Ohio State theater professor Maureen Ryan thrives on contradictions.

She specializes in a style of theater called Brechtian, or epic theater. Named for one of its founders, playwright Bertolt Brecht, it emphasizes contradiction to force an audience to think about the play and the actions on stage, she says.

The epitome of the quirky artist, her eyes glow with intensity when she leans forward at certain points during the interview to hammer home a point about aesthetic distance or the lesson of a Chekhov play.

But she can also be found out on the putting green if it’s a nice day.
And when she was younger, before a bad knee grounded her, she was as likely to be found on the softball diamond as in a drama club meeting.

She has taught at OSU for eight years, where she is now head of the acting and directing program for the theater department.

But her most powerful moment in the theater came not on the stage, but in a prison, she says, where she helped a group of inmates write and perform a play.

Her life seems to mirror her favorite style of theater. The point, she says of Brechtian theater, is not about resolving the contradictions, but embracing them.

Ryan, who prefers to go by Mo, a shortening of her first name, also teaches acting and directing for undergraduate and graduate students.

Learning how to do both is all about practice, she says, like a new construction worker handed a hammer and nails for the first time.

Brechtian theater, her specialty, poses its own challenges, she says.

“It’s often a theater that has a very strong social or political viewpoint. And it’s a theater that very planned and purposefully poses the audience with contradiction,” she says.

It doesn’t attempt to resolve the contradiction, she says, it merely puts it in front of the audience to grapple with it.

“Some plays want you to just sit back and become totally immersed in the situation, go along for the emotional ride,” she says.

But in epic theater, “something will happen on that stage … something that makes you go, ‘Wait a minute, that doesn’t add up. I need to think about that.'”

One of the ways to do that is to have actors “manipulate the aesthetic distance,” she says, a theater professor’s way of describing the moment when an actor turns to the audience and speaks directly to them. “It’s not just enough for you to sit and watch it,” she says; the audience becomes a participant.

She will use Brechtian flourishes when she directs Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” later this quarter. The play, about what happens to people trapped by their memories, is traditionally staged and performed in a realist manner, but Ryan’s interpretation will be more dream-like.

Her love of acting, of being someone else, has been with her as long as she can remember, she says.

When she was nine, her parents bought her a disguise kit.

“It had ridiculous things in it,” she says. The Groucho Marx glasses were her favorite, but there were also scarves and costume jewelry.
They were “things that you could turn yourself into someone else … into characters,” she said.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in 1981 and her master’s degree from Indiana University in 1990. She did stints at theater companies in Fort Wayne, Ind. and Chicago, among others.

After returning to Ohio in 1997, she guest directed and guest lectured for OSU before joining the faculty in 2002.

The broadest definition of theater, she says, only requires someone doing something and an audience to watch. And although OSU might be better known for what happens in Ohio Stadium rather than happens on its stages, Ryan sees a connection between the two.

“Theater is everywhere,” she says. “Go to an OSU football game; that’s theater.”

That broad definition has led to some unconventional theater experiences.

A few years ago, the theater department received an unusual request: a group of inmates at the Ross County Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio, wanted to write a play, and the warden wanted to know if someone could come in and help them.

Ryan thought it would be a quick crash-course lesson, she says.

But at the end of the first day, after working with 16 male inmates, one of the men sitting in the first row, looked up at her and asked, “So Mo, you’re coming back, right?”

She couldn’t say no, she says. And the one-time lesson turned into three years.

Although the plays were about fictional characters, “they had to face the truth of their experiences to write those plays honestly,” she says. They also incorporated what they had learned in victims awareness workshops.

“I don’t know your experience,” she says she told them after reviewing their scripts. “I don’t know how you could, in that instance, pull that trigger … I don’t know how that happens. And what this play needs to do is make that person who’s watching it understand where that comes from, what that’s about.”

The first performance the men did was for prison officials and social workers.

“These guys were scared out of their minds,” she says, “and I was scared out of my mind, thinking ‘oh my God, how is this going to go today?'”

In writing about her experiences, she described the standing ovation “the prison elite” gave to the inmates after that first performance. And in the question-and-answer session afterward, the inmates “who were usually nothing more than a prison number to this particular audience were transformed into men of achievement, and a genuine dialogue took place,” she wrote.

“That’s my most amazing day in the theater I ever had,” she says.

Mo Ryan’s latest show, “Three Sisters,” opens May 13 at the Roy Bowen Theatre. For more information visit theater.osu.edu.