Ruby C. Berryman
Playwright, Academic, and Interdisciplinary Artist in New Hampshire
Ruby Berryman is a playwright from the White Mountains of Northern New Hampshire. Currently, she is a writer/arts entrepreneur with True North Arts & Leisure an arts company dedicated to bringing new plays to the most northern parts of New Hampshire.
Ms. Berryman holds an MFA in Playwriting from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky and a BA in Theatre/Playwriting from the University of California, San Diego. Ms. Berryman’s work explores themes of love, genocide, and the use of science in marginalization and oppression. She is especially interested in the true stories of Blacks in the Holocaust. She has written a variety of plays including Jazz Camp, People Farm, Shopping for Men: The Musical, and Everyman: The Remix and Fish on Friday an excerpt of which was published recently in the Louisville Review.
Her theatre essays have received international recognition and university awards. Published in the Canadian journal The Quint her essay, Distilling Genocide Into Drama: Adaptation of Holocaust and Slave Narratives to the Stage was also chosen for presentation at international genocide conferences including the International Network of Genocide Scholars Conference and The Holocaust in the Contemporary World in Krakow, Poland.
As the Artistic Director of The Reader’s Theatre Workshop, Ms. Berryman teaches the theatre process to a rural community. Her directorial credits include plays by Ibsen, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Strindberg, Synge, and others.
In a unique collaborative work, Ms. Berryman was the Artist in Residence at a New England correctional facility where she guided inmates in creating a portraiture to performance piece based on the inmate watercolor series painted by Chicago based artist, Julian Williams. A subsequent performance and exhibition of the portraits of the offenders entitled, Englewood Boys was held at the Catamount Arts Center, St. Johnsbury, VT.
An avid baseball fan, Ms. Berryman was a presenter at the Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference celebrating the 110th Anniversary of Satchel Paige. Her paper, Barnstorming as Theatre: Satchel Seizes the Elixir connected baseball and myth structure and paid homage to the accomplishments of this legendary American pitcher, Satchel Paige. See Kansas City Star link: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/article88722172.html.
Ms. Berryman is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Chicago Dramatists, The Playwrights’ Center and the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire.