Mary Lynn Owen
(Updated 1/19/26) Mary Lynn Owen is an award-winning playwright and actor. Her play, KNEAD, an intimate look at her Cuban American upbringing, received its world premiere at The Alliance Theatre. A one-person play in which Mary Lynn also performs, KNEAD is the recipient of the Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award and The Alliance Theatre’s Reiser Lab Grant for New Work. Subsequent plays include SALVAGE, a tragic/comic story of the impact of grief within a multi-generational, multiracial family. SALVAGE, a finalist for the O'Neill National Playwright's Conference and the American Blues Theater's Blue Ink Award, has received development from Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights, Threshold New Play Festival, Ethel Woolson Development Lab, the Unexpected Play Festival, and the Sewanee Writers Conference, where Mary Lynn received the Tennessee Williams Scholarship. Her play, LADY PARTS, has been developed by Working Title Playwrights and the Unexpected Play Festival. Shorter works include HOMING, commissioned by the 22 Homes Project for the Alabama Shakespeare Southern Writers Festival, and TRAILERS, commissioned by MultiShades Atlanta for the MoJo Theater Festival Monologue Project. A regular performer on Atlanta’s stages, Mary Lynn is a three-time Suzi Award winner for Outstanding Actor, and a nine-time nominee. At Emory University she teaches Taller de Teatro en Español, a semester-long class designed to improve Spanish language proficiency using acting and theater techniques. Professional affiliations include The Dramatist’s Guild, Working Title Playwrights, New Play Exchange, Actor’s Equity Association, and SAG-Aftra. She has studied playwriting with Marsha Norman, Tammy Ryan, and Joseph Skibell, and her residencies include Cottages at Hedgebrook, The Hambidge Center, and the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, where she received the Carey Perloff Award, given to an established theater artist who desires to transition to playwriting.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://marylynnowen.com
FB: Mary Lynn Owen
IG:@marylynnowen
MORE ABOUT ME
My favorite thing to do when I'm not writing is dig in the dirt. Settle a new seedling into a pot. Trim the dead branches from the St. John's Wort. Water my tomatoes and curse the squirrels. Rake the pine straw from the beds and curse the damn pine trees, the beautiful Alabama Long Needle Pines, that every year block out more of the sun. Break another dish - or two or five - to make my borders. Fertilize. Show off my Dahlias to my neighbor. Pour a glass of wine in the late afternoon, and clip, mulch, weed, and sip until it's dusk. Finish the wine, and wind up the garden hose, and call it a day. And run out first thing in the morning with coffee and do a little inspection, and then sit on the porch and listen to the birds.
WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I'm writing a new play, my first two-hander, and also revising a collection of monologues that may insist on becoming a full play. Later this year, I'll direct a production of A Fool for Love.
KEYWORDS
Family, Rogue Women, Tragic-Comic
