@dramatistsguild @kimstinson

What happens when a produced, published and award-winning playwright moves from a major metropolitan area to a smaller city in a state whose professional theatres are spread from coast to mountains and take hours to drive between? Does her playwriting career suffer or thrive? Looking at the biography for Jacqueline E. Lawton, it is easy to see her thriving with her move from Washington, D.C. to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

In addition to writing plays, Lawton currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the school of Dramatic Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), one of sixteen public universities in the state. Lawton’s success as a dramaturg and playwright has continued, as well.

She is a recipient of the 2015-2016 Kenan Institute’s Creative Collaboratory Project Grant which is an opportunity that would not have been open to her had she stayed in the D.C. area. The grant is to fund Lawton’s writing a play, Ardeo. The play is to explore the “personal narratives from health practitioners and patients at the North Carolina Jaycee Burn Center at UNC-CH.” Lawton is to begin working on the project in February. According to Lawton, “this play will highlight the power, impact, and significance of narrative medicine to create new stories of healing and understanding.” After conducting interviews with staff and patients, Lawton will have two months to write the script for the public reading scheduled in May. North Carolina members should look for emails in April with information about a meeting that is to be held in conjunction with the play’s reading.

Lawton is happy with her move down south, which she made about a year ago. “It’s a beautiful state with endless blue skies,” she commented. “The biggest transition was learning how to write around so much sunshine!”

Getting used to a different lifestyle has been good for her as, “The pace of living is slower, the food is great, and it’s an affordable place to live well. I have more time to write than ever before, which is good because I’ve got a number of commissions that need to be written!”

Those of us who are from North Carolina know that it is a place where one can carve and etch out a career; however, sometimes those outside of our fantastic state may have different conceptions of what it is like here. With this in mind, I asked Lawton whether she felt her moving to North Carolina had slowed the pace of her career at all.

“I don’t know how much further my career would be if I had ever lived in New York…and I may live there one day,” she replied. “I do know that living in D.C. helped me to establish myself in a way that living in Texas, where I grew up, wouldn’t have. Moving to Chapel Hill hasn’t negatively impacted my career at all. I’m still part of the national conversation and my work is being read and presented throughout the country.”

Lawton sums up her feelings about her move when she states that she does not, “know what it means to be a North Carolina playwright, yet…but I look forward to finding out and seeing how it impacts my voice as a writer.”

Jacqueline E. Lawton - photo by Jason Hornick

kstinson@dramatistsguild.com