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I may write a play because I'm so upset about something that I
have to say something. ... I may want to write about someone in
my family I love very much and want to memorialize. I may see
someone walking down the street in a certain way. I'll imagine a
whole life for that person and go home and write a play about
this person who interested me because of the walk. Or I may be
in a supermarket and hear a phrase. — Megan Terry
The Mother of American Feminist Drama — Helene Keysser
Terry's theater is a theater of discovery, in which all
things, and joy, are possible. — June Schlueter
... prodigious gifts. She threads together
many varieties of language, from poetry and lyrical vernacular to senseless,
palpitating vocal noises; she sets each one of her multiple scenes
economically,
without holding up the drama; her lines are rich with buoying rhythms and
unforced song; she knows how to make a harsh satirical comment obliquely.
— Albert Bermel, New Leader (on Megan Terry)
A provocative, frequently wildly
funny, series of theatrical metaphors. — Al McConagha,
Dictionary of Literary Biography (on Viet Rock)
What I find most interesting about her plays is their
exploitation of the theater as a medium, in
particular their accommodation to those unreal and neglected dimensions:
stage
time and space." — Albert Bermel, New Leader, (on Viet
Rock and other plays)
Material that at first glance might seem untheatrical — the play,
after all, records the journey of a soul — into one of
the most powerful and
engrossing pieces of theatre to be seen. — Catharine R Hughes,
America (on Approaching
Simone)
It is a rare theatrical event for these hysterical and clownish times, a
truly serious play, filled with the light, shadow and weight of human
life, and the
exultant agonies of the ceaseless attempt to create one's humanity. —
Jack Kroll, Newsweek (on Approaching Simone)
The way parents pressure children into certain roles, by instruction and
examples; the way society uses this pressure, making the home an horrific
training ground for the horrific larger world. —
Michael Feingold, dictonary of Literary Biography (on The
Pioneer)
It's tough to imagine "a comic, gymnastic extravaganza about family
aggression," but the Omaha Magic Theater has done it.
Avant garde playwright Megan Terry's new play Goona Goona concerns
child abuse as told to
Punch and Judy, the story of a nuclear family meltdown is stylized to
absurdity. ...
Goona Goona may be the best play the Magic Theater has staged.
Roger Catlin, Omaha World-Herald
Megan Terry's Goona Goona turns out to be a racy, raucous and
instructive piece of avant
garde action theater somewhere this side of Grand Guignol and Artaud's
theater of cruelty.
It's a "musical" that is also educational, not only about family violence
but also about a whole clutch of
middle-class American attitudes. It plays like a cross between a circus
and a surrealist sermon. ...
The play is a fascinating, always interesting exploration of the uses
of the stage. — Joan Bunke, The Des Moines Register
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What the Critics Say
