Martha Boesing THEATER ARTIST

PLAYWRIGHT     DIRECTOR     TEACHER

Martha Boesing has written over 40 produced plays, led workshops, and directed plays for theaters throughout the country. She was the Founder and Artistic Director At the Foot of the Mountain theater in Minneapolis (the longest running professional women's theater in the country) from 1974-84. She has won several national awards including an NEA, a Bush fellowship, and the Kennedy Center's Fund for New American playwrights. In the sixties, she was a company member of Minneapolis’ Firehouse Theater (an iconoclastic, experimental theater), and her work remains true to the ideological concerns of that time. She now lives in Oakland with her partner Sandy Boucher, close to her four grandchildren, and creates theater pieces for The Faithful Fools, a street ministry in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.

On Stage in 2010: (Close box) SYLVIA'S ADVICE ON HOW TO AGE GRACEFULLY ON THE PLANET DENIAL will be opening on Feb 5th, 2010, at the Ashby stage in Berkeley, CA. Martha's new musical, commissioned by Oakland's Stagebridge Theater, is based on the stories and cartoons of Nicole Hollander. Scrumbly Koldwyn provides the music; Martha will direct. On July 16th, 2010, The Youth Music Theater Co. of Berkeley will premiere THE MOTHERS OF LUDLOW, Martha's musical drama (music by Paul Boesing), about the miners' massacre in Ludlow, Col., in 1916, directed by her daughter, Jennifer Boesing.

“Ms. Boesing is one of the few women writing for the theater today whose work is informed by consciousness rather than rhetoric, and whose goal is to move audience members rather than chastise them, and whose understanding of theater is as thorough as her understanding of human liberation.”

- Phyllis Wagner, Chair Person, Directing Program, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale