UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 37, Page 4
July 22, 1993
Author's new play to be performed at Hedgerow Theater

     A young concert violinist must decide whether to pursue her musical
career under the domination of her mother or to assert her independence and
follow her own destiny.
     The girl's conflict and the relationships within generations of her
family, including the role of the less-favored daughter, are the basis of a
new play by Jeanne Murray Walker, professor of English at the University.
     The Chosen Daughter will be presented as a staged reading at the
Hedgerow Theater, 146 Rose Valley Rd., Wallingford, Pa., at 7:30 p.m.,
Wednesday, July 28.
     The play also will be produced in the spring by Wheaton College in
Illinois, where Walker received her bachelor's degree.
     An award-winning playwright, Walker won first place for her first
play, Stories from the "National Enquirer," out of 400 entries at the
Washington, D.C., Theatre Festival in 1990. The play was produced by the
Source Theatre in Washington, at the University and by Tatnall School in
Wilmington.
     "Plays require communal effort of the writer, director and actors to
determine what works on stage," Walker said. "Play writing does not
communicate through paper but through speech and action. Everything from
the pace of the play to the smallest prop is important."
     This year, Walker has a grant from the University's Center for
Advanced Study to continue with her play writing. Her current project is a
play dealing with a grown-up, "lost child" who unexpectedly contacts the
father she has never known.
     Because of the special requirements of writing for the stage, Walker
works with different groups such as the Theatre Center Playwrights in
Philadelphia, where a group of writers, directors and actors read and
discuss new plays. Next winter, she has been invited to bring her
"developing play" to work with The Man in the Moon Theatre in London.
     After a play is written, a "play doctor" is frequently called in to 
revise and work on the script. University students sometimes fulfill this
role in a theatre course taught by Nancy King, a professor in the
University Honors Program.
     The students develop Walker's scripts as the basis of the course.
     Performance, input from others and revision are essential parts of the
play-writing process, Walker pointed out.
     In addition to her play writing, Walker has received recognition for
her poetry, which has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies,
including The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Christian
Science Monitor and Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American
Poetry. Her volume Nailing Up The Home Sweet Home was a finalist in the
Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and the Walt Whitman Award and the
winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award. Another book, Coming Into
History, won the 1988 Cleveland State Poetry Center Competition.
     For information about the Hedgerow presentation, call (215) 565-4211.
                                        -Sue Swyers Moncure