Mary Hall Surface is an internationally-recognized playwright and director specializing in theatre for families. A member of the Washington, DC theatre community since 1989, she has had twelve productions at the Kennedy Center as well as at Arena Stage, Theater of the First Amendment, the Round House Theatre, Imagination Stage and Washington Jewish Theatre. Internationally her work has been featured in productions and festivals in Germany, Canada, Japan, Peru, France, Sweden and Ireland. She has been nominated for four Helen Hays Awards for Outstanding Direction, receiving the award in 2002 for Theatre of the First Amendment's Perseus Bayou. With her long-time collaborator, composer David Maddox, she has been nominated for the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play forSing Down the Moon,Perseus BayouandMississippi Pinocchio. The newest Surface-Maddox musical,The Odyssey of Telemaca, opened at Theater of the First Amendment in June 2004. Recent projects includeSpirit Shall Fly: A Kentucky Talewhich will be read at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York in June 2005 and produced at Stage One in Louisville, Kentucky in October, 2005; a new Surface/Maddox musical, based on the Icarus myth, which will premier at Theater of the First Amendment and the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts in February 2006 and Perfume River, a musical set in New Orleans with composers David Maddox and Jon Carroll (premiering at Signature Theatre Monday night series in March 2005.) She has served as an advisor to American Theatre Magazine, on the board of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Youth and as a National Endowment for the Arts on-site evaluator and 2003 theater panelist. In July 2006, she was awarded the Charlotte Chorpenning Prize from the American Alliance for Theatre in Education for her outstanding body of work as a playwright.
