There is a new play titled Conshohocken McFaddens, which tells the story of Anna and George McFadden who met and got married in the borough in 1919. The couple are the grandparents of author Lynn Aylward, who spent five formative years in Conshy until the age of 10 in the first half of the 1960s.
About the play:
Anna and George McFadden meet and marry in 1919 in a small mill town outside Philadelphia, as the country emerges from the devastation of the “war to end all wars” and history’s deadliest epidemic. They struggle to survive and stay true to their values as the Great Depression, another epidemic (polio) and a second world war endlessly thwart Anna’s dreams. Will Anna and George’s beliefs keep them afloat in a world of change and challenge, or sink them? The play invites audiences to re-visit the struggle between what’s good for the family versus the hopes and dreams of its individual members, in an era — 1919 to 1959– that bears resemblance to the present one, with its existential and economic crises.
Back in her youth, Aylward lived on East Seventh Avenue and went to Saint Matthew’s Elementary School. Her father grew up on an upper avenue (either at 310 West 10th or 310 West 11th). Her grandmother, Anna, grew up in Conshohocken as well and her father was a milkman. Family lore is that her grandfather’s family had the first motorcar in the borough. You can find many of the characters featured in the play buried at Saint Matthew’s Cemetery at Butler Pike and North Lane.
Lynn Aylward is an emerging playwright who recently moved from San Francisco via Scotland to New Jersey. She was a long-time member of the Writers Pool at Playground in San Francisco and her short plays have been produced in California, Florida and New York. Her full-length plays have been semi-finalists in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the City Lights Theatre (San Jose) Festival. She taught playwriting for Rising Voices, a theater group for incarcerated women in Oakland and is a co-founder of Same Boat Theater, an eco-justice performance group. Her play “Three Chords and the Truth” was in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2021.
Last week, the Conshohocken McFaddens had a staged reading as part of new play series at The Theater Project’s Playwrights’ Workshop in New Jersey.
Image – The Theater Project