O'Rowe was born in Dublin in 1970 and grew up watching horror movies in the working-class, industrial city of Tallaght. His first success, the two-character monologue play Howie the Rookie, won the George Devine Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Award for Best New Play in 1999. This play showcased O’Rowe’s penchant for unearthing the darkness in human nature and his masterful handling of suspense and revelation: "The darker stories turn me on. I like the feeling that things can turn bad at any time." After this triumph, O’Rowe was appointed joint writer-in-association at the Abbey Theatre for its 2004 centenary.
His success continued with the Abbey's 2007 production of Terminus, which won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008. Terminus, like Howie the Rookie and Crestfall, O’Rowe’s drama about women in rural Ireland, uses beautifully crafted verse to describe violent and sexually charged situations. O’Rowe based Terminus on an image that popped into his imagination: a woman falling from the edge of a construction crane. He was planning to save this moment for the climax, but found himself writing the fall 15 minutes into the play, saying that he “ had nowhere to go: she either died, or someone caught her—so I decided to push into this kind of supernatural zone.”
Terminus with its brutal imagery and seductive poetic language is simultaneously familiar and strange. As the characters travel from the streets of Dublin through the skies above and into the depths of hell, they manage to connect in ways that are tender, touching, and overall human.
https://issuu.com/839998/docs/terminus_program_for_issuu