Jean Battlo
Biographical Information
Playwright, poet, essayist, and more, Jean Battlo is a writer of rare and exceptional talent, one with a deep appreciation and love of her home state and a gift for translating those feelings into the written word. The youngest child of Italian immigrants, drawn to Appalachia to work in the coal mines, Jean Battlo was born and raised in Kimball, a small town in McDowell County, West Virginia. She attended Marshall University, earning both a B.A. and an M.A. Battlo began her literary career as a poet, publishing two award-winning volumes of poetry – Bonsai and Modern Haiku. She first attempted playwriting in response to a request from her community—people who wanted to form a local theatre group but could not afford the royalties charged by publishing houses for producing their materials. Though she had not even thought of writing plays before, Battlo agreed to try.Like most writers, Battlo started with what she knew—her people, her culture, her world. Her first plays, A Highly Successful West Virginia Business and Caves, are examples of the pride that is at the heart of mountain culture and the lengths mountaineers will go to survive and overcome the challenges of poor economic conditions. Similar characters appear in other Battlo works, including A Little Theater’s Performance of “Hamlet” and The Morning Glory Tree. Battlo considers her work an ongoing effort to overcome and dispel the negative stereotypes about West Virginians and Appalachians in the mainstream American media – “These people are not caricatures, not ‘mammy Yokums, not hillbilly stereotypes. These are people I live with. They’re real. They watch CNN. They know what’s going on in the world. They just haven’t lost touch with their roots.”
Word spread quickly about the new playwright. In 1987, Battlo left her job with the McDowell County school system to spend two years as a Writer-in-Residence with the Beckley-based Theater West Virginia. While with the program, Battlo wrote two more plays – Frog Songs and Shakespeare: Love in Stages (co-authored by Alma Bennett). Scenes from both plays were included in Linda Pinnell’s Getting Started in Theater (National Textbook Company, 1996).
Battlo later turned her playwriting focus to historical dramas. #8, a play about a Jewish family just prior to the beginning of Hitler’s Holocaust, was selected as a finalist by Camel-Sea in 1990, as well as being optioned by Off-Broadway Stage Arts and being listed as a finalist in the Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Competition. In 1992, she was commissioned to write Between Two Worlds. The musical, which premiered at the Pearl S. Buck Home in Hillsboro, WV, was written to celebrate the centennial of the Buck’s birth. Jean Battlo was later awarded a seed-grant from the WV Humanities Council to research the 1921 murder of “Smilin’” Sid Hatfield for an outdoor drama intended to help bring tourists to the Hatfield-McCoy Trail in southern West Virginia. The result of that grant, The Terror of the Tug, premiered in the summer of 2000 with a performance at Landbridge, WV. The Terror of the Tug remains under the control of McArts, the McDowell County community arts organization, and is performed each summer in a specially-constructed outdoor amphitheatre.
Jean Battlo continues to live and work in McDowell County, West Virginia. She serves as the McArts artistic director as well as working with Theater West Virginia to teach workshops on playwriting. In 1998, Battlo established Globe Stage, a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in McDowell County. In additional to her many plays, Battlo has also published prose works of fiction and non-fiction, including a collection of Appalachian horror stories (Appalachian Gothic Tales).
Critical Responses
Jean Battlo’s work has been repeatedly praised for its authentic portrayals of Appalachian people and culture. She has received grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council, including a West Virginia Fellowship grant for playwriting. #8, her play about a Jewish family before the Holocaust, was a 1990 finalist in the Eugene O’Neill National Playwright Competition. Her plays, originally written for McArts, have been performed by the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater (North Carolina), the Tennessee Stage Company, the Charleston Stage Company (West Virginia), Theater West Virginia and others. Her work is indeed doing what she set out to do—bring the face of West Virginia to the world.
Works Published
Plays
- # 8
- Caves
- Frog Songs
- A Highly Successful West Virginia Business
- The House on Second Street
- The Little Theater's Production of "Hamlet"
- The Morning Glory Tree
- Of Freckled Human Nature
- Shakespeare: Love in Series
- The Terror of the Tug
- Voltaire's Confession
Other Works
- Bonsai
- Modern Haiku
- Pictorial History of McDowell County
- The Mahotep Synod
- Appalachian Gothic Tales
- McDowell County in West Virginia and American History
- Behold the Man
Selected Bibliography
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Author Website
Jean Battlo