ABOUT The Missoula Oblongata is the name given to the collaboration between long-time friends Donna Sellinger, Madeline ffitch and Sarah Lowry. As a company, it is committed to creating original theatre that manages to be aggressively inventive and experimental, while tipping its hat to established traditions such as clown, vaudeville, and storytelling. The Missoula Oblongata is proud to be a completely self-sufficient production company, which means that the artists who write the scripts also perform, design, build, and light the play themselves. The company provides all of their own lighting (usually desk lamps and footlights) and the actors run the lighting and sound from the stage. This technique allows the company to perform anywhere with electricity and enough space, so that besides two-hundred seat theaters and university halls, the Missoula Oblongata has also performed at a solar-powered permaculture farm in Iowa, a public park in Washington D.C, a community center in North Dakota, and a renovated post office in Illinois.

With this audaciously populist approach, the Missoula Oblongata is proud to draw on the skill-set and talents of the local community. Not only fellow theater-makers, but the roommate who welds, the neighbor who is a magician at children's parties, the cousin with tailoring expertise, and the friend who composes music for hand-manipulated reel-to-reels become resources that get tapped when it's time to build a new show.
The Missoula Oblongata grew out of Totally Realistic Productions, a company which had already completed three season-long tours, received a grant from the NEA (through the Idaho Arts Council), and performed at the Tony Award-winning Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

The Missoula Oblongata's first touring production was The Wonders of the World: Recite, a macabre coming-of-age story, taking place in a lighthouse on the last day of the world. The play toured in the summer of 2006, receiving rave reviews from critics, and standing ovations from audiences throughout The United States and Canada. As a response to the overwhelming success of 'Wonders', the play was revived for a month-long tour in the winter of 2007, during which the show played to sold-out houses in Philadelphia, Minneapolis,and the company's new home of Northampton, Massachusetts.

In October of 2006, The Missoula Oblongata created The Ghost Wedding of Arle Redfern, a full length theater piece designed for performance in people's private homes. Notable for its seamless inclusion of a delicious four-course meal, the play and the dinner party are presented to invited guests as a package evening. Originally created as a fundraiser to support main-stage productions, The Ghost Wedding of Arle Redfern has taken on a life and a following of its own, and is now performed regularly, with eager hosts booking performances far in advance.

The Missoula Oblongata strives to constantly create and recreate avenues for community invention that are as unpredictable as they are inclusive. An ongoing project that has come to be known as "The Missoula Oblongata Shakespeare Repertory Theatre" exemplifies this effort. Instigating non-traditional productions of Shakespeare's plays, this ongoing series draws on the talents and skill-sets of local artists, empowers non-artists to involve themselves in the theatre, and makes new and incredible use of public and private space.

Currently, the Missoula Oblongata is in rehearsals for their next full-scale touring production, The Most Mysterious Day of the Year—a story about feuding detective agency clans, the fall of Morse code, and reluctant carrier pigeons. For this production, the company will be joined by the musical composer Robert M. O'Brien, who will be playing the proverbial reel-to-reel.