Our Third Annual Appalachian Playwriting Festival is happening September 12-14, 2025 here at Parkway Playhouse! We reached out to playwright Steven D. Miller to tell us more about him and his script!
What does being Appalachian mean to you?
For me, in my personal life, it’s mainly a geographic construct. With the homogenization of American culture, it’s a term referring to a bygone era when regional characteristics were more pronounced.
Tell us about your play!
In In a Manor of Speaking, Spinster Florence Wren has fallen on hard times during the Great Depression and is renting her mansion, Wren Manor, to Raskin and Amelia Forbes, Northerners who are in town to scout locations for a textile mill and to repair their marriage. Into this situation comes Georgeanne Cash, a young woman hoping for elocution lessons so that she can snag a rich husband. Lives unravel and then find unanticipated resolutions.
What inspired you to write your play?
I saw a production of The Savannah Disputation, a play concerning elderly women engaging in religious discussion with a door-to-door evangelist. One of the women, played by fine Atlanta actress Shannon Eubanks, put me in mind of a Tennessee Williams faded belle, and I formed the image of her in a crowded room on one side of a stage otherwise filled by the emptiness of a deserted home. The play sprang from there, aided by research into McGuffey’s readers, the spread of the boll weevil, and the movement of textile industries to the South.
What do you hope will stick with audiences after they watch the reading of your play?
I’d like the audience to leave with a sense of how compassion and understanding can overcome differences of background, personality, and financial situation.
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m a native New Englander who experienced culture shock in 1980 when moving to a fairly insular community in upstate SC, which was on the verge of tremendous growth amidst an infusion of non-Southerners. I lived across the street from an old textile mill. Local community theatre organizations welcomed me in, and I acted on their stages and have continued to act in community theatre ever since, across several moves.
Will you be joining us for the Appalachian Playwriting Festival? If so, is there anything else you’re planning on checking out while you’re in Burnsville?
I will be at the festival, staying at the Mount Mitchell Eco Retreat for a bit of time in nature.
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