Celebrating the Year of the Female Playwright in B-N in 2014

There has been a lot of controversy about the lack of representation for female playwrights on American stages. I don't know if it was on purpose or just a happy accident, but Bloomington-Normal knocked it out of the park when it came to showcasing the work of female playwrights in 2014. From The Diary of Anne Frank back in January to Falling by Deanna Jent, which closed just before Thanksgiving, from stories told in ten minutes to one acts and full-length plays, we had a chance to see -- right here in Bloomington-Normal -- 21 different plays written by women, two plays co-written by women, and three musicals with music, lyrics or books written or co-written by women.

Last spring, Illinois State University gave us Diana Son's Stop Kiss, directed by Leah Cassella for Westhoff Theatre, followed by Exonerated, a "true crime" documentary piece written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen and directed by Cyndee Brown, and Mrs. Packard, a look at a particularly dark moment in women's history written by Emily Mann and directed by Vanessa Stalling for ISU's Center for the Performing Arts.

This fall, ISU came back with In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl, directed by David Ian Lee for the CPA, with an amazing set design by Jen Kazmierczak; Water by the Spoonful, Quiara Alegria Hudes's 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner, directed by Cassella in Westhoff; and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, from Lynn Nottage, another Pulitzer winner, directed by Don LaCasse for the CPA.

Over at Heartland, the April play was Iron, by Scottish playwright Rona Munro, a searing look at a daughter trying to reconnect with the mother she can't remember, a mother who is in prison for killing Dad fifteen years ago. Claire BonEnfant, Nancy Halper and Brigitte Viellieu-Davis won slots in Heartland's 10-Minute Play Festival, while Lori Matthews and Pamela Devon Lovell wrote winning one-acts produced as New Plays from the Heartland. And this fall, Heartland staged Julia Cho's The Language Archive, directed by Kathleen Kirk, and Deanna Jent's Falling, directed by Lori Adams, who had also directed the play in its St. Louis premiere and its off-Broadway transfer. Jent's intensely personal play was a shot right to the heart of playgoers.

New Route Theatre continued its mission to showcase underrepresented voices by bringing back The Mountaintop, Katori Hall's play about the last night in the life of Martin Luther King, and then offering Johnna Adams' mother/teacher showdown Gidion's Knot; Full Bloom, a reunion play by Leola Bellamy, Erica Thurman's Flashbacks; and Walking with My Ancestors, a journey into the past told in song, dance and the spoken word, written by ISU professor Ama Oforiwaa Aduonu.

Community Players brought us The Diary of Anne Frank, an adaptation of Anne's own words for the stage originally written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and updated by Wendy Kesselman; the musical 9 to 5, with music and lyrics by Dolly Parton and book by Patricia Resnick, and Shrek: The Musical, with music by Jeanine Tesori and lyrics and book by David Lindsay-Abaire.

Illinois Wesleyan University offered 12 Ophelias by Caridad Svich and The Drowsy Chaperone, a delightful 1920s musical spoof with music and lyrics co-written by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison.

The newest theatrical venture in town, the bar plays called Sticky in the Sticks, also featured work by women, in the tradition of Sticky founder Libby Emmons. The Normal version of Sticky gave us pieces by Emmons herself as well as Jeanine Jones in its December show.

All in all, it was a very good year.  More than two dozen different women with very different voices, all represented on stages in our home town.

The work isn't done, of course. It seems unlikely this will happen two years in a row, let alone three or four. But for now, for Bloomington-Normal in 2014, we can congratulate ourselves on quietly, happily getting it done. Here's to moe of the same in 2015!

New Route Untangles GIDION'S KNOT

You may not have heard of Johnna Adams, but her play Gidion's Knot has emerged as a favorite in a lot of quarters. Adams and Gidion's Knot were nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg New Play Award as well as the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the whole play was published in the pages of American Theatre magazine.

The idea behind the play is certainly topical, something that catches you immediately. A 5th grade boy was suspended, with tragic consequences. His mother, desperate to understand, arrives to talk to his teacher. But there are no easy answers. Was he a bully or being bullied? Where can fault and blame be fixed?

New Route Theatre and Artistic Director Don Shandrow are now bringing Gidion's Knot and its tangled issues of parenting and society, of where violence begins, of how to spot and how to handle troubled children, to Bloomington-Normal in an unusual production staged inside a classroom at what used to be Bloomington High School and is now Mt. Moriah Christian Church, at 510 East Washington Street. "Since the action of the play takes place in a school classroom during a parent/teacher conference, we felt that the location would make for a more exciting theatre experience," Shandrow notes on New Route's Facebook page.

The New Route production is directed by Shandrow and stars Kathleen Kirk and Gabrielle Lott-Rogers. Performances begin March 28, followed by performances on March 29 and 30 and April 4, 5 and 6. Friday and Saturday performances begin at 7:30 pm, with Sunday performances at 2:30 pm. Tickets are priced at $10 or $8 for seniors and students, and reservations can be made by calling 309-827-7330 or emailing new.route.theatre@gmail.com

And because the idea of supporting female playwrights is close to my heart, I'd like to note that 2014 is shaping up as an extraordinary year for Bloomington-Normal when it comes to plays written by women, with Gidion's Knot at New Route later this month, just after The Exonerated, directed by Cyndee Brown for ISU, which was a collaboration between Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. That will be followed by Rona Munro's Iron at Heartland and Emily Mann's Mrs. Packard at ISU, both in April, and then Sarah Ruhl's Vibrator Play, Lynn Nottage's Meet Vera Stark and Quiara Alegría Hudes's Water by the Spoonful, all at ISU in the fall. Illinois State University just completed a production of Diana Son's Stop Kiss, directed by Leah Cassella, as well. And there will almost certainly be additions to that list when we hear about Heartland's 10-minute plays and New Plays from the Heartland, as well as Heartland's and Illinois Wesleyan's fall choices. Wouldn't it be nice if this were just business as usual, instead of extraordinary?

