Barksdale's Women's Theatre Project

Posted by Bruce Miller

As I begin my seventh season as Barksdale’s Artistic Director, the question I’m asked most frequently is, “How do you decide which plays to produce?” The process has so many layers (and so many players) it requires its own publication.

Part of the answer, however, involves a key commitment we made when we began selecting our first Barksdale Season in 2001-02. We pledged to ourselves, our artists and our audiences that we would, each season, produce at least:
· one work by a woman author,
· one work staged by a woman director, and
· one work that focuses on a strong, central woman.

We call this commitment our Women’s Theatre Project. The Member of the Wedding by the brilliant and legendary Southern author, Carson McCullers (pictured below and to the right), will open our Signature Season at Willow Lawn on September 21. It is a part of this Project.

At first glance, the commitment seems hardly necessary. What theatre wouldn’t, without even trying, produce such a season? And yet, if you review Barksdale’s history prior to 2001 and Richmond theatre history in general up to today, you’ll find that the majority of seasons fail to meet these minimal standards.

In the last seven seasons, we’re proud to have selected 15 plays and musicals by women authors. Several of these productions have been among our biggest hits, including The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, Annie Get Your Gun co-written by Dorothy Fields, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Crowns by Regina Taylor, and Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage—to mention only a few.

We’re proud that sixteen of our plays and musicals have been directed by leading women artists, including Robin Arthur, Nancy Cates, Jan Guarino, Leslie Owens Harrington, Susan Sanford, K Strong, Dawn Westbrook and Keri Wormald.

We’re proud of the powerful starring roles performed on our stage by Kathy Halenda, Dorothy Holland, Kelly Kennedy, Liz Mamana, Adanma Onyedike, Robyn O’Neill, Jill Bari Steinberg, Erin Thomas, Harriet Traylor and Irene Ziegler (to name a few), setting a standard for strong, active images of women.

In The Member of the Wedding, actress Katherine Louis (pictured to the left) and playwright Carson McCullers will join this roll of honor. We hope you’ll recognize, appreciate and support the commitments of our Women’s Theatre Project.

Throughout the run of Wedding, we will be exploring the issue of Women and the Arts in our Coffee & Conversations series, our new Cocktail Hour Conversations program, and here on the blog. Please join us in the discussion.

--Bruce Miller

Meet the Woman Behind "Intimate Apparel"

All of us at Barksdale are excited about the next play in our Signature Season at Willow Lawn, Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage. Introducing this beautiful new drama to the Richmond audience doesn't exactly make us trailblazers. Intimate Apparel was America’s most produced play in 2005-06. It won the American Theatre Critics New Play Award and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. And Nottage was first presented to Richmonders in Benny Sato Ambush’s lovely production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy at TheatreVirginia in 2001-02.

Nonetheless, Lynn Nottage is a brilliant, fresh and inviting voice in American theatre—a playwright whom Richmond theatre artists and audience members need to know. Last year, she was one of three women pictured and identified on the cover of American Theatre Magazine as America’s most impressive emerging female playwrights.

I’m told that Nottage rhymes with “cottage.” It’s revealing that when I first encountered this amazing African-American playwright, I mispronounced her name with a continental élan, guessing incorrectly that you put the emphasis on and softened the second syllable, rhyming it with the visual art term “collage.” It’s quite true that Nottage finds eloquence, poetry and zest in everyday lives. She explores the extraordinary exuberance of individuals who would otherwise almost certainly appear to be lost in the mundane. But I fear that what was revealed by my mispronunciation was not my enthusiasm for her joyous and poetic language or the acute sensitivity of her character studies. More likely it was the subconscious association I made between “African American woman playwright” and the exotic and rare.

Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), Suzan-Lori Parks (Top Dog / Underdog) and Regina Taylor (Crowns) notwithstanding, African American woman playwrights are still struggling to find their well-deserved place in the front ranks of American arts and letters. In fact, women playwrights in general find themselves in a similar boat.

But here’s where Richmond can step forward with pride and say that Barksdale Theatre is ahead of the pack. Not only have we produced the plays of Hansberry, Parks, Taylor, and now Nottage, but we’ve included the works of women authors in every season since Barksdale and Theatre IV began working cooperatively in 2001. In fact, if you count our soon-to-be-announced seventh season (2007-08), the new Barksdale will have produced 14 plays and musicals written by women authors in half that many years. No other theatre in Virginia and few theatres nationally, can equal this record of commitment and inclusion.

Many if not most theatres produce seasons on a regular basis that include only works by male writers. In Barksdale’s ten years prior to the 2001 connection with Theatre IV, five of the ten were all male.

In 2001, we established our Women’s Theatre Project, committing ourselves to producing great plays by women authors. Many of our biggest hits have been produced as a part of this project: The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Crowns by Regina Taylor, Annie Get Your Gun co-authored by Dorothy Fields, The Exact Center of the Universe by Joan Vail Thorne, The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien, and our current Hanover Tavern hit, Smoke on the Mountain by Connie Ray.

We’re very proud of Intimate Apparel, and in the next few weeks we’ll be discussing it in greater depth in these blog entries. I hope you’ll do yourself the favor of coming to see it. Until then, please help us spread the word about Barksdale’s Women’s Theatre Project, and read more about Lynn Nottage and her important work. You can find terrific interviews with the playwright at:

www.roundabouttheatre.org/fc/spring04/nottage.htm ; www.ket.org/americanshorts/poof/nottage.htm ; www.tcg.org/publications/at/Oct05/nottage.cfm ; www.phillytheatreco.com/pdfs/PTCplaywise_2006_intimate.pdf .