Our Third Annual Appalachian Playwriting Festival is happening September 12-14, 2025 here at Parkway Playhouse! We reached out to playwright Travis Lowe to tell us more about him and his script!
What does being Appalachian mean to you?
Being Appalachian means carrying the spirit of a people forged by independence. They are the indigenous peoples who chose ridgelines over coastlines, enduring arduous ascents for no other reason than to touch the sky. They are the Germans, Scots, and Irish, unwelcome in the English colonies, who found a home among the lush laurels and rhododendrons. They are the descendants of formerly enslaved peoples who carved out a complex freedom in the hollers and the hills, still struggling against inequity amidst the rough equality of poverty. They are resilient storytellers, full of fears and fables, who work themselves near to death in the shrouded dark just to fiddle their way through the starlit night. I am proud to call myself one of them.
Tell us about your play!
In Carswell Holler, when a traveling EPA agent stops in for a bite at a greasy spoon café in southern West Virginia’s coal country, it sets off a series of dangerous events and menacing stories, both real and imagined, natural and supernatural. A comedically elegant and broodingly dark celebration of Appalachia and its ghosts.
What inspired you to write your play?
My father was born in Carswell Holler, West Virginia, and my younger years were full of stories from his own barefoot childhood growing up in coal country. He would often take us to visit family in Welch, and on these trips, I was always struck by the primordial feel of the place. There’s a quiet, creeping gloom in the tall hollers where the sun never meets the soil, and a dark soot covers everything. The trees, the roads, even the resilient people are all deeply affected by living among the oldest mountains on Earth. However, my father, a true optimist, had a gift for taking the bleakest tales and spinning them into yarns that would make you laugh. He was always the protagonist, always the hero, but through his winning smile, I could see the dark spirits of Appalachia still wandering within. Here is where I let those spirits loose to take their rightful place of reverence, ruling over this ancient land with the New River Gorge Bridge as their towering throne and the East River Tunnel as our careless gateway to a world which is justly theirs.
What do you hope will stick with audiences after they watch the reading of your play?
I hope they come away with a feel for how torn people are in this part of the country. How a bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush, but what happens when that once beautiful bird, which you now hold, is sick and dying from the toxins that infect everything? Who’s to say those in the thicket aren’t infected, too? Often the seemingly simplest answers aren’t simple at all and the only things you can rely on are the stories you tell and the way you tell them, like a canary in flight, or a dervish whirling, with your right hand open and raised to the sky, desiring blessings from God, and your left hand lowered in blind hope of transferring those blessing to the Earth.
Tell us a bit about yourself!
My life is a constant conversation between two different languages. As a programmer, I build systems and craft logical narratives through lines of code. As a playwright and actor, I use words to tell more human stories. The first imagines a world in which everything goes right. The other imagines a world in which, after everything goes wrong, something might be right in the end. Storytelling is an act of hope. My work is my way of inspiring hope in others.
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 wouldn’t miss it! I am looking forward to spending some time at The NuWray Hotel in appreciation of how the good people of that establishment threw open its doors to provide shelter, meals, and support to residents and first responders after Hurricane Helene. It served as a community hub, offering resources and information while also hosting rescue teams and displaced families, playing a major role in the community’s recovery. Good work such as that should not go unnoticed. I can also never pass up a chance to peruse the latest offerings from local artists at the Toe River Arts Gallery or to hang with the bikers and the boat drinks at the oddly mountain-nautical Snap Dragon Bar and Kitchen.
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