FPCT Spotlight - April 27, 2011

Pat Montley - Playwright

"Rachel Carson Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea"

 

Ten things to know about me....

 

When did you begin writing plays?

When I was a kid—maybe 9 or 10—I used to write skits to perform with my friends in the backyard during the summers.  We charged a nickel!  Our mothers and the neighbors would come and sit on the steps and laugh and applaud. 

As an undergraduate English major at Notre Dame College, I wrote mostly poetry (which I seem to be getting back to now).  But I took playwriting classes when I was studying for an M.A. in Drama at Catholic University, and one of my plays won a Shubert Fellowship, which paid my Ph.D. tuition at the University of Minnesota, where I took another playwriting class.  But I didn’t really think of myself as a playwright until I spent two years as a writer in residence at Goucher College. During that time I wrote and directed three feminist comedies.  All three were published, two of them by Samuel French.  So I was hooked!

 

What is it about the playwriting format that appeals to you?

Although I enjoy reading novels, going to the theatre is my passion.  (My record is seeing 15 plays in 9 days in London!)   The theatre experience is more…distilled, more intense.  A conflict is initiated, complicated, and resolved all in two hours or less.  And there are actors to bring the story alive.   So I like to write for the stage rather than the page.  For me, it’s appealing to write in the present tense, to write dialogue for actors.  I don’t mean for specific ones—though I have done that—but to write dialogue that is meant to be spoken by live actors and heard by audiences   and to create a complete dramatic experience that can be had in one sitting.

 

Where else in the area has your work been staged?

I’ve had readings at Center Stage, the Kennedy Center, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, and the Baltimore Book Fair, and productions at Loyola, Notre Dame, Goucher, Towson, Bowie State, and Catholic University, as well as at Theatre Project, the Vagabonds, and Corner Theatre before it merged with Fells Point Theatre.  

 

Anything in New York?

Readings at the Abingdon Theatre and NYU and productions at the Manhattan Theatre Source, the Harold Clurman Theatre, and the Nat Horne Theatre.

 

And beyond the Big Apple?

Productions in 27 states and 4 Canadian Provinces.  Oh, yes, and one ten-minute play—a feminist satire of American history called “Valley Forgery”—was produced at high schools in Germany and Senegal.  Go figure.

 

What kinds of plays have you written?

Dramas, satires, adaptations of Greek classics, epic theatre, musicals, story theatre versions of Japanese and Native American folk tales, and ten-minute pieces. 

 

Do you have recurring themes in your work?

Mentor relationships

Conflicts with authority

Spirituality and the search for meaning

 

In which category is Rachel Carson Beyond the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?

Well, I guess that depends on whether you consider the devil an authority figure...or a mentor!  Okay, okay, the Faustian motif pretty obviously puts it in the third category.  But Rachel is a mentor to her nephew—as well as to a host of environmentalists who followed her.  And in her book Silent Spring, she certainly challenged the capitalist “authorities” of her day whose chemicals were destroying the environment.

 

What do you write besides plays?

Thousands of e-mails…which I spell-check! 

I’ve also written a non-fiction book: In Nature’s Honor: Myths and Rituals Celebrating the Earth (Skinner House Books).

Once in a while I write sermons and conduct the Sunday service at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore.  I also write and direct the annual Winter Solstice Ritual there.  All are welcome!

 

What do you do besides write?

Occasionally I teach a course in playwriting or public speaking.

Work out at the gym.  Take walks.  Bake.  Cook dinner for friends.  Take the tots in my family to Children’s Theatre. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

design by ksp