Parity Productions Announces 2024 Development Award Winners

Parity Productions, the New York based theatre company dedicated to producing new work by women, trans, and gender-expansive playwrights and filling at least 80% of the creative positions (playwrights, directors, and designers) with women, trans, and gender-expansive artists, has awarded its 15th and 16th annual Development Award to Paloma Monfiletto for My Mother the Sun and Mallory Jane Weiss for Lights Out and Away We Go. 

The ceremony took place on Thursday, October 24th in person at the Helen Mills Theater and Event Space. The awards were presented by 2023 Development Award Winner Reid Pope and in a video recording by Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus. Scenes were performed from My Mother the Sun and Lights Out and Away We Go, as well as scenes from 2023 Development Award Winner Cayenne Douglass' Some Body Will Pay and Reid Pope's Biology Play. Guests were treated to a musical performance by Brooklyn based Poet/Musician/Actor Tsebiyah Mishael Derry.

Each year, Parity awards two women, trans, or gender-expansive playwrights who have demonstrated a singular talent for storytelling. The selected playwrights receive $2,500 each, extensive development support from Parity, including at least one public reading, with an option for Parity to produce their work. 

“We are absolutely thrilled to be awarding the 15th and 16th Parity Development Awards to two such amazing writers,” says Parity Founder and Artistic Director, Ludovica Villar-Hauser. “We look forward to diving into these two extraordinary works that function so beautifully in harmony with our mission. We are beyond grateful this year, which is so challenging for so many, to be able to shed light on all the good these artists put into the world with their plays.”  

My Mother the Sun follows Solana, who enlists the help of a migrant aid worker after her estranged mother is lost while crossing the US-Mexico Border,. While they search, Solana's daughter Sierra experiences strange visions of her grandmother, beckoning her home.

Lights Out and Away We Go is the story of Riya, Morgan, and Frites - the only women on the pit crew for Scuderia Pirandello's Formula 1 racing team. Actually, they're the only women in all of Formula 1 — and it's not quite how they imagined it. Over the course of the season they travel around the world, from race track to race track, feeding their desire to win (trophies! champagne!) and grappling with the inherent danger of being a woman in a man's world.

Parity has not yet announced its application period for the 2025 Development Award. Information will be posted on their website after December 1st, 2024. 

Those interested can support this year's Development Award winners and other Parity artists by bidding on Parity Productions' auction items at CharityBuzz with half of the lots closing October 30th and half of the lots closing November 7th. All funds raised through Parity's auction support their work with women, trans, and gender-expansive theatre artists.

Parity Productions identifies, develops, and produces new work exclusively by women, trans, and gender-expansive playwrights. At all phases of development and production, our creative teams are comprised of 80-100% women, trans, and gender-expansive artists. Our work unrelentingly centers the experiences of women, trans, and gender-expansive individuals onstage and off to provide urgent perspective to our audience and the industry, and to create greater momentum in achieving gender parity within the American theatre.

Paloma Monfiletto (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based playwright and essayist. She is currently in residence as a FIFE Fellow with the Bechdel Project. Her play, My Mother the Sun, was commissioned as part of the Echo Theatre Young Playwrights Lab, performed in reading at Premiere Stages, and was a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2021 and 2023. 

Mallory Jane Weiss (she/her) grew up in New Jersey & writes plays in Brooklyn. Her plays have been developed at Clubbed Thumb, Portland Stage Company, the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference (2022; finalist 2021 & 2023), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Playing on Air, and the Sam French Off-Off Broadway Festival. Mallory is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. B.A.: Harvard University, M.F.A.: The New School.

Ludovica Villar-Hauser (she/her) is the Founder and Artistic Director of Parity Productions, where she directs plays and readings yearly. Other directing (selected): Final Analysis (Signature Theatre); The Countess (Lamb's Theatre); As It Is in Heaven (The Cherry Lane); This Will All Be Yours (The Barrow Group Theatre); Long Day's Journey Into Night on London's West End. Ludovica was one of the few women to own and operate her own theatre in NYC, The Greenwich Street Theatre, which she ran for 17 years. Ludovica served on the Board of the League of Professional Theatre Women from 2009-2018, is the Producer of the Oral History Project, and was co-President from 2022-2023.

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