Parkway Playhouse’s playwriting festival continues to promote new work
Two years ago, Parkway Playhouse’s director of marketing, Cheyenne Dancy, pitched the idea of founding a playwriting festival specifically focused on work about Appalachia and written by regional playwrights. Previously the marketing director for Asheville’s Magnetic Theatre, its mission of developing and staging original work was one that Dancy wholeheartedly subscribed to.
After the Magnetic Theatre closed, Dancy moved to Burnsville, where she was again detetrmined to create a space for native plays that authentically spoke of Appalachian life.
“As a proud Appalachian, I’m constantly looking for new ways to share and keep alive Appalachian culture,” Dancy said.
“I hope to create opportunities not only for folks to be a part of the magic of creating theatre,” Dancy continued, “but also to give Appalachians a microphone to tell stories about their home and heart right here in these mountains and to give representation to those stories, traditions, and voices that are slowly slipping away.”
Parkway’s Appalachian Playwriting Festival follows the model that Dancy helped establish: submitted plays are read and winnowed down to three. The plays picked are then rehearsed as staged readings, to be performed before audiences, with judges afterward determining a winner.
The chosen play then becomes part of Parkway’s following season where it’s given a full staging. (The theatre recently finished its run of Walter Thinnes’ “Bloodletting in These Hills,” the winner of the 2024 festival.)
This last weekend, the festival presented three new plays by established, regional playwrights: “Carlswell Holler” by Travis Lowe, “Deera’s Country Funeral” by Ned Dougherty, and “In a Manor of Speaking” by Steven D. Miller.
Miller’s play, which takes place in a declining antebellum mansion, was prompted by the playwright thinking of the faded belles of Tennessee Williams’ plays. He suddenly imagined his own protagonist “in a crowded room on one side of a stage otherwise filled by the emptiness of a deserted home,” according to Miller.
A native New Englander, Miller has long made the fringes of Appalachia home, becoming a student of the region’s own manner of speaking.
If Williams influenced Miller, Travis Lowe acknowledges his debt to Irish playwrights, though his father’s stories of West Virginia’s coal country became the foundation for “Carswell Holler,” wherein a greasy spoon serves as the center for local tales of the supernatural, becoming, Lowe said, a piece of “Appalachian Gothic.”
Also inspired by West Virgina, Ned Dougherty’s play centers on a farmer forced to say goodbye to his beloved John Deere tractor, which is beyond repair. With that idea in mind, Dougherty imagined the farmer giving his dead tractor a funeral.
“I was intrigued by this character, this dynamic, and I wondered about a community that would be grieving alongside this man,” Dougherty said.
With a reading directed by Doug Savitt, Dougherty’s “Deera’s Country Funeral” has been chosen the festival’s winner by the judges’ panel, and will now officially join Parkway’s 2026 season, hitting the stage in a full production next August.