Barter’s Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights SLAPS. Full houses for every reading, smart and gracious and gifted acting ensembles, engaged and engaging talkbacks, and FOOD TRUCKS in a really charming small Virginia downtown. The icing on the cake of a beautiful, funny reading that showed me things about my play was a real-life female coal miner in the audience who spoke in the talkback of the way miners take care of each other. What an experience.

Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights

Directed by Nick Piper • Featuring from left: Libby Zabit, Mary Lucy Bivens, Hannah Ingram, Michael Poisson, and the inimitable Tricia Matthews

My women-in-coal-mining play, MOUNTAIN MAMAS, gets a staged reading on May 7, 2023 as an official selection of Florida Rep’s 2023 PlayLab Festival.

Director: Margaret Ledford

WE ARE ALL WAVES ON THE SAME OCEAN was presented in a staged reading at Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit on April 26, 2023, after being awarded a month-long residency and workshop in The Unexpected Play Festival.

Director: Rebekah Suellau
Dramaturg: Dalyla McGee
Featuring Shannon Murphy and Vallea Woodbury

Safety Net completed its 18-month developmental residency at the Alliance Theatre on August 3, 2019 with a workshop performance in the Selig Family Black Box Theatre. (dir. Karen Robinson; producer: Donya K. Washington; featuring Carolyn Cook, Daryl Lisa Fazio, and Rhyn McLemore Saver with Rebekah Suellau; photos by Chris Helton)

PRESS:

• Florida Repertory Theatre’s 6th Annual PlayLab Festival (radio interview)
• Florida Rep Announces 6th Annual PlayLab Festival Line-up (Broadway World)

MEDIA:
(Directed by Maureen Heffernan, featuring Rachel Burttram, Sara Morsey, and me with stage directions and other voices by Liz Abbott; photos by Joe Dafeldecker)

PRESS RELEASE: PTC announces 2019-2020 Season

• AMERICAN THEATRE ANNOUNCEMENT
• THEATRICAL OUTFIT SHOW PAGE

This new play (formerly titled LADY OF THE HOUSE) for one actor has been a challenge and adventure to create. The play unfolds in real-time, and the audience shifts between being a classroom, a mother, a support group, and even a squirrel. Music–particularly classical–figures in strongly along with atmospheric sounds for a soundscape that is truly a second character.

I workshopped it as both playwright and actor for a week at Actor’s Express in their 2019 Threshold New Play Festival. The performance was at the Atlanta Contemporary gallery. Nothing like exposing your soul in full light!

(directed by Rachel Parish, with stage directions by Tori Thompson)

SYNOPSIS:
Percy Wright has always had an active imagination. Maybe that’s why her real life never fully launched. Now she finds herself back in the tiny Missouri town where she lived out her miserable teenage years. Because her mother is dying. But not fast enough. For either one of them. While Percy struggles with her mother’s needs, not to mention teaching night classes in horticulture at the junior college extension for adult learners, she unexpectedly frees memories from her stressed, fertile brain. As the past comes into focus and truths she used to take for granted start to fall apart, Percy finds herself at a crossroads. A play about how wonder and empathy can help us transcend the unthinkable.

I’ve got a new three-woman play—called SAFETY NET—about the opioid crisis in Alabama. It’s intimate and intense. And, as always for my stuff, funny. It takes on addiction, first responders, mothers and daughters, cooking as therapy, and the ways of strong women in the Deep South.

I’ve written myself into this one and will be working with fellow actor/collaborator, Carolyn Cook, and director, Karen Robinson, on development in a 16-month residency at the Alliance Theatre.

READ MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT AND THE ALLIANCE’S YEAR OF DEVELOPMENT HERE 

From the Alliance:
The ALLIANCE THEATRE is pleased to announce the three artistic projects chosen for development during its 5th Reiser Atlanta Artists Lab. Each project will receive $10,000 to use toward further exploration and development, as well as access to the Alliance’s artistic, educational, and production staffs, and rehearsal spaces. The lab productions will be presented in free performances in 2019. It is the goal of the Reiser Atlanta Artists Lab to celebrate the breadth and vision of Atlanta-based artists, to encourage collaboration among Atlanta’s artistic community, and to seed projects that will be produced here in Atlanta.