Capturing the heart of Appalachian culture through “rough" theater

Updated: Mar 23, 2023

I had the privilege of working with Maryat Lee through the 1980s and got to experience her unique methods firsthand. -- David

"Maryat dug theater out of these mountains."

- Billie Jean Young, MacArthur Fellow, actress, poet, author and teacher.  You can hear a brief interview with the Maryat Lee I knew in this video:

Playwright Maryat Lee, a Kentucky native, trained under theologian Paul Tillich and anthropologist Margaret Mead before making a name for herself with street theater in 1950s East Harlem, using non-actors and the most primitive of stages to mirror the real lives and concerns of the community. Her first play Dope! focused on the heroin epidemic ravaging the city, and was championed by Jackie Robinson among many other notables. Lee's other plays addressed then-taboo themes of gay urban life, domestic abuse, and failing schools, all presented on crowded city streets by performers on a tiny stage just a few feet from the audience. It was a thrilling and exhausting experience for the young Lee. She produced off-Broadway shows, traveled around the world, and struck up a deep friendship with short story master Flannery O'Connor before resurrecting her street theater troupe in the swirling New York City of the 1960s. In 1975, ground down by city life, Lee moved to rural West Virginia and began using the same "rough theater" methods that worked in the inner city, crafting plays from local legends and oral histories. 

Drawing on Lee's archives and much other previously unpublished material, this volume collects four plays from that era, with extensive notes by the author and Dr. William French on the plays and Maryat's process.

Maryat Lee: The Appalachian Plays can now be ordered directly online or through any bookstore.

Praise for Maryat Lee: The Appalachian Plays

“In a time where Appalachian Studies scholars are reckoning with (and revisioning) our region’s history of movement building, multiculturalism, political strife, and hard times of all kinds, this new collection of Maryat Lee’s timely and pathbreaking work is long past due. Lee’s Appalachian Plays, edited with energy and care by David Thurman Miller, re-gifts to all of us the work of an artist whose vision we will need if we are ever going to make sense of these hollers, these hills, and these diverse and complex lives of the people herein.” --Dr. Matt Bryant Cheney, Assistant Professor of English & Director of the Center for Community Engagement, Carson-Newman University

"A play is always pretending, but Maryat tried to keep it as 'real' as possible by using local, untrained actors and a raw and vibrant prose she drew principally from their own lives. She wanted them to become themselves on stage, not actors reading lines. Her Appalachian actors had to struggle both with the role they were stepping into and the stereotyped role the larger culture had already assigned them. That struggle is the play. Maryat's work is not just exciting: it's real." --Joseph G. Anthony, author of A Wounded Snake and other novels and story collections

"Maryat has been underappreciated not just as an influence on Flannery O'Connor but in her own right as a visionary dramatist, proving that her unique methods worked, first in New York and then in rural Appalachia. She found the transcendent in the ordinary."--Rev. Dr. Georgia Newman-Powell, scholar and author of "A 'contrary kinship': The correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and Maryat Lee, early Years, 1957-1959"

“David T. Miller has put together Maryat Lee’s Appalachian plays in a book driven by commitment and connection—he worked for Lee after she left New York for Summers County, West Virginia, producing indigenous Theatre based on oral histories. Dr. William French’s excellent introduction provides the backstory and dramatic roots of Lee’s work and life. And Miller’s preface is a personal homage to the groundbreaking truth of Lee’s Appalachian work. If you don’t know the story of Maryat Lee, here’s the place to listen to it.”--Joan Vannorsdall, journalist and author of the novels Solitary Places and The Hearts of Soldiers

"Kentucky native Maryat had a unique gift for portraying authenticity while producing compelling theater, using non-actors relating stories from their own communities, first in Harlem and then in Appalachia. David T. Miller's collection of her plays and the stories around them remind us that we can find universal themes played out in our everyday lives when we, with open ears, take time to listen."--Steve Flairty, author of the series Kentucky's Everyday Heroes and Everyday Heroes for Kids