Mary Lynn Owen

Mary Lynn Owen is an award-winning playwright based in Atlanta. Her background is “una mezcla” – a mixture – of Cuban American artisans and laborers, and South Georgian preachers and sharecroppers, the whole bunch of them with storytelling flair. Her work has been produced by The Alliance Theatre, The Aurora Theatre, The Alabama Shakespeare Southern Writers Festival, and MultiShades Atlanta. Her work has also been selected for development at The New Comedies Festival at B Street Theatre, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, The Barter Theatre's Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights, Theatrical Outfit's Unexpected Festival, Actor's Express' Threshold Festival, The Ethel Woolson Lab, and the Sewanee Writers Festival, where Mary Lynn received the Tennessee Williams Scholarship. Her...

Mary Lynn Owen is an award-winning playwright based in Atlanta. Her background is “una mezcla” – a mixture – of Cuban American artisans and laborers, and South Georgian preachers and sharecroppers, the whole bunch of them with storytelling flair. Her work has been produced by The Alliance Theatre, The Aurora Theatre, The Alabama Shakespeare Southern Writers Festival, and MultiShades Atlanta. Her work has also been selected for development at The New Comedies Festival at B Street Theatre, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, The Barter Theatre's Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights, Theatrical Outfit's Unexpected Festival, Actor's Express' Threshold Festival, The Ethel Woolson Lab, and the Sewanee Writers Festival, where Mary Lynn received the Tennessee Williams Scholarship. Her full-length plays include SALVAGE, a finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and the American Blue Ink Award; LADY PARTS, featured at the 2026 New Comedies Festival at B Street Theatre; and KNEAD, recipient of the Gene Gabriel Moore Award for Playwriting and The Alliance Theatre's Reiser Award. She has received commissions from The Alabama Southern Writers Festival and MultiShades Atlanta, and her residencies include Cottages at Hedgebrook, Hambidge Arts Center, and The Eugene O'Neill Foundation, where she was named the Travis Bogard Artist-in-Residence and the Carey Perloff Fellow. Mary Lynn is a member of The Dramatists Guild, Working Title Playwrights, and Honor Roll Playwrights. A member of SAG-Aftra and Actors’ Equity Association, Mary Lynn is also a professional actor with over seventy-five professional theater credits. Learn more: marylynnowen.com

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Scripts

Salvage

by Mary Lynn Owen

Cast Size
4
Genre
comedy,
drama

Finalist, American Blues Theatre Award 2025
Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference 2022

Six months after Father’s death, Mother sends an ALL-CAPS email to her adult children, ordering them home to collect their things. Brother and Sister, each with their own ALL- CAPS agendas, arrive to find the stuff of their childhood crammed into boxes, Father’s belongings in a box in the corner, and Grandpa...

Finalist, American Blues Theatre Award 2025
Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference 2022

Six months after Father’s death, Mother sends an ALL-CAPS email to her adult children, ordering them home to collect their things. Brother and Sister, each with their own ALL- CAPS agendas, arrive to find the stuff of their childhood crammed into boxes, Father’s belongings in a box in the corner, and Grandpa just as alarmed as they are to learn that Mother is tossing in the towel and “heading west” the very next day. In the twenty four hours that follow, the family will face what they’ve each boxed up through the years: things said and unsaid, grief borne alone, and the wonder of Stevie Wonder. As they fight to let go and fight to hold on, what can they find worth saving?

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Knead

by Mary Lynn Owen

2
Cast Size
1
Genre
comedy,
drama

In the wee hours, a woman bakes bread, determined that her mother’s incomprehensible recipe will finally work. But something is different about this night. The ingredients of Time and Memory keep interfering, tumbling out of cabinets, drawers, the refrigerator, and finally the oven as the bread-baking process, all in real-time, reveals the messy business of bread-baking and of love handed down, mama to hija, and...

In the wee hours, a woman bakes bread, determined that her mother’s incomprehensible recipe will finally work. But something is different about this night. The ingredients of Time and Memory keep interfering, tumbling out of cabinets, drawers, the refrigerator, and finally the oven as the bread-baking process, all in real-time, reveals the messy business of bread-baking and of love handed down, mama to hija, and generation to generation.

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Lady Parts

by Mary Lynn Owen

1
Cast Size
6—8
Genre
comedy,
political

A play about sex. And death. And gender roles. And Scrabble.

Nella, a middle-aged, mid-level talent agent, and the middle sister between Carmen and Charlotte, is smack in the middle of a middling life. She spends her days talking clients into B-movie acting jobs, her nights talking her husband into looking up from his cellphone, and her Friday Night Game Nights - “Fun Fridays” - talking her sisters and in-...

A play about sex. And death. And gender roles. And Scrabble.

Nella, a middle-aged, mid-level talent agent, and the middle sister between Carmen and Charlotte, is smack in the middle of a middling life. She spends her days talking clients into B-movie acting jobs, her nights talking her husband into looking up from his cellphone, and her Friday Night Game Nights - “Fun Fridays” - talking her sisters and in- laws into just playing nice. After sending her widowed mother on a cruise to the fjords, a medical diagnosis makes it plain: Nella might just be dead inside. That’s when Eleanor and Franklin, failed members of the Marital Restitution Program, arrive on a late-night assignment to Nella’s dreams, and soon Nella’s Restitution is the main event - Eleanor sees to that - with No More Secrets the first order of business. One botched Scrabble Game later, it appears that Charlotte and Carmen have secrets, too. And that Mom might not be where they think she is. And that Nella might soon recast herself in the role of a lifetime.

There is dancing. There are twinkling stars. There are women making it up as they go.

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