Hedgebrook and WICA Present The Women Playwrights Festival 5/16

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and Hedgebrook present THE WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL at WICA, 565 Camano Avenue, on Sunday, May 16 at 4.00pm.

The Women Playwrights Festival was founded in 1998 to nurture and support the work of women playwrights. Playwrights are selected from a group of highly accomplished writers nominated by a national committee.

The festival invites the writers to a residency at Hedgebrook for further work on their new plays and presents public readings.

This year, Hedgebrook and WICA are proud to welcome Danai Gurira, Sherry Kramer, Lenelle Moïse, and Sarah Treem.
Following their Hedgebrook residencies, the playwrights will spend the summer to continue working on their plays. In the last week of August, the writers will reconvene in NYC, where in collaboration with NYU-Tisch School of the Arts and The Public Theatre, they will be joined by directors and actors for a week of rehearsals that will culminate in a weekend of public readings of all four plays to have emerged from this year's Festival. (August 28 and 29, 2010)

A list of alumnae of the Women Playwrights Festival reads like a Who's Who of contemporary women playwrights, including Tanya Barfield (Blue Door), Julia Cho (The Language Archive), Lynn Nottage (Ruined), Theresa Rebeck (The Understudy), Sarah Ruhl (Dead Man's Cell Phone), Kathleen Tolan (Memory House), and many more.
Tickets are $5 and available at www.WICAonline.com or 360.221.8268 - 800/638.7631. 

The Playwrights.

Danai Gurira is a playwright and actor. Eclipsed explores Liberian women's stories during the civil war and received premiere productions at the Wooly Mammoth, Center Theater Group and Yale Repertory Theater. She co-created and performed in the award-winning two-woman play In the Continuum, which premiered off-Broadway and toured the U.S. and Southern Africa. For her work on that production, Danai won a 2006 Obie Award, the 2006 Outer Critics John Gassner Award, and the 2004 Global Tolerance' Award (Friends of the United Nations), in addition to being honored by the Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2007, she received a Helen Hayes Award for Best Lead Actress in In the Continuum at Woolly Mammoth. Danai most recently starred in the acclaimed film The Visitor (with Oscar-nominated actor Richard Jenkins) and on Broadway in Lincoln Center Theater's production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone. She is also featured in films "3 Backyards" (Sundance 2010), "My Soul to Keep" (Wes Craven, April 2010) and "Restless City". She has appeared in TV shows "Law and Order", "Life on Mars", "Lie to Me", and "Law and Order CI". She is the recipient of '08 TCG New Generations travel grant for Eclipsed with the McCarter Theater and has taught playwriting and acting in Liberia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. She is developing a play about current day Zimbabwe where she travels in April 2010 with the help of another TCG grant and the McCarter Theater. She is currently completing a historical Zimbabwean piece entitled The Convert (a commission with CTG). These plays comprise parts of a trilogy on Zimbabwe's coming of age from a feminine perspective. She received her MFA from the Graduate Acting Department at NYU Tisch Institute of Performing Arts. Danai was born in the US to Zimbabwean parents and raised in Zimbabwe.

Her play.
The Convert takes place in present day Zimbabwe in 1896: a young girl escapes a polygamous marriage to become the newest convert to a stalwart black Catholic. Her gratitude and devotion to her new faith is complicated by the culture and family she loves -- but finds herself disassociating from them. As a civil uprising against coloniAl White rule emerges on which side of the conflict will she find herself?
Sherry Kramer's work has been seen at theaters across the country and abroad, including the Humana Festival at The Actors Theatre of Louisville, InterAct Theatre, Yale Repertory Theater, Soho Rep, Ensemble Studio Theater, New York's Second Stage, The Woolly Mammoth, The Tokyo International Arts Festival, and The Theater of the First Amendment. She is a recipient of NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Playwriting Award and a New York Drama League Award (What a Man Weighs), the LA Women in Theater New Play Award (The Wall of Water), The Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (David's Redhaired Death), and a commission from A.S.K. (The Mad Master). Other plays include When Something Wonderful Ends, Things that Break, About Spontaneous Combustion, The Master and Margarita (music theatre adaptation with composer Margaret Pine), The Release of a Live Performance, Partial Objects, The World at Absolute Zero, Hold for Three, Before and After, The Long Arms of Jupiter, The Ruling Passion, The Law Makes Evening Fall, and The Bay of Fundy: An Adaptation of One Line from The Mayor of Casterbridge. She was the first national member of New Dramatists, and teaches playwriting at Bennington College, and in the MFA programs of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.
Her play.
A Thing of Beauty is a play about beauty, and that means it's a play about time. In a world where the culture spends defines heaven as looking 29 years old her entire life, is it a woman's duty to give in gracefully or fight the paradigm bravely? Of course, when you go about time bending, you're in a science fiction play, and so A Thing of Beauty takes place in the near future, as time itself is about to end, and three friends find themselves on the brink of forever. A play about the way women measure our time on earth, on how we do the calculus of our value.

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Lenelle Moïse is a Haitian-American poet, playwright, vox musician, and nationally-touring performance artist. Equipped with an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College, she creates politicized texts about identity, immigration, spirituality, and the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality. Moïse regularly performs and leads workshops at colleges and conferences throughout the United States. She has performed in venues as diverse as the Omega Institute, the Louisiana Superdome, and the United Nations. Her writing is featured in several anthologies, including: Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution and We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists. Her essays have been published in Utne Reader, MakeShift Magazine, the legendary OurChart.com and Velvetpark Magazine. Lenelle also co-wrote the award-winning feature film "Sexual Dependency". Her critically acclaimed play Expatriate was produced Off-Broadway at the Culture Project in 2008. Curve Magazine calls her work "piercing, covering territory both intimate and political... vivid and powerful."
Her play.
Eclipse follows Mona, a prodigious fiction writer, struggling to thrive in a prestigious MFA program in which she is the department's only student of color. When she befriends Professor Emeritus Dr. Sive, a depressed divorcee, also African-American, their mutual trust spirals into sex, scandal, and chaos. The pair is called to strike a balance between attachment and propriety, power and love, desire and professionalism. Eclipse explores race relations, academia, and isolation.
Sarah Treem has lived up and down the eastern seaboard, but no one place for too long. She always wanted to be a playwright, which was strange in a family of doctors. Her play A Feminine Ending premiered at Playwrights Horizons in the fall of 2007, went on to productions at South Coast Repertory and Portland Center Stage, and was published by Samuel French. Her other plays include: Human Voices (Manhattan Theater Club's Springboard New Play series, New York Stage and Film), Empty Sky (South Coast's Pacific Playwrights Festival, winner of the Reva Shiner Playwriting award), Mirror Mirror (developed at Playwrights Horizons, Ars Nova), and Against the Wall (Source Theatre, DC; Friends of the Italian Opera, Berlin). Sarah's latest plays include Vienna's Amazing (Ojai Playwriting Conference) and Orphan Island (Sundance Theater Lab). She has taught playwriting at Yale, where she earned her BA and MFA. She is also producer on the HBO drama "In Treatment," and she's currently writing a romantic comedy for Miramax.

Her play.
As Rues Go [Working Title] Etienne is a 16 year-old living in occupied Provence during the Second World War, waiting for something to happen. And happen it does in the form of a Leo, a 24-year-old American soldier who she discovers one morning sleeping in her barn. Half a century later, Leo's granddaughter, Samantha, 29, is teaching French in a small southern town and wondering what makes a life worth living. She comes across a box of letters. It will be a play about love and language. Where do words come from? Are they simply signifiers of something ineffable? Or are they themselves creationists?