18th Annual Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival Begins This Month

Hedgebrook announces the 18th annual Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival (HWPF), a celebration of women writing for the theatre. This May, playwrights Leanna Brodie, Dipika Guha, Karen Hartman, Julie Marie Myatt, Suzanne Vega, and Lauren Yee will join dramaturgs Liz Engelman, Anita Montgomery, and Christine Sumption for a two-week residency at the famed Whidbey Island writers retreat, capped off with public presentations of excerpts from the playwrights' latest works.

The public events of the 2015 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival take place on Sunday, May 17th at 4:00 PM at Whidbey Island Center for the Arts in Langley and on Monday, May 18th at 7:00 PM at ACT Theatre in Seattle. These events include readings of excerpts from each of the writers' latest plays and an opportunity to talk with the playwrights, their dramaturgs, and Hedgebrook's Executive Director, Amy Wheeler.

Playwrights taking part in the 2015 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival represent a wide variety of theatrical styles and dramatic voices. Leanna Brodie is working on Turbulence, a play about the conflict that erupted when the Ontario government erected thousands of wind turbines as part of its green energy plan. Dipika Guha is working on an as-yet untitled play about three generations of women who all suffer from immaculate conception. Karen Hartman is working on Roz and Ray, an emotional, political, and moral confrontation between a young father and a seasoned woman doctor during the AIDS pandemic. Julie Marie Myatt is working on The Rescued, a play set in a home filled with rescue animals-four dogs, and two cats-whose stories of incarceration sound strangely human. Suzanne Vega is working on a new musical with Duncan Sheik, Two Lectures: An Evening with Carson McCullers. Lauren Yee is working on King of the Yees, a play about legacy, obsolescence, and the great and powerful house of Yee.

Participation in the Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival is by invitation in collaboration with partner theatres from around the country. In recognition of the fact that fewer than 20% of the plays produced each year on US stages are written by women, Hedgebrook is partnering with theatres who show their commitment to women playwrights through commissions, development, and production opportunities. In this way, Hedgebrook forges opportunities for women playwrights to deepen their relationships with theatres and is becoming a major pipeline for plays by women to move from creation to development and production. Current partners include: ACT Theatre, Denver Theatre Center, the Goodman Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and the Shakespeare's Sister Fellowship.

Since the festival's inauguration in 1998, the Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival has supported the work of an impressive array of women playwrights, including Quiara Alegría Hudes (Water by the Spoonful), Lynn Nottage (Ruined), Tanya Saracho (The Tenth Muse), and many others, and has served an important role in the development of new plays by women.

For more information about Hedgebrook and the Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival, visit our website at www.hedgebrook.org.

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