About Samantha Marchant
Samantha Marchant is a playwright and director based in WNY. She graduated from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University with a concentration in Playwriting. Her work has been produced on both US coasts and has had readings all across the country and in Canada. Her plays have been produced or developed with Nickel Flour, Woven Theatre, Inkwell Lab, Workshop Theater, The Pulp Stage, The Skeleton Rep(resents), Theater Three, TMDT, Post Industrial Productions, Skull and Dagger, Alleyway Theatre, and Route 66, among others. Her script, Stintz Milestrip Center, was a semi-finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference.
She has attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a Horton Foote Scholar in playwriting and was a DGF National Fellowship Finalist. Her writing has been published in Smith & Kraus The Best 10-Minute Plays, Go Play Outside, The Louisville Review, Sick Lit Magazine and Women Writing Letters Season 3 and 4. Her full-length script, Turtle Play (The Play About the Turtle), is now available from Next Stage Press. She is a proud member of the Dramatist Guild and BAWG Playwrights. She longs for what's weird and a good laugh.
Artistic Statement
I am a playwright
I begin with research. Observing. Gleaning. Dreaming. I like to find things I wrote or thought long ago. And rework it. Or insert it. Building around or in spite of that old voice. Beginning theatre’s collaboration with a collaboration with my other selves. I like extremes. Heightened reality. Believable flamboyance. I love it when things are blunt. And I love it when things hide in subtext. My writing has a quiet sense of humor that seeps in. It explores people’s relationships with relationships. Examines people’s disconnects. Experiments with how to live. I’ve spent time learning the rules, so I can break them while still tying down the corners in my writing. Aiming for understanding. Connection. Conversation. I long for what's weird and a good laugh.
I’m inspired by myths (ancient and everyday - personal and global). Music (like the Violent Femmes or Sunset Rubdown). Art (anything accredited to Hieronymus Bosch). And junk floating around the internet.
Nature likes to pop up in my work. Particularly water and fire and women named for trees. I draw from my family's summer cottage on a lake. A cottage for which I have complicated feelings and a lake that is pure beauty.
I write about coming of age and searching for connections. I'm not picky with genres. Writing structured farce or experimental collages or something new. I construct whatever serves my stories as they break from reality in a search for truth.
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My latest interest lies in the realm of environmental theater. Immersive but not necessarily interactive. I like to experiment with how the world, space and story can open up, layer, swallow and highlight.
I aim to leave my audience soaring with new thoughts and a sense of belonging.