“Elizabeth Heffron is one of the friendliest playwrights you’ll ever meet. She laughs easily; and when she listens, it’s usually with the attentive, sensitive smile of an experienced mom. Pretty, relaxed, and engaged, she doesn’t seem in any way a troublemaker. But that’s only true if you haven’t seen her plays. “That’s what I was told by a literary manager I met at Hedgebrook,” she says, remembering a recent encounter at the Whidbey Island writers’ colony. “After we read one of my plays, she just looked at me and said, ‘But you seem like such a nice lady.’ ” Read the rest of the story: Seattle Weekly Fall Arts: Elizabeth Heffron. Why a local playwright wants us to consider a rigged economic system.

See the Seattle Rep Writer’s Group Spotlight: Elizabeth Heffron. Elizabeth talks about her latest work-in-progress, Portugal, that will have its first read at The Rep this Friday night. Excerpt from the Q & A:

(Portugal) is about a pair of tank farm workers, a young couple, and what happens when one of them gets “dosed” by radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation over in eastern Washington. How the company responds. How their family and co-workers respond—and ultimately how this accident changes both of them. The problems over there are so overwhelming and seemingly intractable, and yet people keep doing what they can to try and clean the place up, even in the face of massive technical problems and corporate corruption. I am drawn to this combination of both despair and hope.