This year’s ACT Ottawa Resident Director, Marilyn Pilkey, is thrilled to present four wonderful productions:  Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Charles Schulz’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland; and Neil Simon’s Star-Spangled Girl.  Pilkey’s vision involves a partnership with Ottawa USD #290.  ACT Ottawa has invited 9th grade English classes (who all read the novel) to see Mockingbird; they hope to share Charlie Brown with Ottawa Middle School students; and all the elementary schools are invited to Alice in Wonderland.

Ms. Pilkey brings a lifetime of theatre experience to the job.  Like many budding Thespians, she fell in love with acting in high school, discovered costuming as a KU grad student's wife, and began directing school plays during her first year teaching, back in 1976.  She founded Thespian troupes #3815 and #4850, winning top awards in State Festival competition and bringing her production to the International Festival at Ball State University.

On entering Canyon High in 1990, Pilkey jump-started a dormant program involving only a dozen students:  by her retirement in 2007, the program had grown to involve two full-time teachers and over two hundred students, filling ten theatre classes a day, and staging six productions and several competitions each year.   At Canyon Pilkey wrote and obtained grants for stage lighting, sound equipment, risers, and costume cabinets totaling $32,500. After building a 120-seat black-box theatre, Pilkey created the Children’s Theatre Project in which her students produced 35 fully-staged children’s classics for combined audiences of over 50,000 elementary students.  Concurrently, she produced a variety of comedies, dramas, Shakespeare plays, and original works for teen and adult audiences.

Marilyn Pilkey studied acting and directing at the American Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco), improvisation and creative dramatics at Cal. State University (Northridge), playwriting at BYU, and Shakespearean text analysis and stage movement at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA).  She is a member of the Educational Theatre Association.