Two plays by Professor of Theatre Lynne Conner were recently recognized by theatre festivals. Earlier this month, Conner’s The Mother was named a semi-finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, one of 148 plays chosen as semi-finalists from 614 applicants. The Mother, which was a 2018 and 2019 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference semi-finalist, received its world premiere by Dramatic Repertory Company (DRC) in Portland, Maine, in March 2020, and was subsequently released as an audio production. The Mother explores the effects on a mother – and her family – of a school shooting that is perpetrated by her son. A review of the March 2020 premiere in the Portland Press Herald called it "a powerful and harrowing drama."
Earlier in the year, Conner’s play about Rachel Carson, In the Garden of Live Flowers (published by Dramatic Publishing), was produced by First Flight Theatre Company as a Zoom recording. The Zoom production received a Green Academy Award in the Biopic category.
Conner was the chair of the Department of Theatre from 2016 to 2022 and served as Interim Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the 2022-23 academic year. Returning to the theatre department in the upcoming academic year, she will teach in the spring semester, continue her research in the audience studies field, and develop a new play called Seven Sisters.
“The play is loosely based on my mother’s family—seven sisters brought up on a subsistence farm in western New York State,” she says. “The play moves back and forth between 1936 and 2023 and touches on the daily life of farm women, the impact of rural poverty, the evolution of American feminism and my favorite themes about the nature of resiliency and innate optimism (and why some have it and some do not).”