This year’s Iowa New Play Festival is dedicated to Professors Kim Marra and Meredith Alexander, who have made an indelible mark on generations of University of Iowa students engaged in the development and production of new work. Starting in 1990 when they joined the Theatre Arts faculty, and continuing beyond their retirements in 2021, Professors Marra and Alexander taught and supported playwrights and their collaborators with passion, dedication, and special insight. In the process, they helped to shape the annual celebration of new work that Festival is today.

Kim Marra received her BA from Dartmouth College, MA from Brown University, and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. As a scholar, she specializes in U.S. theatre history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially the work of LGBTQ+ theatre artists. Her work led to election as a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

Professor Marra’s scholarship culminated in several groundbreaking studies, including Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914 (2006), published by the University of Iowa Press, and Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (1998). The latter was one in a series of collections on pre-Stonewall LGBTQ+ theatre artists co-edited with Robert Schanke and published by the University of Michigan Press. Strange Duets was awarded the 2008 Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theatre conferred biennially by New York University’s Department of English.

Professor Marra crossed over from scholarship to creative work with her brilliant solo performance, Horseback Views: A Queer Hippological Performance, which dramatized her experience as a horseperson and former competitive equestrian. She performed the piece - under the direction of Professor Alexander – to great acclaim at the Universities of Iowa and Michigan, and at Chicago’s Links Hall. A related article, "Riding, Scarring, Knowing: A Queerly Embodied Performance Historiography" (Theatre Journal, December 2012), won the 2013 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).

In the Department of Theatre Arts, Professor Marra taught theatre and performance history and served as the Director of Graduate Studies. She also held an appointment in the American Studies Department, which she chaired from 2008 to 2011, and was affiliate faculty in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. In her teaching and advising, and in her regular participation in Playwrights Workshops and New Play Festival events, she used her scholarly expertise to challenge students to think deeply about how and why they were creating new work, to conceive of their work as extending and/or disrupting theatrical traditions of the past. The work of numerous playwrights and their collaborators gained special focus and purpose as a result.

Meredith Alexander directed and taught acting in the Department of Theatre Arts and was affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. While pursuing her MFA at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), she performed with the Old Globe Theatre Company. She taught at UCSD and San Diego State University before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she headed both the undergraduate and graduate acting programs. Professor Alexander has also directed professionally in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Kansas City.

For innovation in addressing diverse identities in the classroom, most notably through her course, Performing Autobiography, which served creative writers across departments, Professor Alexander received Iowa’s President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence.

Throughout her time in the Department of Theatre Arts, Professor Alexander regularly advised playwrights and other theatre arts students in the Playwrights Workshop and New Play Festival. Many students were fortunate to collaborate with her as a director of staged readings and productions. Her dedication to Playwrights Workshop students has continued with her regular attendance at Workshop readings and feedback sessions following her retirement. In all of these contexts, she has used her creative and practical experience and skills as a director to help sharpen the form and purpose of each play she encounters.

Together and individually, Professors Marra and Alexander leave an immeasurable legacy of influence on Iowa playwrights and their collaborators. We are honored to dedicate this year’s Festival to them.