From Westchester Arts September 2009:
Rosemary explains her Monstrous Love.
This is about Little Red Riding Hood, who is like so many young girls who are drawn to the dark, mysterious, dangerous…,” says Foley. “So the wolf in this play symbolizes that danger.”
“I am always interested in writing plays about people who go to the edge,” Foley said. “I do not like plays where nothing happens. I need to be engaged.”
The comic element in her plays may be from her upbringing. “We always found something funny in impossibly tragic things,” Foley said. “My mother was the greatest storyteller and told frightening stories.”
In one story, Foley's mother was being chased up a winding staircase by a shadow and when her mother reached the top, there was nowhere to go. Young Rosemary became fear-stricken, asking, “What happens next, Mom?” Her mother replied, “Then...I woke up.”
“If you've got a funny script, and it's really funny, and you take those funny lines and make them tragic, it's funnier!” Foley says.
“I think the most exciting thing about being a playwright is the tribulation, then triumph. To experience the agony going with getting your play on stage. But when you see your play on stage, you say, “That's good...who wrote that?”
“I don't write at special hours, or use special pens, or need privacy,” she adds. “I write on anything, because my mind never stops.”
“The brain writes when it wants to write, and it needs time soaking in the tub or staring into space. I have never believed in writer's block because it's just a writer's pause, not a block.”
“I let my characters do whatever they want, but I keep asking them, 'What is it that you want? And how far would you go to get it? And what's the one thing stopping you from getting it?'
“And whatever it is, Rosemary Foley will make it even harder for her character to get it.
From The N.Y. Times February 1990
ALICE and Biff and Mimi and Randall are two married couples in ''I'm Sorry, I'm Sorry,'' a one-act play by Rosemary Foley of Pelham that just won first prize in an international competition.
When Biff scolds her for forgetting to pick up his suit from the drycleaners, ''Alice, to keep her sanity, takes a rifle and blows her husband's brains right out,'' Mrs. Foley said about the opening scene in her play.'
"But there's a balance,'' the playwright pointed out. ''In the other marriage, it's Randall who kills Mimi. She has never known the place of a period in a sentence. She just runs on mindlessly, endlessly. Her optimism is neurotic, her cheerfulness so abundant it casts gloom wherever she goes. So that drives him to smother her with a pillow.''
Mrs. Foley's play, which she described as ''a murder non-mystery about the difficult state of matrimony'' won the first prize out of more than 800 submissions in an international competition held by the University of Cincinnati. The prize brought a fully-staged production of the play this month at the Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati, a co-sponsor of the contest.
From "I’m Sorry, I’m Sorry"
CORINTH: Where are you going?
ALICE: Turn myself in.
CORINTH: Oh, Alice, stop being a Presbyterian. We’ve got to get rid of the body.
(From the International Festival of New Works, first-prize winner, 1990)