Mary Lynn Owen

Mary Lynn Owen, a 2024 Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellowship Finalist, is a playwright, actor, and teacher from Atlanta, Georgia. Her most recent play, SALVAGE, a finalist for the 2022 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, was featured in The Unexpected Play Festival at Theatrical Outfit (2023), The Ethel Woolson Playwrights Lab (2023) the Working Title Table Series (2022), and the 2021 Threshold Festival at Actors Express. Other full-length plays include KNEAD which received its world premiere at The Alliance Theatre in November 2018, and enjoyed a second production at Aurora Theatre in 2024. KNEAD is the recipient of the 2019 Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award, The Alliance Theatre’s 2017 Reiser Lab Award, and a semi-finalist for the 2017 O’Neill National Playwrights...

Mary Lynn Owen, a 2024 Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellowship Finalist, is a playwright, actor, and teacher from Atlanta, Georgia. Her most recent play, SALVAGE, a finalist for the 2022 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, was featured in The Unexpected Play Festival at Theatrical Outfit (2023), The Ethel Woolson Playwrights Lab (2023) the Working Title Table Series (2022), and the 2021 Threshold Festival at Actors Express. Other full-length plays include KNEAD which received its world premiere at The Alliance Theatre in November 2018, and enjoyed a second production at Aurora Theatre in 2024. KNEAD is the recipient of the 2019 Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award, The Alliance Theatre’s 2017 Reiser Lab Award, and a semi-finalist for the 2017 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Her play, LADY PARTS or, ATTACK of the INVISIBLE WOMAN, was named a semi-finalist for the 2020 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and chosen for the 2019 Working Title Playwrights First Light Series and for Theatrical Outfit’s 2020 Unexpected Play Festival. Mary Lynn’s shorter works include the monologues HOMING, commissioned in 2020 by the 22 Homes Project for the Alabama Shakespeare Southern Writers Festival, and TRAILERS, commissioned in 2019 by MultiShades Atlanta for the MoJo Theater Festival Monologue Project. In 2020 Mary Lynn received a MAP Foundation Grant through Synchronicity Theatre to develop a play about Women and Work. In May 2022 Mary Lynn was named by the Eugene O'Neill Foundation as the Travis Bogard Artist-in-Residence and the Carey Perloff Fellow at the Tao House in Danville, California.

Scripts

Salvage

by Mary Lynn Owen

Cast Size

4

Genre

comedy,

drama

Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference 2022

Six months after Father’s death, Mother sends an urgent email to her adult children, summoning them home to collect their things. Brother and Sister arrive to find their childhood home in a state of collapse and strewn end to end with the stuff of their lives, and soon the truth is out in this interracial, intergenerational family: Mother is tossing in the...

Finalist, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference 2022

Six months after Father’s death, Mother sends an urgent email to her adult children, summoning them home to collect their things. Brother and Sister arrive to find their childhood home in a state of collapse and strewn end to end with the stuff of their lives, and soon the truth is out in this interracial, intergenerational family: Mother is tossing in the towel and “going West” the very next day. In the hours that follow, Mother will fight to leave, and Brother, Sister, and Grandpa will fight to stay, and as they each fight to set the course of their lives, they will struggle with how to save themselves and each other. What will they keep? What will they toss? What will they transform into something new?

Knead

by Mary Lynn Owen

1

Cast Size

1

Genre

comedy,

drama

In the middle of the night, 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 the cabinets, the drawers, and the refrigerator, as the bread-baking process - the kneading, rising, shaping, baking, all in real-time - becomes a journey into the unpredictability...

In the middle of the night, 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 the cabinets, the drawers, and the refrigerator, as the bread-baking process - the kneading, rising, shaping, baking, all in real-time - becomes a journey into the unpredictability of baking and of a family's love.

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 medial 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 just re-cast herself in the role of a lifetime.

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