Cailín was Associate Artistic Director of Boomerang Theatre Company (2013-23); Resident Director, National Schoolhouse (2019-23); Creative Artist with DionysusFest, Athens Greece; and Artistic Advisor, New Light Theatre Company (2012-23). Also, formerly, she was Resident Director (2005-11) and Artistic Advisor (2011-17) of Texas Family Musicals; Resident Director of Boomerang Theatre Company (2008-13); Founder/Artistic Director of Manhattan Dance/Theater (1980-98); and Producing Artistic Director of School of Performing Arts at YWCA of NYC (1994-1997).

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Before relocating to Texas she directed/choreographed Impossible But True by Dan Furman in October and November of 2022 with a young cast of fifteen actors in taverns and museums in Brooklyn and at the Soho Playhouse in Manhattan. The musical is a devised, immersive production with some degree of improvisation which has been seen previously in various venues in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn in 2018, 2019 and 2021.

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She directed Garret Dillahunt, Michelle Hurd, Traci Godfrey and Linda S. Nelson in the sold-out streamed reading of Godfrey’s The Sweet Texas Reckoning in November of 2020 for Boomerang Theatre.

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In 2019, she directed the highly regarded solo show, Places, written by and starring Romy Nordlinger at Dixon Place, The Player’s Club produced by White Horse Theatre Company, HERE Arts produced by Pat Addiss with Laura Fay Lewis, and the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center Family Theatre presented by Tonic Theatre in conjunction with Pat Addiss.

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She directed multi-Obie and Drama Desk winner Kathleen Chalfant in Emmy and WGA award winner Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s Letters Home for the Lincoln Center Archives in late 2018.

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Other recent works were the hugely successful developmental production of Loveless Texas at the Sheen Center written/ directed/choreographed by Heffernan with music/lyrics by Broadway veteran, Henry Aronson - produced by Boomerang Theatre Company;

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Monte Cristo by Jared Reinmuth at Urban Stages presented by New Light Theatre Project where she assembled an international cast in an experimental production including the disciplines of Delsarte, Dalcroze, Mime, Live Foley, Music and Dance.

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Her theatrical work encompasses directing and/or choreographing Off-Broadway, LORT Regional Theatres and New York theatre including: Sheen Center, Urban Stages, Bay Street, Capital Repertory, Folksbiene, Jewish Repertory, Lucille Lortel, Miller Outdoor Theatre, Naked Angels, New Amsterdam, HERE Arts, Dixon Place, The Player’s Club, New Jersey Repertory, Penguin Repertory, St. Luke’s, Walnut Street, Bruno Walter Theatre (Lincoln Center), Family Theatre (Kennedy Center) and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival as well as at Universities including NYU, St. Peter’s, Hofstra and Pace.

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For Boomerang, she has directed twelve full productions including the aforementioned Loveless Texas, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Love's Labour's Lost, Jeffrey Hatcher’s To Fool the Eye, The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard (nominated for NYITAwards in 2012 including Most Outstanding Remount), Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed, Larry Kirwan’s The Heart Has a Mind of Its Own, Tennessee William’s Summer and Smoke, her own adaptation of John Dryden’s All for Love, two of O’Neill’s Pulitzer prize winning plays – Anna Christie and Beyond the Horizon, as well as Francis Kuzler’s The Substance of John. Additionally, she has directed four workshops, the latest being Terence Patrick Hughes’ Fake Plastic Love, an updated gender-switching take on Pygmalion; nineteen readings; and three fundraisers.

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For Texas Family Musicals, she’s directed: CATS (choreographed as well), America, the Beautiful (which she co-wrote), Annie Get Your Gun, Barnum and South Pacific with Rob Gallagher, two productions of Hello, Dolly! with Judy Norton ("The Waltons") and Don Most ("Happy Days”), and Brigadoon.

 

She is the author of a trilogy of novels, “The House of Atreus” - “The Book of Orestes”, “The Book of Stavros” and “The Book of Cassandra”.

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Currently in development:

 

Loveless Texas by Heffernan and Aronson - a feel-good musical set in Depression era Texas with music spanning several genres

 

Blooddrinker - tragicomedy in two time periods by Heffernan centering on an Irish Vampire in Derry during the Dark Ages and then in the swinging Sixties

 

Rebel Hearts by Heffernan - a play set in Arizona in the cabin of Nellie Cashman during the 19th century and centering on a itinerant Shakespearean troupe of Fenian actors

 

Underworld by Heffernan and Aronson - a new musical based on the disenfranchised Manges culture in Greece in the first half of the 20th Century.

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She currently teaches Acting and Scene Study privately, and at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UTMB, Galveston.