"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed                self was another."  ― Toni Morrison, Beloved

      "I am unable to proofread my own work."  Marlea Evans

​        Marlea Evans lived many lives in several different time zones, collecting fast friends and excruciating failures. But, she knew, or believed, from a premonition felt on an Oklahoma prairie, that some “great thing” was going to happen to her, for which she must stay free  (like Henry James's Marcher).  She was a Navy wife and French teacher in Oklahoma; she became an actor/ singer/ teacher in Philadelphia, changed her name to Marlea when joining the Screen Actor’s Guild in New York City. She worked as a waitress and a proofreader to support acting, off off and off-Broadway, then in Los Angeles she became a playwright, a documentary filmmaker and a writer of stories and scripts.
         With the Women Artists Group of Los Angeles, she performed her short stories in venues all over the city; the journal Women’s Studies at Claremont College published her short story,“Belief.” A performance theater piece that began as a dialogue with music and lyrics for two choirs, Women in the Kitchen and Five Uncles, became her play, Lone Wolf Rhapsody, which was produced at LATC and won an LA Weekly award for Best Music Written for a Play (shared with composer John Ballinger).
            Inappropriately Yours, a novelized version of her ongoing affair and marriage, chronicles her ability to tame “the beast in the jungle” (unlike Henry James’s Marcher) and to accept imperfect love as the “great thing” that would happen to her. Or, was it?  She is currently adapting the stories of Inappropriately Yours, ongoing episodes in the lives of sparring partners Gus and Mona Lee.
​       She has been a volunteer for Wonder of Reading, for many years with the Motion Picture and Television Fund, and she will probably be donating her documentary, The Plan Is Workin', Project Montgomery, to the Montgomery family.  Or will she?

​“I have always wanted to be free. I don’t know why. Nor do I know what it means, to be free. If you were to pull all my nails out, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But although I can’t put it in words, I do know what it is. I have always desired it. I still desire it. That’s all I desire. At first I was a prisoner of other people. So I left them. Then I was the prisoner of myself. That was worse. So I left myself.”  Samuel Beckett. Elutheria