Mary Lynn Owen

Playwright

Mary Lynn Owen is an Atlanta-based theater artist with a career spanning over forty years. Her first full-length script, KNEAD, a one-person play in which she also performed, baking 4 loaves of bread onstage during every performance, received its world premiere at The Alliance Theatre in November 2018.  KNEAD, the recipient of the 2019 Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award and The Alliance Theatre’s Reiser Lab Award, was also a semi-finalist for the 2017 O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference.  Mary Lynn’s second full-length play, LADY PARTS, was a semi-finalist for the 2019 O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference, a selection for the 2019 Working Title Playwrights First Light Series, and a selection for Theatrical Outfit’s 2020 Unexpected Play Festival.  Mary Lynn’s commissions include a ten-minute play, TRAILERS, for the 2019 MoJo Festival, a celebration of women theater artists over forty, and the recent, ’22 Homes Project’ by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, in which she wrote an original monologue around the theme of ‘Home.’ Mary Lynn is a professional member of the Dramatists Guild, Working Title Playwrights, AEA, and Sag-Aftra. Her writing residencies include Cottages at Hedgebrook in Langley, WA, and The Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA. 

As an actor, Mary Lynn’s work includes a breadth of styles, a repertoire of the theater’s most well-known roles, and working relationships with all of Atlanta’s professional theatres. She is a two-time Suzi Award winner for both Outstanding Performer in a Leading Role (WIT - Aurora Theatre) and Outstanding Performer in a Supporting Role (THE LITTLE FOXES - Theatre in the Square) and an eight-time Suzi nominee. Recently, she assumed the traditionally male role of The Stage Manager in the historic repertory of OUR TOWN and THE LARAMIE PROJECT at Theatrical Outfit.  She is a frequent performer and collaborator in many of Atlanta's New Works Festivals including the Kendeda Festival at The Alliance Theater, the Stripped Bare Festival at Synchronicity Theater, and the Brave New Works Festival at Theater Emory.

Mary Lynn is a faculty member of Emory University’s Theater Studies Department where she teaches Introduction to Acting and yearly workshops in Teaching as Performance. Also at Emory, she has curated for the Brave New Works Festival and developed an ongoing collaboration with the Spanish and Portuguese Department in the production of both new and classical Spanish/Latinx Theater.  She co-created the popular course, ‘Taller de Teatro en Español - a Theater Workshop in Spanish,’ a class designed to improve Spanish language proficiency through the use of Theater techniques. 

Mary Lynn grew up ‘una mezcla' - a mixture - of Cuban-Americans and South Georgians, preachers and misfits.  In her work, she seeks the mezcla – the moments where farce and tragedy meet, the sacred graces the profane, and where mundanity is filled with longing.  She believes that the mezcla is a moment of possibility.  For hope and other new things.