Marisa Smith

(Playwright, Total Expression)

Total Expression is a play about an American woman getting some very surprising advice from a young Russian model named Katerina.

Total Expression was inspired by real events, in particular, by an evening spent talking with a real Katerina who “left a big impression on me and made me realize the truth in that famous French saying: the more things change the more they stay the same.”

Katerina is a reoccurring character for Marisa. She was used in her next full length play even though it wasn’t planned. The Nap, a romantic comedy, shows Katerina as a working girl from theUkraine who is in search of a Wall Street “benefactor” and a killer recipe for cabbage soup. Katerina just “wouldn’t be denied.”

Marisa spent years publishing plays and books about theatre but actually wrote her first play on a dare. That play, BOOKGROUP, was produced locally and that experience hooked her.

Her work has been described as “Gurney on acid.”  Marisa is drawn to writing about issues she finds in our culture and she likes to employ a “slightly farcical, heightened reality to reveal the truths and the hypocrisies that I see.”

Click here to read more about 10×10 on North New Play Festival.