Theresa Rebeck, Committee for Recognizing Women in Theatre, & More to Present 4th Annual Lilly Awards at Playwrights Horizons, 6/3

On June 3, 2013 Julia Jordan, Theresa Rebeck, Marsha Norman, Tim Sanford and The Committee for Recognizing Women in Theatre will present the 4th Annual Lilly Awards at Playwrights Horizons. Named for playwright Lillian Hellman, The Lilly Awards were created to recognize the extraordinary contributions made by women to the American Theater. Producers, playwrights, actors, designers, and directors will be honored for their continued excellence in the theater community.

"Several years ago, a group of artists came together to address a growing concern that truly brilliant work by women actors, writers, directors and designers was being overlooked by theater awards committees. The Lillies were formed to address the real need to honor these artists and recognize, as a community, what they have accomplished. We hope that one day the other awards committees will figure out why their selection process excludes women. Until then, we celebrate the Lillies, and the women they honor. Once again the girls have rocked it this year," said Theresa Rebeck.

Receiving lifetime achievement awards this year are actress Lois Smith and founder of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Mimi Kilgore. Ms. Smith will receive her Lifetime Achievement award from Terry Kinney and Ms. Kilgore will receive her award from Alex Kilgore who is her son. This year's honorees include Jessica Hecht, Jill Du Boff, Paula Vogel, Julie Crosby, Laura Marks, Tanya Barfield, and Lear deBessonet. They will also celebrate Jiehae Park for winning the Leah Ryan Prize and architect Denise Scott Brown, will be honored with a Lilly Award. The winners will be presented with their awards by the likes of Sarah Ruhl, Marsha Norman, Lisa Kron, Theresa Rebeck, Leigh Silverman, Terry Kinney, Neena Beber, David Van Tieghem, Mandy Greenfield, Alex Kilgore, Cusi Cram and other surprise guests.

Denise Scott Brown is one of the founders post modern architecture and was famously denied a Pritzker Prize due to her gender. Denise Scott Brown and her husband worked as a team. The year was 1991 and the foundation declared that they only gave awards to individual architects, ignoring the fact that they had honored all male team three years prior. A Change.org campaign has been started in an attempt to rectify the shocking oversight. As these sorts of stories are myriad in all art forms, Ms. Scott Brown is being honored by the Lillies for standing up and demanding that the artistic contributions of women be recognized and not be attributed to others or ignored.

In 1978, Mimi Kilgore founded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize to honor women writers and as a tribute to her sister. It is given annually to recognize women who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. The Prize is administered in Houston, London and New York by a board of directors who choose six Judges each year, three from each side of the Atlantic. The Prize currently awards $50,000 annually to the Finalists. Mimi has cultivated a community of strong women writers, five of which have gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Lois Smith studied acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors' Studio. She is a two-time Tony-nominee for her work in Steppenwolf's Buried Child and The Grapes of Wrath. She is an ensemble member of Steppenwolf. She made her Broadway debut in 1952 in the comedy Time out for Ginger, other Broadway credits include: The Iceman Cometh (1973) and Orpheus Descending (1957). In 2006, she won a Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Obie, and Lucille Lortel Awards for her performance in The Trip To Bountiful (Signature). Other recent NYC theater credits include Heartless (Sam Shepherd, Signature), After the Revolution (Amy Herzog, Playwright's Horizons), and The Illusion (Tony Kushner, Signature).

Ms. Smith made her film debut in 1955 East of Eden opposite James Dean, and appeared in such seminal films as Five Easy Pieces (National Society of Film Critics Award), Fried Green Tomatoes, The Pledge, Minority Report, Twister, How to Make an American Quilt, Fatal Attraction, Next Stop Greenwich Village, and Dead Man Walking. Her TV credits include: soap operas (Another World, Somerset, The Edge of Night, All My Children, One Life to Live), prime-time dramas (The Defenders, Dr. Kildare, Route 66, thirtysomething, The Practice, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Desperate Housewives, ER, Grey's Anatomy, Cold Case and True Blood), and sitcoms (Just Shoot Me!and Frasier). Her career has spanned five decades working continuously in theater, film and television and is still going strong.

The Lilly Awards and The Committee for Recognizing Women in Theater were founded in 2010. Their mission is "to celebrate the work of outstanding, successful and up-and-coming women playwrights, directors, designers and advocates for the work of women in the theater."

Photo by Walter McBride