The creative output of 19 area women artists will be presented in staged readings or performances of:

• short plays
• monologues
• stories
• poems
• dance pieces
• music
  
  Light refreshments will be served after the show. 
  

Directions to the Boston Playwrights’ Theater can be found at:
 http://www.bu.edu/bpt/directions.html 

Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5 at the entrance; proceeds go to support The Fund for Women Artists. 

13 ICWP Plays Selected for 9th WPI Conference

The International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP) is proud to announce that 14 member playwrights have had plays selected for the 9^th Women Playwrights International (WPI) Conference.  The selected members include playwrights from the Turkey, Canada and the United States.   The plays are:

Afgan Voices by Lia Gladstone (USA)

Aftermath by Sarah Cole (USA)

Cry After Midnight by Talia Pura (Canada)

Familium Vulgare by Melisa Tien (USA)

Girl Kicks Girl by Jyl Lynn Felman (USA)

Isaac, I am by Mary Steelsmith (USA)

Manhattan Transits by Donna Spector (USA)

Medine by Zeynep Kacar (Turkey)

Osama the Demented by Farzana Moon (USA)

Phoolan is Everyone by Angelina Llongueras (USA)

Remnants of a Liquid World by Bianca Bagatourian (USA)

Talking in Bed by Cornelia Hoogland (Canada)

Venus in Orange by Paula Cizmar and Laura Shamas (USA)

The complete list of selected plays can be found here.

The WPI Conference will be held in Stockholm, Sweden from the 15^th to the 20^th of August.  The theme of this year’s conference is the democratic stage.  The conference is held in a different city every three years and is organized by Women Playwrights International. 

The International Centre for Women Playwrights was founded after the first WPI Conference held in Buffalo, New York in 1988.  The organization has worked for the past 24 years to support women playwrights around the world.  ICWP is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization incorporated in the United States.  It currently has over 300 members in more than 20 countries.  You can find our more about ICWP on the web at www.womenplaywrights.org or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/womenplaywrights. 

March 25, 2012 from 2 PM – 4:30 PM

The Boston SWAN Day event will be Sunday, March 25th,
at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA,
from 2 – 4:30 pm.

A collection of short plays, monologues, stories, poems, dance pieces and music of 19 area women artists will be presented in staged readings or performances.  Light refreshments will be served after the show. 

Directions to the Boston Playwrights’ Theater can be found at:
http://www.bu.edu/bpt/directions.html 

Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5 at the entrance; proceeds go to support The Fund for Women Artists.  For more information or to reserve seats, email swanboston2012@gmail.com.

"Feel the need to connect with other playwrights? You can't go wrong looking into the International Centre of Women Playwrights organization."  One ICWP member details her own experience as a new member - read her full article here.

This interview with Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro was published on the website of the Huntington Theatre, Boston, USA, after Alfaro became a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, received a MCC Artist Fellowship, and was given a slot in the 2011-2012 Huntington Theatre Season - all at the age of 72!

From the New York Times:

PARIS undefined Yasmina Reza is one of the world’s most successful playwrights, but she wears her fame with discomfort. She can talk at length about her red leather Prada coat. She can relate stories with biting humor about her year on the road shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 campaign for the French presidency. But ask her about herself, and the anxiety of the writerly persona takes over.

A blend of fragility and steel, Ms. Reza wavers between extremes: a determination to be judged by her work alone and a desire that it be understood and appreciated. The publication of her new play, “Comment Vous Racontez la Partie” (“How You Talk the Game”), has propelled her, once again, to face a reporter.
“After I write, I have nothing to say,” she said in an interview in the bar of the Lutetia Hotel on the Left Bank.

Read the rest of the article here ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/theater/yasmina-reza-on-how-you-talk-the-game.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

This is quoted from an article in the Guardian, UK online.

Where are all the young male playwrights?

Women as young as 17 are writing plays and winning awards. Do their male counterparts no longer have anything to say?

This week Anya Reiss's The Acid Test opens at the Royal Court. It will be fascinating to see whether she can match the success of her debut,Spur of the Moment, written when she was only 17 and lauded by the critics last year, when it also won an award. While, by now, Reiss must be sick of the constant references to her age – she is still only 19 – she must accept that in a line of work where the 40-year-old Simon Stephensis still referred to as a "young British playwright", to achieve such acclaim as a teenager is a remarkable thing...

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/may/25/where-are-young-male-playwrights

Last day of application: 1 October 2011.

Quoted from the Conference website:

Enter your play to WPIC 2012!

The conference 2012 will be hosted by Riksteatern in Stockholm, Sweden.

We estimate that 400 delegates will attend the conference and we will put much effort into giving women from other lingual areas than English the opportunity of attending. Approx. 100 scripts will be presented at the conference.

We ask for scripts within these six themes:
• The individual and society
• Sexuality
• War
• Social equality and poverty
• Work and career
• God/divinity

The easiest way to enter your play is to fill in the submission form at this site.

http://www.riksteatern.se/templates/Sida.aspx?id=12352&epslanguage=SV

------------------------
For More information
There are other links on that page that will give you more information about these fantastic triennial conferences.

Many ICWP Members have attended these events in the past and benefitted greatly.

You can read reports, see photos from ICWP members who attended the conference in India in 2009.

From Study report website:

"The results of the LA FPI Study have given us a figure which represents the percentage of work on stages in the Greater Los Angeles area written by women.

• A sampling of theaters who self-reported in the survey portion of the Study revealed that less than 20% of the plays produced or presented in workshops or readings for a ten-year period (2000-2009) were written by women.

• Of the 4796 productions in LA STAGE Alliance’s database from 2002-2010, only 993, or about 20%, were written or co-written by women playwrights.

While slightly above the widely accepted national average of 17%, this figure is far from representative of the work that’s being created by Los Angeles playwrights."

Read the full study report here