Women's Project Increases Main Stage Production Next Season, Announces Two World Premieres

Women's Project, the 32-year-old non-profit theater dedicated to producing plays written and directed by women, will increase main stage production next season by 50%. The theater's board of directors authorized Julie Crosby, producing artistic director, to increase main stage productions from two to three at The company's Julia Miles Theater on West 55th Street.

Women's Project is now on solid financial footing after stumbling earlier in the decade and in spite of the economic downturn that has resulted in cuts to many other theater companies' programming.

Emboldened after two of its most successful seasons in recent history (Freshwater, Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, crooked, Sand), Women's Project has scheduled two world premieres: Or, by Liz Duffy Adams, directed by Wendy McClellan, is a comedy about Aphra Behn getting out of the spy trade and into show biz . Or, runs October 29 through November 22 and is followed by Smudge by a staff writer of NBC's "Parks & Recreation" and former Jon Stewart "Daily Show" staff writer Rachel Axler, directed by Pam MacKinnon. Smudge is a dark comedy in which a hopeful young couple gives birth to a smudge. Smudge runs January 3 through February 7.

Q&As with the playwrights are at www.womensproject.org/on_our_stage.htm.

Women's Project third main stage production will run in April - May 2010. Ms. Crosby is ecstatic about the rich array of plays by women from which to choose and will announce the title and creative team for the season's final offering later this summer.

"I'm grateful to the board for finding the funds to increase production and provide women theater artists with the opportunities they deserve," Ms. Crosby said. "I'd do a fourth production if someone wants to write a check. Hint, hint."

Single are $52.00 and are on sale now at www.Telecharge.com or 212.239.6200. Member Tickets $15.00 at membership@womensproject.org or 212.765.2105. For groups of nine or more, tickets are $25.00 at membership@womensproject.org or 212.765.2105

World Premiere
Or by Liz Duffy Adams, directed by Wendy McClellan
October 29 - November 22 at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street
Designed by Jennifer Moeller (sets), Andrea Lauer (costumes), Deb Sullivan (lights), and Elizabeth Rhodes (sound).

Aphra Behn is getting out of the spy trade and into show biz, if she can only write her play without interruptions from her love life - celebrity Nell Gwynne, King Charles II, and double-agent William Scott, among others. While war rages and Aphra and her friends celebrate free love, cross-dressing and pastoral lyricism, the 1660s start to look a lot like the 1960s. Verse or prose, now or then, love or death... and a lot of kissing.

Playwright Liz Duffy Adams is a WP Lab alumna, a New Dramatists alumna (2001-2008) and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award, a Will Glickman Award, a Frederick Loewe Award in Music Theatre, a Weston Playhouse Music Theater Award, and a commission from Children's Theater Company, Minneapolis. Her work has been written, produced, or developed at the Humana Festival, Portland Center Stage, Portland Stage Company, Syracuse Stage, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, New Georges, Shotgun Players, Moxie Theater, Clubbed Thumb, and Crowded Fire Theater among other organizations. Publications include Poodle With Guitar And Dark Glasses in Applause's "Best American Short Plays 2000-2001," numerous short plays and monologues in anthologies from Heinemann and Smith & Kraus, and several plays published by Playscripts, Inc. Adams was profiled in American Theatre magazine's December 2004 issue. BFA: NYU's Experimental Theater Wing; MFA: Yale School of Drama.

Wendy McClellan is a WP Lab member and a New York-based director who has developed and directed new American plays in New York and across the country. Her world premiere credits include Deborah Stein's Wallflower (Stages Repertory Theatre, Houston), Laurie Brook's Brave No World (The Kennedy Center), Jennifer Maisel's Birds (Rorschach Theatre, DC) and Goody f-ing Two-Shoes (Actors Theatre of Louisville). Developmental work in New York includes directing the Loewe Award Workshops of two new musicals at New Dramatists. The first, Liz Duffy Adams and John Hodian's The Listener of Junk City, is a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, rock-opera. The second, Runway 69 by Erin Kamler and Carson Kreitzer, is a Chicago-in-the-making about the "clean up" of Times Square in the mid-90's. Also at New Dramatists, she developed Sarah Hammond's House on Stilts and Liz Duffy Adams's Or. With Mabou Mines Suite she directed the workshop of Julia Pearlstein's commedia play Rat Bastards, and with New Georges she led a workshop of Olga Humphrey's restoration farce Cornbury, among others. She directed Sarah Hammond's Green Girl in 2008's SPF at The Public.

