The League of Professional Theatre Women held its second annual Awards Celebration & Big Mingle on Monday evening at the Pershing Square Signature Center on 42nd St. in Manhattan. Actress Kathleen Chalfant received the Lifetime Achievement Award, one of five honors presented in a ceremony hosted by Kristine Nielsen. The League of Professional Theatre Women, a nonprofit organization, advocates for greater visibility and opportunities for female theater artists.
The other 2015 award recipients were scenic designer Donyale Werle, music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell, director Rachel Dickstein and actress/playwright/producer Sandra A. Daley-Sharif. Monday's event took place at the home of off-Broadway's Signature Theatre, whose executive director, Erika Mallin, is an LPTW member. The Big Mingle, the cocktail party that followed the awards presentation, was held in Signature's Frank Gehry-designed lobby cafe. LPTW's next event is a roundtable discussion on "Writing Plays By, For, or About Women," with playwrights inlcuding Kara Lee Corthron and Jenny Lyn Bader, next Monday, March 23, at TheaterLab in midtown. Click here for more information.
Host Kristine Nielsen is fresh off the Broadway revival of You Can't Take It With You.
All the award winners and presenters on stage before the show began
"I want to acknowledge the sparkling awardees and presenters with whom I get to share the stage this evening. It's a treat and an honor," Nielsen said in kicking off the ceremony.
Nielsen directed the audience's eyes upward at the floral decoration for the event, which was actually part of the set of Big Love, the Charles Mee play that had just wrapped up its run at Signature the day before.Musical director and arranger Mary-Mitchell Campbell, founder of Artists Striving to End Poverty (ASTEP), received the Lee Reynolds Award, given for work that illuminates theater's potential for social, cultural or political change. In presenting the award, her friend Dick Scanlan (left) stated: "Mary-Mitchell recognized that there are a lot of people in our industry who have all the talent and technique they need to express themselves but sometimes not a lot to say beyond the next gig, and she also believed that there are children all over the world who have a lot to say but lack the tools they need to say it--lack even the awareness that they deserve to be heard." ASTEP's programs for underserved communities in the U.S. and abroad use the arts to awaken young people's imaginations and improve their life skills, critical thinking and health education.
Before presenting the award, Scanlan noted, "The last time I was the only male on stage, I was 4 years old, playing the Queen of Hearts' son in a production of Alice in Wonderland at the Ursuline Academy school for girls." Scanlan, the lyricist of Thoroughly Modern Millie, is cowriter and codirector of Whorl Inside a Loop, a new show starring Sherie Rene Scott that opens at Second Stage this summer. He called Campbell's work with ASTEP "superheroic."
Campbell, musical director of the soon-to-open Finding Neverland and a two-time Drama Desk Award nominee for orchestrations, told the audience about an ASTEP project in India, creating a brand-new musical with children who live in slums. In the show, which has toured the country, "the protagonist was a little girl who saves the world," Campbell said, "and in a country where women are not equal and where girls' education is a fight and girls are told they're not equal to their brothers, to do a show featuring a little girl saving the world was a pretty powerful experience."
Scenic designer Anna Louizos (left) presented the Ruth Morley Design Award to her former student and assistant Donyale Werle, a Tony winner for Peter and the Starcatcher currently represented off-Broadway with Brooklynite at the Vineyard Theatre. Werle, who recalled that when she moved to New York she had no set-design experience and had never seen a Broadway show, said her career resulted from "a pattern of women opening their doors and letting me kind of crawl in, and then learning." She added: "I went to grad school, but where I really learned was in Anna's studio." Louizos is a previous winner of the Morley award.
Ellen McLaughlin (left) presented the LPTW Lucille Lortel Award to Rachel Dickstein, artistic director of Ripe Time, which won a 2014 Obie for its production of The World Is Round, a Gertrude Stein adaptation conceived, written and directed by Dickstein. The Lortel Award comes with a monetary grant for an emerging artist who shows creative promise. McLaughlin collaborated with Dickstein on 2011's Septimus and Clarissa, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway.
Referencing her role as Woolf's iconic party-thrower Clarissa Dalloway, McLaughlin said that as a theater artist Dickstein "does what any good hostess does...let them think, let them be charmed, engaged, unsettled but never bored." Best known for originating the role of the Angel in Angels in America, McLaughlin is also a playwright who won the 1987 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for A Narrow Bed.
Sandra A. Daley-Sharif received the Josephine Abady Award, recognizing a producer or director of work of cultural diversity. She won an Obie last year for 48 Hours in Harlem, a festival of African-American theater, and is also the founder and producing artistic director of Liberation Theatre Company as well as an actor, playwright and dramaturge.
"The role of theater is not just simply about entertainment, it's about education," Dael Orlandersmith said in presenting the Josephine Abady Award. "It's about us looking at ourselves and giving ourselves permission to go to places that are darker and unsure, because we all share in that and it's something we all need to do." In Daley-Sharif's work, "every part of our own experience is laid out before us," said Orlandersmith.
"The idea that I should be given an award for achievement...is astounding to me, because the weight of achievement on this stage and in this room is astounding," said Lifetime Achievement honoree Kathleen Chalfant. LPTW founder Julia Miles (who also founded the Women's Project Theater) was "one of my mentors," said Chalfant. "I'm a person who has been gifted with the most extraordinary luck...and the most extraordinary friendships and collaborations," the actress remarked. "This enterprise that we're engaged in is wonderful, important, dangerous and worthy of every cent we can give to it. I'm so grateful to be part of it."
Playwright Sybille Pearson, who wrote the books for the musicals Giant and Baby, presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Chalfant--"a really wondrous creature to watch on stage." But Pearson wanted to "tell you about the person you may not read about in a Playbill bio": a Phi Beta Kappa classics graduate of Stanford, mother of two and grandmother of three, and board member of theaters and arts organizations. "Her activism is not confined only to theater," Pearson said of Chalfant. "She also volunteers for Doctors Without Borders and Candles for Clemency and SHARE, a support group for women with cancer. She can also be found on the street protesting against war, against poverty, against nuclear weapons, to name a few."
Chalfant was honored for her stage and screen acting and also her activism and humanity. Paying tribute to her, Pearson said: "In the early '80s, when AIDS was a very misunderstood disease that many believed you would catch from sitting in the same room as someone who had contracted it, Kathy was more than a visitor; she was referred to as 'the day shift' at Roosevelt Hospital. She was an early volunteer for God's Love We Deliver." To this day, "what she feels is needed to be done, Kathy is out there doing it. Her pace is so relentless."Best friends Pearson and Chalfant met as the mothers of elementary schoolers in the 1970s. They vacation together in Italy every year.
