Mary Hall Surface

Mary Hall Surface is an award-winning playwright, director and producer devoted to theatre for multigenerational audiences. In 2022, she received the Medallion Award from the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America for being “a foundational leader and mentor for more than a generation of Theatre for Young Audience artists.” Her plays have been produced at major professional TYA theatres, museums, and festivals throughout the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and Canada, including 19 productions at the Kennedy Center. With her longtime collaborator, composer David Maddox, she wrote and directed five musicals which reimagined classic stories through diverse American roots musical forms. Their "Sing Down the Moon: Appalachian Wonder Tales," "Perseus Bayou," "Mississippi Pinocchio," and "Lift: Icarus and Me" were each nominated for the Charles McArthur Charles MacArthur Award for Best New Play. She received the 2002 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical for her Perseus Bayou. Since 2007, she has been commissioned by the National Gallery of Art to write, direct, and produce five plays for family audiences. In 2006, she received the Charlotte Chorpenning Award from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education for her outstanding body of work as a playwright. She has 14 published plays and three award-winning cast albums of her Surface-Maddox musicals. As a teaching artist, she presents creative and reflective writing workshops as a national Kennedy Center Teaching artist and for the Smithsonian Associates, National Gallery of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. From 2014 - 2023, she was the mentor for the Sigworks in the School High School playwright’s program of Signature Theatre, Arlington, VA. As a producer, she curated One Theatre World, a seminal national festival of Theatre for Young Audiences at the Kennedy Center in 2000 and she was the founding artistic director of DC’s Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival from 2009 – 2015, an all-arts festival that fosters connection across boundaries of age, perspective, and community. With Adventure Theatre MTC in Washington, DC, Mary Hall directed "Good Night Moon" in 2008 for which she was nominated for a Helen Hays Award for Outstanding Director, "Ella Enchanted" in 2017 which received the Helen Hays Award for Outstanding Play or Musical Adaptation and "She Persisted" in 2024.