Wild Western Women
by Brandi Andrade, Ph.D.
Mary Casey loves the old west and she loves writing strong women. Most of her plays feature both -- in fact, her cowgirl heroines have sometimes been criticized for being "too strong" (of course, here at Echo, we believe that strength in women is not a liability!). Casey grew up in a small western town in a house with no television, and it was the local radio station -- playing the songs of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins and the like -- that first fueled the fires of her imagination. This early influence shows itself in the narrative structure and the western world of her plays.
Casey herself is a bit of a "wild western woman." She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she received her MFA in Screenwriting but discovered that, despite the lure of Hollywood, writing plays was her true passion. A historian-playwright at heart, she is at work on a cycle of plays about women in the west. Inspired by re-thinkings of the history of the American West, her focus is on the people who have traditionally been left out of that narrative: women, and men and women of color.
Women and Horses and a Shot Straight from the Bottle came out of that inspiration. In 2000, it was a finalist in the Jane Chambers Playwriting contest, and was subsequently selected for a workshop reading at Theatricum Botanicum in Los Angeles before being featured in the Echo Reads... series in 2005. The next two plays in Casey’s cycle were inspired by Vernelle, one of the characters in Women and Horses.
In 2003, Casey was the recipient of the Butcher Scholar Award at the Institute for the Study of the American West, in conjunction with the Women of the West Museum. That award resulted in Wide Open Spaces, a play that covers 100 years of women in western history and features the adventures of Vernelle's imagined grandmother, a frontier prostitute-cum-dentist. The play was given a staged reading at the Autry National Center in 2004. After that came Seeing the Elephant, a play set during the California gold rush, with a focus on the lives of the women and immigrants in that time period and including Vernelle's great uncle.
Casey continues to work with the Autry National Center, where she is involved with a monthly history consortium. She was also the Artist-in-Residence on the California Arts Council, where she taught playwriting and mentored emerging playwrights--thus using her work to honor both "(fore)mothers" and "daughters."
It’s fitting, then, for Women and Horses and a Shot Straight from the Bottle -- with its theme of being true to yourself and its exploration of the role of mothering in one daughter’s life -- to be at the start of Mary Casey’s cycle of Wild Western Women plays.
This essay was compiled from interviews with the playwright at
www.autrynationalcenter.org.
[Copyright © 2006. All rights reserved.]