World Premiere
Smudge
By Rachel Axler, directed by Pam MacKinnon
January 3 - February 7 at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street

The world premiere of a dark comedy about the changing face of the American family and the limits of love and cheesecake, as a hopeful young couple gives birth to a smudge.

Rachel Axler is a playwright and Emmy-winning television writer. Her play, Archaeology, premiered at The Kitchen Theatre in 2009. Other plays of hers have been developed through The Lark Play Development Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Playwrights Foundation and the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. Rachel has held fellowships at The Dramatists Guild and The Lark, and is currently working on commissioned plays for South Coast Rep and Lincoln Center Theater. Humor pieces of hers have been published in The New York Times, In Character and two editions of Monologues for Women, By Women. For television, Rachel wrote for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for several years, where she received the 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program and three Writers Guild Award nominations. She now writes for Parks and Recreation on NBC. Rachel received her BA from Williams College and her MFA in Playwriting from UCSD. Member: Dramatists Guild, Writers Guild of America.

Pam MacKinnon most recently directed world premieres of Jason Grote's Maria/Stuart (Woolly Mammoth) and Richard Greenberg's Our Mother's Brief Affair (South Coast Rep); productions of Adrian Hall's adaptation of Penn Warren's All The King's Men (Intiman), Lanford Wilson's Burn This (Juilliard) and Richard Dresser's Below the Belt (ACT-Seattle). She also continued her long-standing collaboration with Edward Albee directing A Delicate Balance (Arena Stage). New York productions include Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry (Second Stage); Edward Albee's Occupant (Signature); Itamar Moses' The Four of Us (MTC); Itamar Moses' Bach at Leipzig (NYTW); Sheri Wilner's Father Joy (SPF), John Fugelsang's All the Wrong Reasons (NYTW); Adam Bock's Medea Eats (Clubbed Thumb), Gina Gionfriddo's U.S. Drag (Clubbed Thumb) and Erin Courtney's Alice the Magnet (Clubbed Thumb). Other recent productions include the premiere of Roberto Aguire Sacasa's Good Boys and True (Steppenwolf), Bruce Norris' The Unmentionables (Woolly Mammoth), David Mamet's Romance (Goodman), Edward Albee's The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? (Alley and Vienna), Edward Albee's Play About The Baby (Philadelphia and Goodman) and Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest (Juilliard). She is currently in preproduction for three world premiere productions in New York: Cusi Cram's A Lifetime Burning (Primary Stages) with Jennifer Westfeldt; and Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park (Playwrights Horizons) as well as a production of John Patrick Shanley's Savage in Limbo (Juilliard). Pam is an Affliated Artist with Clubbed Thumb, a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect and a Drama League alumna.

The third Women's Project mainstage production will be announced later this summer and will run April - May 2010.

Also on Women's Project's agenda is a Hothouse workshop production of Talk Soon by Joy Tomasko, directed by Meiyin Wang with choreography by Martha Mason and new media visual design by Wendy Richmond. It will perform in March 2010.

Hothouse is a development series for new works created by Women's Project Lab Artists. Commissioned by Women's Project with the support of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Talk Soon is a multi-disciplinary performance piece that examines how people connect distances and establish identity in the digital age. In both the natural and the digital worlds, the story follows the accidental death of a woman and her online afterlife.

Women's Project (WP) produces theater created by women, providing a forum for women's perspectives on political, social, and cultural topics. Now under the direction of Producing Artistic Director Julie Crosby, WP was founded in 1978 by Julia Miles to address the conspicuous under-representation of women theater artists in the professional theater. During its 32 years, countless artists have achieved significant recognition through WP productions, including Anne Bogart, Eve Ensler, Maria Irene Fornes, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Leigh Silverman, and Anna Deavere Smith, among the many. WP has staged over 600 mainstage productions and developmental projects, and published ten anthologies of plays by women. In 1998, WP purchased a historic off-Broadway venue on Manhattan's West 55th Street, making WP the first and only women's theater company to hold the keys to its own stage.