Enumerating Success at the Women's Voices Theater Festival Launch Party

For an event meant to toast the start of the biggest festival ever for female playwrights, the Women's Voices Theater Festival launch party Tuesday featured a lot of numbers.

Mostly, organizers were reveling in the fact that 56 fully produced world premiere plays by women would be staged by 51 participating theaters in the D.C. area in the next two months, representing 72 female playwrights.

A discussion between "Fun Home" Tony winner Lisa Kron and NPR's Susan Stamberg that was the focal point for the Tuesday event, however, paid a lot of attention to a new survey by the Lilly Awards and the Dramatists Guild of America that women wrote just 26 percent of plays and 12 percent of the musicals produced in the U.S. in the past three seasons.

It seemed a daunting number for a gender that represents 51 percent of the population.

But, Kron said, hopefully, "if we want change, it can be changed automatically."

Arena Stage artistic director Molly Smith, one of seven theater executives (and the only woman) who came together to plan the festival two years ago, said the full effect of this fall's Women's Voices Festival in D.C. won't be known for perhaps five years.

"We'll see how many of these plays are done in second or third productions across the country, and how many cities will copy us," she said.

Already there are plans for women's playwrights festivals in Philadelphia, Denver and New York, Smith said. And Signature Theatre artistic director Eric Shaeffer, another one of the festival planners, said it's entirely possible Women's Voices will become an annual event in D.C.

Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where the discussion and party were held, said she also wanted to see that figure of produced female playwrights closer to 50 percent.

But, she said, a 26 percent representation would be a big leap for female visual artists. "We're at about 5 percent when it comes to women on the walls of museums."

"Unless you believe men are better writers than women, there's an inherent bias," Kron said, and the survey figures bear it out. "This isn't a feeling women have. The numbers are there."

Kron, who won two Tonys for "Fun Home," including the first all-woman team to win for best score, doesn't have a play in the festival. But Sheila Callaghan, Yael Farber, Julia Jordan, Bekah Brunstetter and Karen Zacarias all do, among dozens of others.

Kron's discussion with Stamberg wandered a bit, and questions at the end dealt with how she adapted Alison Bechdel's graphic novel to the stage.

"I'm not familiar with the score," Stamberg said. "Does it rhyme?"

But at the discussion's end, almost as an afterthought, Kron yelled out to the crowd, peppered with many of the playwrights of the event, "The definition of parity is that there will be as many bad plays by women as great plays"; that women will produce great plays "in the same proportion as everyone else."

For a night, it seemed like the theatrical world was centered in Washington, though the party was crowded largely by local theater companies and executives whose community, Shaeffer said, was at the core of the event's success.

That meant at least one of the many big names on the event's honorary committee (that includes Jane Alexander, Audra McDonald, Tea Leoni, Anika Noni Rose and Kathleen Turner) walked around the party largely unnoticed.

Marg Helgenberger, well known for 12 seasons on TV's "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," said she was in town in part to do a table read for a possible upcoming Arena Stage production of "The Little Foxes" by another female playwright, Lillian Hellman.

Another member of the honorary committee, four-time Oscar winner Marsha Mason, was also in attendance.

The honorary committee chair was not present. But Michelle Obama sent a note that "The President and I congratulate everyone involved and send our very best wishes for a successful festival" that will "serve to celebrate the talented female artists across our country."

Photo:

Naomi Jacobson, Amy McWilliams, Holly Twyford, Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan and Emily Townley in "Bad Dog" by Jennifer Hoppe-House at Olney Theatre Center Sept. 30-Oct. 25, one of more than 50 world premieres in the Women's Voices Theater Festival. Photo by Christopher Mueller.

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