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Play
Reading to Honor Late Smith Alumna
The late Leah Ryan AC’93, a playwright, essayist,
and writer of post-modern greeting cards, was a woman of
letters. She graduated with honors from Smith, winning the
Denis Johnston prize for excellence in playwriting three
times and the Jill Cummins MacLean Prize once. Ryan then
earned her Artist Diploma in Playwriting at Julliard and
her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop,
where she won the Distinguished Teaching award and was twice
chosen to take part in the annual Iowa Playwrights Festival.
Ryan died on June 12, 2008, of leukemia.
On Thursday, Dec. 11,
the Smith theatre department will present a staged reading
of Ryan’s play The Wire, in
her memory. Directed by Holly Derr, a lecturer in theatre,
the reading will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Earle Recital
Hall, Sage. It is free and open to the public.
The Wire, which was
first produced at Smith in 2002, was named a semi-finalist
in PlayLabs in 2005. Ryan described her play this way: “You
go to sleep, you have a nightmare about being up on the high
wire in front of thousands of people. In the dream, you start
to fall. Then everyone else starts to fall. And then you
wake up. Or else, you don’t. And if you manage to survive,
perhaps even the simple act of setting foot on the floor
will seem impossible.”
Ryan’s plays are performed
all over the United States. Her play Bleach, a
dark comedy about the legacy of the Armenian genocide,
received the Maibaum Award for plays dealing with issues
of social justice.
Ryan taught playwriting, English,
and creative writing to a wide variety of students, including
at the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, where she
was a professor in the Arts and Communications department
and founder of their Writing Center. She also worked with
groups of high school and college students at Vassar College
and at New York Stage and Film’s
Powerhouse Theater Apprentice Training Program. She received
a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for her
work with Epic Theatre Centre, creating modern adaptations
of classic plays with groups of middle and high school students.
Her publications include the
literary anthology For
Here or To Go, Even More Monologues by Women for
Women, essays in The Best of Temp Slave,
as well as work in many small magazines. Her play Pigeon was
published by Playscripts, Inc. Her short work
also appeared in 400 Words, including the debut
issue. She was Fiction Editor and a regular columnist at Punk
Plant magazine.
Holly Derr teaches acting, directing,
theater history, and play analysis at Smith. She recently
directed House of
Gold, by Gregory Moss, at the PlayPenn New Play Development
Festival in Philadelphia, and Common Decency, by
Ann Marie Healy, with the Brown University/Trinity Repertory
Consortium. Her New York productions include Anatomy
of Isabelle: A Reconstructed Production, The Vagina
Monologues, Monsieur X: Here Called Pierre Rabier, In the
Penal Colony, When We Dead Awaken, Hollywoodland, Cymbeline,
and Like It Is.
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