Meehan wins MacDowell fellowship

Wheaton Associate Professor of English and playwright-in-residence Charlotte Meehan has been awarded a coveted Alpert/MacDowell Colony Fellowship.

The MacDowell Colony was established in Peterborough, N.H., in 1907 to nurture the arts by offering talented individuals an inspiring environment in which to produce their work. More than 250—writers, composers, visual artists, photographers and playwrights among them—come to the colony each year from all over the United States and abroad. Meehan joins the impressive company of previous MacDowell fellows, including award-winning playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Wendy Wasserstein and Thornton Wilder.

"I'm honored to have been selected for the fellowship because my work was read by a group of artists and arts administrators whose own creative work and contributions to the theatre I greatly admire," said Meehan, who has been a Wheaton faculty member since 2002 and recently received tenure.

Located on 450 scenic acres, the colony provides fellows 24-hour-access to private studios, meals and support. Meehan, who has written 15 plays, plans to spend a month at the colony working on her next play, Banishing the Blues, which will be an investigation of the depression industry in America.

She has a master of fine arts in playwriting from Brown University, a master of fine arts in creative writing from Brooklyn College, and a bachelor's degree in French and comparative literature from SUNY, Binghamton. Currently, she also is in the Artist Residency at Perishable Theatre (RAPT) in Providence, R.I., under the direction of Artistic Director Vanessa Gilbert. Meehan also was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in playwriting at the Sewanee Writers Conference in 1994, and a resident artist (with her late husband David Hopkins) at HERE Arts Center in New York in 2002–03.

"Our panel was very impressed with the work she submitted," said Courtney Bethel, MacDowell Colony admissions director. "To give you an understanding of the competition for such an award, we received 802 applications and awarded 77 residences for the season. Charlotte was one of seven playwrights who received a residency for the summer."

One of the impressive works Meehan submitted was Sweet Disaster, her most recent play. The play will debut at Perishable Theatre, from April 25 through May 11. The multi-layered, multimedia work is the culmination of her residency there. An example of Meehan's ability to go beyond the boundaries of traditional theatre, the play is described by director Ken Prestininzi as "a hybrid of theatre, music and film navigating the moments between explosions."

Sweet Disaster combines fictional conversations that take place before, during and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks with biblical excerpts, life insurance company claim forms, and the real pathology reports charting the cancer of her now deceased husband David Hopkins whose animated film series will also be included in the work. Sweet Disaster, begun with Hopkins as a residency at HERE Arts Center, marks their last collaboration together and a bittersweet ending.

Among her other recent works is Looking for George. Last summer in New York, she presented a staged reading of the play, which was directed by Wheaton Assistant Professor of Theatre Stephanie Burlington. The play is based on a series of Dadaist letters she and some Wheaton students wrote to President George Bush begging him to end the Iraqi war.

"One of my former students was at my house with my 16-year-old niece. We were very depressed about the war and very despondent," said Meehan. "I thought, I'm the older one, I need to try to make these young people feel better. I said, 'alright I declare every Thursday night Dadaist letters to the President night.'" So every Thursday night they wrote the letters, read them aloud to each other and sent them out on Friday mornings.

"Some of them were fictitious, some of them were real, some of them were heartbroken, some of them were in love with him, some of them were hating him. In every letter, we were trying get him to end the war," she said. "Not a single one of our letters was responded to."

So Meehan gave the words a bigger voice by transforming them into a theatre piece. She was inspired to do so by Burlington who invited her to present something with a theatre ensemble in New York. The piece is a multi-media work that, along with the voices of the actors, incorporates everything from TV weather reports to hand-held cutouts of the President's face.

The inspiration for the play that she will work on at the colony came about because Meehan is very attracted to questionable advice she has seen in print for people who are depressed.

"It must be ten years ago now that I read an article on the front page of the New York Times in which a pharmaceutical representative, a young woman, was talking about the new target market for Paxil—six-year-olds. I was appalled and there it was in black and white, just one day's news in the ‘all the news that's fit to print' paper. That has stayed with me, and what I call the ‘Dr. Phil-ing' of America. It can all be fixed in one hour—minus television commercials. So there's a lot I want to say about this.

"This play deals with desperate people seeking help from other desperate people who, instead of getting their own proper help, become successful charlatans. And the cycle goes on," said Meehan. "But remember that I'm being quite mischievously general here and that of course I know millions of people are helped by anti-depressants and therapy."