Our Third Annual Appalachian Playwriting Festival is happening September 12-14, 2025 here at Parkway Playhouse! We reached out to playwright Ned Dougherty to tell us more about him and his script!
What does being Appalachian mean to you?
Being Appalachian means that every person you know is probably a storyteller. You might get caught listening to the story of a cousin’s nephew’s birth while pumping gas. Or maybe you’ll hear a yarn about what critter was caught mid-rummage on the trail cam at the pharmacy. Wherever you’re headed, it’s not a bad idea to factor in some extra time, because after running into folks, you’ll be running late.
I married into a family of four sisters, and the food leftover from a late breakfast can turn into appetizers for an early dinner if you’re not careful. People around here relish a chance to hear a good story. The greeting, “What’re you doing?” is less a question about your current activity and more an invitation to let out a story. The amount of pain and suffering I’ve heard about someone’s distant family member who I’ll never meet, while standing in the canned bean aisle makes my heart break. Just as numerous, the number of times I’ve laughed too loud in a library, asked a buddy to repeat a story to someone who hasn’t heard it yet, come home after school to my niece and nephew midstream in a belly buster.
There must be as many stories as there are trees around here. I’m hopeful mine are worthy of an audience’s evening.
Tell us about your play!
In Deera’s Country Funeral, Ray Sally’s beloved tractor died, and it’s time to have a funeral. But maybe it’s Ray Sally who is about to meet his maker, since what good is an old farmer to the world if he can’t even keep a tractor running? On the surface, this is just a silly little play about a tractor, but underneath, questions about destiny, rural masculinity, and the measure of a life well-lived face this tiny community caught at the height of their grief.
What inspired you to write your play?
I’ve always wondered about the motivations for a family to prominently leave an old tractor out in a field for all to see. I tried to imagine the stories behind that machine, and those of the farmer who kept it running for so long. I wondered if that tractor we see out in a field might be a more fitting headstone for a dedicated farmer, as if the tractor there told the story of a man’s life. The highs and the lows, the harvests and parades, and the floods. But I always like to write plays that are a few clicks off-center from reality, so I thought up a story of a farmer who wanted to bury his tractor. That made me laugh. And I thought of a community like the one I live in and love, and I wondered what it would be like if they went along with the old farmer and wanted to bury her too. Once I started telling people about that idea, and they laughed too, I knew I needed to find the soulful story hiding in that humorous world. And now a guy who has never driven a tractor himself has written a play about a tractor.
What do you hope will stick with audiences after they watch the reading of your play?
I hope people leave thinking about their community, how far we go to hold each other up. This is a play about shared communal grief, and it might hit harder in your area with the aftermath of Helene still playing out in some towns around Burnsville. I hope audiences leave proud of being members of their own communities.
I also think people might appreciate the intergenerational friendships and evergreen themes of this play. Every character is dealing with some shade of the same questions all of my students have struggled with…Am I going to be in this small town forever, and what does the answer mean for me? Do I have a place here? Am I stuck here, or am I free here? In Deera’s Country Funeral, folks from 18 – 200 years old struggle with those questions.
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m an award-winning public school educator with deep roots in both New Mexico and West Virginia who writes existential black comedies that shine a spotlight on anxious, complex, and unforgettable characters navigating life in small towns. My plays are fueled by the lived experiences of my students – gentle hunters, rebellious art punks, soulful dreamers, and living out the tension between wanting to leave home and finding meaning in staying. Since earning an MFA in Playwriting in 2019, my work has landed at festivals across the country (and abroad in Ireland), with recent productions and festival showcases across West Virginia. My play Blue Reunion was named a semifinalist for the 2024 O’Neill National Playwriting Festival. I’m developing the Appalachian Ode Project wherein I lead free community writing workshops across the region to help places articulate their shared identities and reclaim pride-in-place through the power of story (so far I’ve led workshops in OH, WV, and VA…let’s bring this project to Burnsville!). I teach students navigating the juvenile justice system in Pocahontas County, WV where I live with my family.
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