Local playwright Sheila Cowley wrote Flying while living in St. Pete, and it's about to take off — after the staged reading at American Stage this Friday night (March 3), this play about women fighter pilots downshifting when they went home after World War II will get an Equity production this May at Chenango River Theatre in upstate New York. After that, the play will be featured in a series in Chicago.
In other words, a lot of people in a lot of different places like this drama.
Over the course of five years, Cowley developed Flying in Chicago, London, and, a couple of months ago, in Tampa. Local audiences heard her at a reading sponsored by Tampa Rep and this newspaper; it’s that most recent reading, Cowley told me, that led to the current draft, the one that’s going to be heard at American Stage.
She’s written six or seven full-length plays, and about a dozen short ones. Only one other of her full-lengths, Stay, has been produced (by the Wimberley Players, outside Austin, Texas), but her short pieces have been staged everywhere from Ohio to California to Korea. And she’s been professionally involved in local theater at least since 1998, when she started a radio theatre series for WMNF (it’s now the Radio Theatre Project at Studio@620).
As for how she avoids becoming a starving artist, she and her husband Matt do freelance audio work: recording, editing, post-production, mixing. Matt is also a writer and designed the sound for the USF BRIT Program play Antigone and is sound designer and sound effects specialist for the RTP.
“We moved to St. Petersburg a few years ago, and it is a fantastic place for any artist to live, of whatever description,” Cowley says. “There are so many incredibly talented actors and directors and dramaturgs and dancers and choreographers and visual artists and you know, so many writers and musicians around here. The nice thing about living here is that if you meet one artist, they introduce you to even more… And people don’t just go to the theater or just read books or just go to music, people go to everything.”
Back to her play, though: What’s Flying about?
Cowley has lived in the Tampa Bay area since her junior high days, and graduated from USF with a degree in history. She incorporates war history into Flying.
“The background of it is drawn from a lot of oral histories and memoirs of women who flew military planes in World War II so men could go and fight,” Cowley says. “But it’s set after they all get sent home to get back to normal. They were flying fighter planes, training and test piloting. They were training men how to dogfight, and they were the targets guys were shooting at when they were using antiaircraft artillery. So they were doing pretty amazing stuff, but then just got kind of disbanded and sent home to cooking and all that.”
“The play is based on storytelling, and how you can keep people alive and you can keep things going and keep a whole town alive through the stories that you tell,” says Cowley. And, she adds, “through the things that you leave out of your stories.”
"I like writing roles for strong women,” said Cowley, “And it’s not the only play I’ve been working on for five years; I’ve written several other full-length plays and a whole lot of short ones in the meantime. So I’ve been mainly writing plays since this one that deal with text tied to music and visual art and dance. And this is the last straight-up play that I’ve written in a while.”
“It’s a fantastically collaborative place, and I’m really fortunate to have so many other kinds of artists to work with as well as theater artists.”
Flying
Staged reading as part of the 21 Century Voices Series
American Stage
163 Third St. N., St. Pete.
Mar. 3, 8 p.m.
$10
727-823-PLAY. americanstage.org.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 2, 2017.
