Lee Nowell’s exciting new play, The Woman You Want To Be, will be coming to Essential Theatre for two performances only! Read on to learn a little more about Lee and the play you’ll be seeing in August!
Lee Nowell is a professional playwright, director, and actress. The productions she has directed have garnered critical acclaim, including being named one of the Top Ten Productions of the Year by the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION. Her plays have been presented by Actor’s Express (ALBATROSS; PAPER HOUSE; OBSESSION), Georgia Public Broadcasting (BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT: THE TROY DAVIS PROJECT), Horizon Theatre (BLUE ANGELS WEEKEND), 7Stages (TRUE NORTH), Ex Somnium (HOW TO SURVIVE BEING HUMAN), and Synchronicity Theatre (BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT: THE TROY DAVIS PROJECT). HOW TO SURVIVE BEING HUMAN was published by Ex Somnium. In 2024, she performed I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT THIS to sold-out houses at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern. She is also the member of a band called The Dianas. She is the recipient of two NEA Grants, and has been nominated for The List, a Jennie Award, two Suzi Bass Awards, and Best Play of the Year by Atlanta Theatre Fans. Go to www.leenowellplaywright.com to learn more.
ET: Hi Lee! Where did the inspiration for The Woman You Want to Be come from?
LN: I had heard my mom talk about how her mother trained her to be a very proper woman. With that being said, I had no idea that the instructions came from a book: The Woman You Want to Be, first published in 1938. I discovered it in my mother’s attic. Then I found a 1922 copy of Physical Beauty: How to Develop and Preserve It at my dad’s house. It was owned by my paternal grandmother. I opened one of the books and found this sage piece of advice for women: “If you wear a wig, keep it vermin-free: Wash it in gasoline.” That started it all.
ET: I love that. Could you explain how you found your way to playwriting?
LN: When I started in the theatre as an actress and director, new plays were the only genre that deeply interested me. As an actress, long ago, I started writing my own monologues to use in auditions. Then I met Phillip DePoy, the well-known playwright and novelist, at Georgia Ensemble Theatre. I had been cast in a play there, which Phillip was hired to direct. One day, he suggested that we write a play together- which we did. That play was URBAN FAIRYTALE, which premiered at Theatre in the Square. Since then, I’ve written plays on my own, experimenting with form, style, and content along the way. Ideas just seem to pop into my head, and when an idea won’t go away, it’s time for me to write a play around it.
ET: What excites you about working with Essential Theatre in particular?
LN: I love the Essential Theatre. I have worked with the Essential as a director on many new plays, and every experience has been incredibly rewarding. Performing in this festival makes me really happy. I love that audiences are looking to see new stories they’ve never seen before. We’re living in a time when the opportunity to see new plays is rare, but they are needed so deeply. The Essential is a rare jewel.
ET: What do you hope audience members will walk away with?
LN: I hope that the piece will inspire audience members to explore the energies inside of themselves. My personal belief is this: Your power is in the uniqueness of who you are. That is the biggest gift you have. It will never fade; it is eternal. The outer manifestation of that will change as you go through experiences, and what you like or don’t like will shift. But your compass will remain true. Part of that compass’s working mechanism is the interplay of energies, which include masculine and feminine energies. If every person explored, accepted, and worked with their unique energies, they would be happier, more balanced, more resilient, truer in the way they manifested in the world, more effective as human beings, more accepting and embracing of differences, and more at home in themselves, no matter where they are at any moment in their lives. I wish that for every single person on this planet.
ET: You explain that your views on the women’s rights movement have shifted as you’ve grown older. How would this play have differed if you wrote it 20 years ago?
LN: Twenty years ago, I saw more progress being made in women’s rights. At that time, I wouldn’t have felt the need to write this piece, because I felt as if we were on the right track. We certainly weren’t there yet, but it looked as if we were headed in a strong direction.
In 2016, things started to negatively shift for women’s rights. Some of the things that happened from a political perspective were so jarring and out of character for what I thought the U.S. was. It was impossible for me to understand. That was the beginning of a slow-dawning realization that progress is not permanent. My feelings on that have stratospherically increased since then. Ten years ago, I was just trying to figure out what was happening. I didn’t have the scope or understanding of what was causing these shifts. I needed to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to allow my nervous system to calm down so I could formulate a response.
ET: How is The Woman You Want To Be essential to 2026?
This will seem like it’s off-topic, but it is absolutely connected. On the topic of plays in this moment in time: The vast majority of current tv shows, movies, Broadway plays and musicals, and music are controlled and formulated by giant corporations. The vision is not from an artist: it’s from an enormous company trying to make money. In the theatre, corporations and public funding are leading theatres to choose not to present new plays. So we don’t have what generations of people before us had in moments like this: new shows, movies, plays, and music that were written by individual artists. Art that could respond to this moment, and could help us make sense of it.
I can’t think of another moment in my lifetime that has made less sense from a societal perspective. So I funneled all of my personal experiences into this play, in the brash hope that it will help me navigate it and feel that I’m doing something that is useful. A lot of audience members have been younger than I am, and a lot of them have been older. There’s something rare and powerful in having multiple generations explore this material in the same room together. I was very surprised and delighted during the first performance of the piece, when audience members started saying my lines with me-even though they’d never read the script. Apparently, the experiences that are discussed in the play are so universal that people understand that when I’m talking about me, I’m actually talking about all of us. This play is about all of us. And it took me 10 years to get to the point that I could write it.
ET: Thank you so much for your insight, Lee. We are so excited to experience this hilarious, outrageous look at feminism in the past and present.
Lee’s play, The Woman You Want To Be, is showing for two nights onlyat the Essential Theatre Play Festival on Sunday August 16th at 7pm & Thursday August 20th at 7:30. Tickets: EssentialTheatre.Tix.com
2026 Meet the Playwright interviews conducted by 2026 Literary Management Intern Olivia Smith.
