Tammy Ryan - Made Local Playwright

In 1980, Molly Rush, a Pittsburgh housewife, and mother of six, walked into a G.E. plant in King of Prussia, PA and took a hammer to the nosecone of a nuclear warhead in protest of the buildup of our nuclear arsenal. She and her fellow activists, The Plowshares 8 went to trial and spent time in prison, and the world was pulled back from the brink of nuclear annihilation for the time being. Molly’s Hammer is the fictionalized play of these events told through the lens of Molly’s marriage and the competing narratives of Molly and her husband Bill, a working-class pipe draftsman whose only goal is to stop his wife from sacrificing herself to save the world. The play is inspired by the non-fiction account Hammer of Justice, by Liane Ellison Norman.

Tammy Ryan’s award-winning plays have been produced across the country and internationally. She won the 2012 Francesca Primus Prize awarded by the American Theater Critics Association for her play Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods and in 2015 two of her plays, Tar Beach and Molly’s Hammer were both nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.