Mary Hall Surface (born June 15, 1958) is an American theatre director, playwright, and teaching artist. Based in Washington, DC, her work focuses on theatre productions for family audiences and writing inspired by art.
In 2022, Surface received the Orlin Corey Medallion Award from the Children's Theatre Foundation of America." Surface has been nominated for 10 Helen Hayes Awards and received the 2002 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Direction of a musical for her production of Perseus Bayou.
In her approach as a creative writing teacher and mentor, Surface uses visual art in the writing process. As described in a Washington Post feature about her work at the National Gallery of Art, "Surface searches for a powerful link between a work of art and an aspect of writing."
Surface moved to California in 1982 and served as the associate director of the California Theatre Center (CTC) from 1982 to 1988.ÃÂ She wrote her first plays for and with the acting company of CTC, including Prodigy, Blessings and Most Valuable Player, a play about Jackie Robinson.
In 1989, Surface moved to Washington, DC, to write and direct for the John F. Kennedy Center's first season of Theatre for Young Audiences. She has since written and/or directed productions for both young and adult audiences at numerous Washington theaters including Arena Stage, Round House Theatre, Folger Theatre, and Constellation Theatre, and has had nineteen productions at the Kennedy Center. Surface is the founding Artistic Director (2009âÂÂ2015) of the Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival, an all-arts festival.
Surface has also created interactive performances for very young children, with a program of plays for infants and preschool aged toddlers called Theatre for the Very Young.
Female characters center prominently in Surface's work. She was commissioned by Arena Stage to write a monologue for My Body, No Choice (2022) and she directed She Persisted (a musical by Adam Tobin and Deborah Wicks La Puma, based on the book by Chelsea Clinton) for Adventure Theatre MTC in 2024.
Surface's 1997 Kennedy Center commission and three-time national touring production of The Nightingale, a dance-theater piece created with choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess, launched her 10-year collaboration with composer David Maddox. Together, Surface and Maddox created five music-theater works commissioned by Theater of the First Amendment (TFA), George Mason University's professional theater from 1990 to 2012.ÃÂ These collaborative productions included:
Four of these shows were nominated for the Charles MacArthur Award for Best New Play.ÃÂ Surface received the 2002 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical for Perseus Bayou.
Surface has been commissioned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to write, direct, and produce four plays for family audiences inspired by visual art:
Surface explains that these plays were created to "engage the public in a very emotional and lively, personal way in the art." Inspired by the artists' lives and methods, these plays are not biographies. They are independent theatrical experiences that illuminate the spirit of the visual artists' work.
Surface then became the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art's Writing Salon, a public program from 2014 to 2020 that approaches art as an inspiration for writing and writing as a way to deepen connection to visual art.
In a 2018 article for the Journal of Museum Education, Surface and article co-author Nathalie Ryan share the pedagogical approach of the program.
Surface now leads a series, "Write into Art," as well as reflective writing workshops inspired by art through the Smithsonian Associates. She also has presented art-inspired writing workshops through the Washington National Cathedral and the Chautauqua Institute. She also facilitates Writers' Studios in the US and Europe.
Surface designs each art-based writing workshop to pair a specific type of writing with a specific work of art, such as using landscapes to explore setting or portraits to explore character.
On December 12, 1987, Surface married actor and sculptor, Kevin Reese. They have one daughter, American YouTuber, singer-songwriter, actor, and filmmaker, Malinda Kathleen Reese.