and Africa and the American South, “immortals in the world patrimony of trickery.” The first performances were in Hong Kong in April 2009.

He arrived as a writer in 1976 with a $26 dollar check (50 cents a line for a 52 line poem) from The American Poetry Review. “Crime and Poetry don’t pay.”  With Susan Seidelman (of Desperately Seeking Susan fame) O’Reilly co-wrote the screenplay for I Didn’t Die, a send-up of art films, with music by Bob Telson. O’Reilly has taught acting, writing and performance art at the actors’ conservatory, Casa das Artes de Laranjeiras, in Brazil; the Tempe and West campuses of the Arizona State University; University of Texas at Austin, Bard College, Naropa Institute, Manhattanville College and many other settings. His film credits include Ironweed with Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Tom Waits and Dead End Kids.

Trained as a dancer, he has performed across the U.S. and Asia with the companies of Simone Forti, and Barbara Dilley/New York Sets. With Steve Paxton he was a guest artist for Trisha Brown at BAM and at other times with Meredith Monk, Nancy Topf, Nina Martin and Yoshiko Chuma. He is a founder of Movement Research.

“Most of my work at Mabou Mines has been doing the wildest thing I could think of; then figuring out how to market it. In New York, there’s always an audience for what you’re doing. You just have to find them.”