by ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This hour is not a direct attack on “Mango Mussolini.” But it is, perhaps, a direct result of the threat America’s current president represents to the health and safety of the award-winning comedian, and even more especially, to Rosie O’Donnell’s autistic non-binary tween.
This hour also “is not Angela’s Ashes the musical,” although the first thing O’Donnell does is recount the tragedy of her mother dying on St. Patrick’s Day in 1973, at age 39, leaving behind Rosie and her four siblings. Their dad shuffled them off from New York City that summer to Donegal, the northernmost county in Ireland just as Northern Ireland’s Troubles were becoming most troubling.
But O’Donnell also got to meet her cousins in Edinburgh that summer, and more than five decades later, she’s relieved beyond her wildest dreams to be back in Ireland and Scotland, this time with designs on becoming a permanent Irish resident and citizen. The why and how of that, of course, leads back to Trump.
She reveals that she already had begun making an “Escape Plan” (“my therapist called me, very worried”) as January 2021 and Trump’s second inaugural approached. Since her father had been born in Ireland and her grandparents were Irish, “I knew I could get citizenship.” The bigger issue, she found, was raising her fifth adopted child, who was diagnosed autistic as a toddler, changed their name from Dakota to Clay at age nine, and later at 12, declared themself nonbinary. But as it turns out, they found the perfect school for Clay in Dublin, costing 20 Euros a month, versus $78,000 a year in Los Angeles. And O’Donnell has found “my refuge and my salvation,” as well as heartfelt humor in her interactions with a kind-hearted short-haired pharmacist, a lollipop-lady crossing guard, and a young boy who snuck out of his home after seeing O’Donnell advocate for autism on Ireland’s The Late Late Show.
Even if some bits of this hour don’t yet feel polished, and even though O’Donnell still cannot quite remember to refer to Clay by their preferred pronoun, it’s all delivered with sincerity and gratitude. It’s already a moving show, and it’s only going to get better for her from here.
Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge plays at Gilded Balloon’s Appleton Tower through Aug. 10, 2025.
