rosemary mclaughlin

Rosemary’s plays, for which she has won several NJ State Council on the Arts Playwriting Fellowships, include Pushing the River, Jersey City Theatre Center, (developed in residency with the New Jersey Women’s Playwrights Project) a darkly comic exploration of memory, consciousness and eminent domain; A More Opportune Time, a free adaptation of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; and Paterson Falls, commissioned by Writers Theatre of New Jersey, about about silk strikes, salons and the power of theatre. Earlier plays include Standing in the Shadows (Wings Theatre, inspired by the Sharon Kowalski story); Voices Carry (Drew University); Motherless Child (Chicago Cooperative Stage); Horsefeathers, Women Playwrights Collective (Intimate Acts play anthology, Brito Lair); The Raw and the Cooked (Hallie Flanagan Play Series).
 Shorter works include: Wombats, 10Fest; The Hanukkah Bush, Speranza Theatre; Breaking Quarantine, The Coronavirus Plays Project; Texas Walmart, Monologues & Madness, Panjera; Bella For The Revolution, Monologues and Madness, Cornelia Street Cafe; Sensitive, SHEatre; Can-Can, Cathedral Arts Live; and Totally Not Liam, Speranza Theatre Company. A member of the Dramatists Guild, Rosemary serves on the board of directors of ICWP (International Centre for Women Playwrights). She is a founding member both of Sheilah, a mixed genre writers group as well as Write Where You Are, for playwrights. Rosemary received her MFA from Rutgers. She is a professor of Theatre and Dance at Drew University where she directs the Playwriting program. She and her wife, Laurie Wurm, live in Maplewood, NJ, with their two children, three cats and one hamster.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
FB @RosemaryMcL
Twitter @RosemaryMcL
IG rpmclaugh
Spoutible @RosemaryMcLaughlin

MORE ABOUT ME
Senior year of high school I was visiting a friend in DC. I’d always loved A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we heard it was playing at the Kennedy Center. We showed up at the box office an hour after the early curtain, doubly disappointed to learn it was sold out. Seeing people come out for the first intermission, we decided to follow them inside and lurk in the back of the theatre until someone threw us out. They would have had a fight on their hands. What we had stumbled into was THE Midsummer, directed by Peter Brook. I’d grown up going to Broadway, thanks to the two-fer discount tickets my Dad would bring home, but nothing had prepared me for what I was seeing: a white box with trapezes representing Athens and the forest. Sally Jacobs’ brilliant set design and how Brook’s direction used it blew me away. Everything about this RSC production made me think: “THIS is what theatre can be and do!” Ten years later, enrolled in Rutgers Playwriting MFA program, I could hardly believe it when they announced Sally Jacobs would be teaching stage design there. I took every class with her I could. She was a delight, thoroughly inspirational and vastly good humored about my scrambling to catch up with classmates who actually had a design background. Her impact, and that of Peter Brook, have had a lasting influence on my work as a playwright and as a teacher of playwrights.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Works-in-progress include Thank You, Dark (developed in residency with Women Playwrights Circle) about gentrification, theatre and LGBTQ+ activism; Seven Fishermen, inspired by a would-be missionary’s tragic encounter with uncontacted people; and The Triumph of Realism, a screenplay in which a retired Art Historian’s past becomes a thriller for her grandchildren.

KEYWORDS
​Gay, LGBTQ+, Women, Comedy, Lesbian, Satire, Historical, Political, Gentrification, Liminal, Adaptations