Thanks to the ICWP grant I was able to partially fund my travels to the 8th Triennial Int’l Womens Playwrights Conference in Mumbai, India.

On a personal note, my play KNOWING CAIRO was presented at the conference with much success but little audience. The play garnered interest by some of the India women in attendance, one of whom wants to translate the play into Marathi. The conference was lovely and interesting but did suffer from some debilitating organizational issues which led to small audiences for many of the plays. This was a shame because I had wanted to learn about the work of as many participants as possible.  I suspect that many of the organizational issues will be solved for the 2012 conference in Stockholm.

Other than making my work known to a wider public and learning about other playwrights work, I have been able to help women playwrights whom I met in India be exposed to a wider market, specifically through recruiting plays from conference participants for the International Center for Women Playwrights new anthology and for several other opportunities I knew about in the states who were looking for plays by writers from non-western countries.

Although I had much opportunity to see plays, I did not make any direct match to a Portland theater to produce one of the works I had seen (which I had hoped). I suspect that connections made at this conference will surface in Portland as I find the right match for the right project.

While I thought the work I saw at the conference would have an aesthetic impact on my writing, I think it will in fact have a thematic impact. The work at the conference was very political in nature. I have always shied away from writing political plays. At this conference I was able to see plays that were political in nature but also excellent pieces of art--I felt this was inspiring to me and my process. I also do firmly believe that while it is "exotic" and "exciting" to write about far away lands and politics, I will try to find my political stories in my own community, if I can. This is not to say that I will write political plays from now on, rather that it is a genre for which I have gained a new respect.

Overall my window on the world of women playwrights globally has been expanded. It was enlightening for me to meet women like Ratna Sarampaet (Indonesia) who had her play shut down by government tanks because her ideas of gender equality were so dangerous to the status quo that they could not be tolerated. It was inspiring for me to learn of the women directors at the Swedish National Theater who led a four year federally funded research project resurrecting lost Swedish plays by women