An Interview with Mary Donnet Johnson

Mary Donnet Johnson’s play Shanktown was a recent winner of Memphis’ Playhouse on the Square New Works Competition and is scheduled for a full production in their 2022–2023 season. She wrote the screenplay for Nashville Rep’s 2021 online holiday show ’Twas the Night and continues to workshop new plays at the Nashville Greenhouse Story Garden and Pipeline-Collective’s Salon. Her plays have been recognized by the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (semi-finalist), American Shakespeare Center’s Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries contest (semi-finalist), and the Kentucky Women Writers’ Conference (finalist). Mary has had plays produced at Darkhorse Theater, Tennessee Women’s Theater Project, and the Cordelle in Nashville. Passionate about illuminating inspiring women in history through a lens of comedic magical realism, her commissioned works include To Know You, which enjoyed a sold-out run in 2019 at the Clayton Center for the Arts in Maryville, TN, and Party of Twelve which will have its world premiere at the Washington Theater in Murfreesboro, TN, in April of 2022. Mary grew up in Vermont, earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, worked for a decade in New York City as a professional actress, and now makes her home in Nashville, TN.

You’ve had an illustrious career, spanning film, theater, opera, etc. What drew you to all of these?

Anything to make money! When you’re in New York, you just take anything. I mean, I did radio.

What inspired you to transition from more traditional productions to working with children?

I think that working with children is the most exciting place to be in this field, because they’re open, they’re brave — they’re imaginative! I specifically wanted to work with children who were not advantaged, either children in horrible neighborhoods or with disabilities. Which is so ironic, because then up I pop with a child with autism!

That’s your son Pace, right? Has he ever been involved in your work?

Yes, he has. I have two children. The older one — she is extremely high-performing. She’s always been his peer model, his buddy, his puppeteer. But he, oddly, loves to do scenes. His autism is a huge spectrum, and his most severe deficit is verbal. I started to notice that he was really interested in film because I was in the movie Tootsie. He obsessively watched Tootsie, and it wasn’t because of me — it was because it’s about transformation. It’s about somebody becoming who they really think they could be. He started watching Big for the same reason. Home Alone. E.T. These are people who grapple with, “Who am I? And how can I be the strongest person I can be?” So we create scenes now. We do theater, because if he sees it on the page, he can say it.

And the work with the children was amazing, also. When I got a whole elementary school to do The Tempest — if you think about all the jobs you can have — a wave, a pirate, a main character, somebody who’s prompting, somebody who’s directing, a prop master — so many jobs that can be done in the theater. And children love to teach other children, so I’d employ the older ones to teach to the younger ones. The whole thing was so exciting. Nobody failed, and nobody was scared.

What brought you to Nashville?

I came to playwriting really late. When I moved to Nashville, there was not a lot of theater. Everybody wanted me to write, because I was quick, quick, quick. Advertising was perfect for me. I was always inhabiting another character. If you wanted me to write about how it feels for a studly guy to have a headache, I could do that!

For a long time, I just worked corporate, but then I got married and had these two kids. When Pace came up with this severe disability, I realized that I was going to have to be 24/7 with helping him get the best chance in life he could get. I had a lot of issues around “I’m not at all equipped to do this.” But then I understood: I’m actually uniquely equipped to deal with a non-verbal child because I read cues. I got into a groove with him, like, “What can I do parallel with him?” I interviewed people, I wrote books, I ran workshops that employed my need to be an actor.

I didn’t get into playwriting until 2012, and the first play I wrote was about Pace. And there were aerialists, and a cello player on stage through the whole thing. I sent that play [to the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center] and became a semi-finalist, and I freaked out. Like, “Maybe I can do this!”

As a playwright, do you feel like festivals are a way to measure your success? Is it the most marketable thing to do?

I feel like if you don’t show up, you’re never gonna win, so I show up everywhere. I have a spreadsheet, and I shove ’em out the door, five a week. It’s not very targeted. But what I’ve discovered that is even more satisfying is to find ways to create my own opportunities to make work.

Many of your plays feature women/center the female experience. What draws you to that?

I feel like we’re surrounded by the spirits of people who have gone before us, all the time. I was in a library at Maryville College, close to Knoxville, researching a woman that was fascinating to me. The librarian said, “Nobody’s cared about her for years!” But I wanted to do a one-woman show about her. I talked to the archivist, and that ballooned into a one-hour play about this woman for the college’s bicentennial. People were deeply moved because she hadn’t put her name on anything, but she’d done all these magnificent things for the college. She was 80, and she didn’t die until she was 98. So she did her best work in those years, and that’s really reassuring!

That morphed into a conversation with someone in Murfreesboro who hired me to write Party of Twelve. The overall project is called “Leading Ladies of Rutherford County.” It’s finding the history of all — and I mean all: every color, every class — all the incredible women. And there are so many that are non-white. It was very exciting to discover, but harder to get the material, as they didn’t have as many books written about them. But it caused us to reach out to their descendants. So writing one play about these women caused all this collaboration, respect, and knowledge.

In regards to the female experience, rage is driving me, power interests me, phenomenal bravery interests me. If anyone ever read my body of work, I think the through line would be tremendous courage in the face of incredible challenge. And don’t let me forget humor.

What is your favorite thing about what you do now, and what has been the most challenging for you?

Writing is my favorite thing. It is the world I can retreat to, where everything is under my control. (She laughs.) I’m just saying that for every artist, there is no end to the ideas you can have. That’s my biggest joy. My biggest challenge — and I don’t want to harp on [Pace] or make him the bad guy — but sometimes I’ll only have five minutes before something really destructive happens, so I have to be laser-focused. But it’s not sacred. There’s so much ritual around writing; it’s exactly like being an actor. But you just jump in. Five minutes a day, whatever you can do. This is my instrument, and all I have to do is give it a chance every once in a while. I just learn to embrace the time: Either I can close my eyes and think it through, or I jump out of the shower and get it down.

Are you working on anything new now? Care to share anything about it?

For In Process, it’s going to be a play about a woman who is a resiliency expert and undergoes a horrible tragedy and takes to the Appalachian Trail to find herself. Then Party of Twelve — April 8th is the world premiere; it’s going to be at the Washington Theater [in Murfreesboro], several days, all local actors. We’re going to get some MTSU students involved.

Do you have any advice for people aiming for similar careers?

The one thing you can control is to constantly improve your craft by working with other people, collaborating. Lateral thinking! Maybe you could write a libretto. Maybe you could do children’s theater. Always, always, always be open and giving, as much as you can. Consistency is the number-one thing. Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t write!

Mary, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much!

Thank you!

V. Taylor Davis is an English major at MTSU and is expecting to graduate in winter this year.