Top Steinberg/ATCA Prize Goes to Robert Schenkkan for LBJ Drama

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards are handed out every year during the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville. This year, the finalists were Johnna Adams for her script Gidion's Knot, a teacher/parent drama about suicide and grief; Ayad Akhtar for his political thriller The Invisible Hand; Luca Hnath for Death Tax, a life, death and taxes struggle that premiered at last year's Humana Festival; Mia McCullough for Impenetrable, about beauty and its impossible standards; Dan O'Neal for The Wind Farmer, a mythic piece about hanging on to old traditions in a changing world; and Robert Schenkkan for All the Way, a new play about President Lyndon Johnson.

A committee within the American Theatre Critics Association reads scripts suggested by its membership, choosing six finalists -- new plays first produced outside New York City -- from among the field submitted. The ATCA reports that this year, they evaluated a record 42 plays for consideration for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play citations, which awards a total of $40,000 to the winning playwrights. That sum represents "the largest national new play award focusing on regional theaters as the crucible for new plays in the United States."

Robert Schenkkan

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan was the big winner, with a $25,000 check presented along with a plaque, for his LBJ play, All the Way, which was commissioned to be performed last summer as part of the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Schenkkan is no stranger to American history; his Kentucky Cycle won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1991. Characters like Hubert Humphrey, J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr. populated the landscape of Schenkkan's play, an exploration of how Lyndon Johnson came to power and how this "charismatic, conflicted Texan hurl[ed] himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil." The ATCA judges called the play "an engrossing, epic" play and described Schenkkan's version of LBJ as "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless." 

Actor Jack Willis as Lyndon Johnson in the OSF production of All the Way

The two $7500 citations went to Adams' Gideon's Knot and Hnath's Death Tax, both gripping dramas about the American way of life and death.

Adams' play premiered at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Gidion's Knot involves a grieving mother who clashes with her dead son's teacher to try to find some explanation for his suicide. Fifth-grader Gidion wrote a horrifying story for school, something powerful and violent and strange, but no more violent, no more strange than the medieval literature his mother studies. Was Gidion too aggressive to stay in school? Or pushed around by other aggressors? Either way, who's to blame?

The issues in Hnath's Death Tax are equally compelling, as we see a withered old woman, a dragon sitting on a pile of money, who tries to bargain with her nurse in an assisted care facility to keep herself alive. Nurse Tina is not on the take to murder her patient, even if she can't convince the old dragon of that. "Without positing easy answers, the play dissects greed, dysfunctional human relationships and the potential implications of a medical paradigm that can keep people alive indefinitely," noted the ATCA. 

Since its inception, the Steinberg New Play Award has singled out and honored playwrights like
Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson. Yussef  El Guindi took the prize last year for his play Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World. For the complete list of winners and runners-up, click here.

For more information on the Steinberg/ATCA Award, contact William F. Hirschman, chair of the ATCA New Play Committee, at muckrayk@aol.com or 954-478-1123; Jay Handelman, ATCA chair, at criticjay@gmail.com,or 941-361-4931; or Christopher Rawson, ATCA communications chair, at cchr@pitt.edu or 412-216-1944.

Susan Smith Blackburn Finalists Announced

The 2012 finalists for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize, which carries an award of $20,000 to the winning playwright, have been announced. They include one Irish, five American and four British playwrights.

This year's finalists are:

Johnna Adams (U.S.), for "Gidion’s Knot," submitted by The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

Alice Birch (U.K.), for "Many Moons," submitted by Theatre 503 in London.

Madeleine George (U.S.), for "Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England," submitted by Clubbed Thumb in New York.

Jennifer Haley (U.S.), for "The Nether," submitted by Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.

Nancy Harris (Ireland), for "No Romance," submitted by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

Zinnie Harris (U.K.), for "The Wheel," submitted by National Theatre of Scotland.

Molly Smith Metzler (U.S.), for "Close Up Space," submitted by Manhattan Theatre Club.

Meg Miroshnik (U.S.), for "The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls," submitted by Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.

Jaki McCarrick (U.K.), for "Belfast Girls," submitted by King’s Head Theatre in London.

Alexis Zegerman (U.K.), for "The Steingolds," submitted by Playful Productions of London.

The Blackburn prize is awarded annually to "recognize women who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre." Previous finalists Margaret Edson, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein went on to win Pulitzer Prizes after their Blackburn honors.

Plays are nominated by professional theaters, and nominated scripts are then read by an international panel of judges. The 2012 judging panel includes familiar names like Martha Lavey, actress and Artistic Director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago; actress Frances McDormand, who won the Best Actress Oscar for "Fargo;" Ben Power, Associate Director of Britain's National Theatre; and actress Imogen Stubbs, who has played Desdemona for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Stella opposite Jessica Lange in "Streetcar," as well as appearing as Viola in the 1996 film version of "Twelfth Night."

For more information about the nominated playwrights, click here. You can also read what judge Randy Gener (an award-winning writer, editor and critic) thought about the process here. He's not telling who won, though! That will be announced in London on February 28th.

The art you see with this post is an original Willem DeKooning lithograph created just for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The winning playwright gets the lithograph in addition to the $20,000 cash prize.