Below is my review of Rosie O’Donnell’s one-woman show, “Common Knowledge,” which we now know will have a run from July 23 through August 8, 2026 at Daryl Roth Theater. She teased this on the Tony Awards red carpet, then announced the details on her substack.
I saw “Common Knowledge” as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last August, and resurrect it here with a couple of corrections. I left the final sentence intact; I guess she listened.
Rosie O’Donnell does eventually talk about her longtime feud with ”Mango Mussolini”; she also makes a brief and self-effacing reference to her film career; she is of course often laugh-out-loud funny. But “Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge,” her hour-long debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is primarily a heartfelt story about her relationship with her youngest child with whom she moved to Ireland in January to “escape” before President Trump’s second inauguration. Adopting a daughter twelve years ago at literally the moment she was born – she was there in the hospital room with the baby’s birth mother — O’Donnell named her Dakota. But three years ago, Dakota decided to take a new name, Clay.
Why choose “Clay,” O’Donnell asked..
“Clay is an art form, and I am an artist,” the nine-year-old replied.
It is one of the many remarks that help make Clay such a compelling subject for O’Donnell’s masterful storytelling.
Clay, who later identified as nonbinary, was diagnosed autistic at an early age, and has a vast vocabulary and an intimidating reservoir of esoteric information, which gives the show its title, and is a central source of its humor: O’Donnell is consistently stunned at what her child considers common knowledge.
O’Donnell begins her show, after some brief informal remarks, telling the story of her own mother’s death at age 39 on St. Patrick’s Day 1973, when Rosie was ten, and none of her four siblings were older than 13.
“Now I know what you’re thinking,” she says, after describing the sad scene. “‘Did I buy the wrong fucking ticket? I thought I was seeing a comedy show.’” She promises things will get lighter, and takes out a confetti gun and blasts us with it, as a kind of reassurance. She just needed, she explains, “a tragic Irish beginning.”
Sure enough, the very next story, of her father soon afterward taking his five children back to the Ireland where he grew up – near Belfast, during the Troubles — locates the levity in this New York girl’s culture shock: She was appalled by porridge: “This is what oatmeal looks like when it gives up on life.” The move was brief; they soon moved back to New York, but she implies the experience helped motivate her decision to return there this year.
O’Donnell is the mother of five adopted children, which helps explain why she began the show talking about the five children who were left without a mother. The first four had grown up and left home when she got a call from an adoption lawyer who had a pregnant client who wanted her child to grow up in a household without a male figure; did she know of any lesbians who would be interested in adopting?
“I’m still a lesbian,” she replied.
“Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge” is illustrated by a series of projections, none more compelling than replicas of some of the 240 paintings she made ridiculing “the orange man” as a way to lift her depression at his having been elected the first time around. She also shows Trump’s unhinged social media post threatening to take away her U.S. citizenship. (“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her.”) Her initial reaction: “I thought it was a joke.” When convinced it wasn’t, she told interviewers it was not legally possible to revoke citizenship unless a person decides to do so herself. “I was praised for being calm. I wanted to go [she grabs her crotch) ‘Eat me, you orange fuck.’”
Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge is performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe through August 10, 2025 but the run is sold out. My hope is that this Irish expatriate and fellow New York native will one day feel comfortable taking her show on the road…back home.
