Meghan Brown

What Happened While Hero Was Dead

ANPF 2021 Winner

Meghan Brown writes about dangerous women. Winner of the Ovation Award for Playwriting of an Original Play for The Pliant Girls (Fugitive Kind Theater), her work has been performed at Lincoln Center (Untuned Ears Hear Nothing but Discord); Victory Gardens Theater (The Tasters, Ignition festival of New Plays); Portland Center Stage (The Tasters, JAW: A Playwrights Festival); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (I KILLED A TIGER); and the Getty Villa (Cowboy Elektra, with Rogue Artists Ensemble). Other theatrical projects include These Girls Have Demons (music by Sarah Taylor Ellis, developed with Pittsburgh CLO); What Happened While Hero Was Dead (developed at Moving Arts MADlab, Great Plains Theater Conference 2021); The Tasters (Rivendell Theater, UT Austin, upcoming Milwaukee Rep); Shine Darkly, Illyria (Fugitive Kind Theater); The Discord Altar (OperaWorks); The Kill-or-Dies (Electric Footlights + Moving Arts, Max K. Lerner fellowship winner); and This Is Happening Now (available through Montag Press). She is a current member of the Geffen Writers Room at the Geffen Playhouse.

Currently residing: Pasadena, California! 

Grew up in: Millbrae, CA. (Right next to the San Francisco airport!) 

Creative beginnings: My mother tells a story about me writing scripts for my dolls (and being very frustrated when my playmates wouldn’t say the right lines). I was obsessed with acting in school plays and community theater, and wrote a set of one-acts my senior year of high school that my friends and I performed in a local park.

Like many artistic kids, I was somehow both painfully shy and incredibly loud, and was lucky to find theater as an early outlet of expression.

Playwriting empowerment and nurturance: My first plays were written for theater companies started by and/or with my friends. Spending years working with beloved, supportive collaborators was a real gift.

Writing process: Oh, it’s pure chaos. I would recommend it to no one. It involves intense procrastination, a giant papier-mâché tiger head, smelly candles my husband hates, frequent submersion in water, melodramatically ripping up giant pieces of paper, literal growling and foot-stomping, and alternating feelings of terror, rage, and accomplishment. 

Inspiration behind your play: I saw a fantastic production of Much Ado About Nothing and left feeling royally pissed off. I thought Hero deserved better. I still do. 

Favorite moment or line: The back half of Hero’s first scene with Benedick is a favorite.

Most looking forward to at ANPF: I’m always looking to deepen—so looking forward to digging in with such a stellar director and cast!

Hope for audience takeaways: I hope they get to tap into some feelings they’ve been neglecting, whatever those may be.

(And laughter! I hope they experience laughter!)