Women make up half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce, but you would never guess that from watching plays, films, or television.  WomenArts has challenged  36 playwrights at PlayGround, the Bay Area’s leading playwright incubator, to help correct that situation by writing ten-page plays showing Women at Work.

Six winning scripts will be selected by our blue-ribbon team of readers – WomenArts Executive Director Martha Richards; Lily Tung Crystal, Founding Co-Artistic Director of Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company; James A. Kleinmann, Artistic Director of PlayGround; and Annie Stuart, PlayGround’s Casting Director.  The six scripts will be presented as staged readings at the prestigious Berkeley Repertory Theatre with some of the Bay Area’s best directors and actors.

The performance will be Monday, March 21 at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison Street in Berkeley, CA.  WomenArts board member Christine Young will lead a pre-show discussion with the playwrights.

Order tickets online at: http://playground-sf.org/boxoffice/ .  Advance general admission single tickets are $15, $20 – priority admission, $10 – students with valid ID.  $20 at-door general admission, subject to availability.

Our Challenge to the Playwrights

Your play can be about an issue the woman faces at work, the differences between the ways women and men do the same jobs, the challenges of balancing work and family life, or any other angle you can think of.  Here are the rules for this month:

• Your play must have at least one female protagonist of any species.
• She must be earning money for her work.
• She must communicate with another female character about something other than men at least once.
• Try to include roles for women of color, since they are very under-represented on stage and in other media.  (For instance, a recent study by Martha Lauzen showed that in the top 100 U.S. films of 2015, women were only 33% of speaking characters, and that 76% of those female characters were White, 13% were Black, 4% were Latina, 3% were Asian, 2% were other worldly, and 2% were other. In reality – as of 2015 California is 50% female, 39% Latino, 38.8% White, 13% Asian, 5.8% Black, 3.4% Other.)
• Try to show women working in jobs that they do not usually have in plays, films, or television shows. Do not write about sex workers.

We can’t wait to see what the playwrights will come up with!