Fourth in a Women’s History Month series on female artistic directors
Gangway, world, get off of our runway...women, according to Urban Stages artistic director Frances Hill, are set for a massive breakthrough in theater. “I think there’s going to be a great women’s revolution,” says Hill. “When you look at the women whose plays are out there now, they’re of tremendous substance and they’re all interesting and they’re taking a little risk. Women have a lot to say. I think they’re in a much better place than ever before as far as what they’re contributing to drama. They’re going to take over, believe me.”
Hill did not create her theater to promote women artists—the goal was showcasing newer playwrights, male and female. “I look for the play first,” she says, “but I love if there’s a woman’s voice. What I want to do for any playwright is show their work and have it move. I mean, we’re 75 seats. I want more people to see it. The last six or seven plays we’ve done have been published, and that makes me feel good because I know that they’ll be out there.”
The company has produced plenty of plays by men, but some of its biggest successes came from women. Eisa Davis’ Bulrusher, which had its world premiere at Urban Stages in 2006, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chungmi Kim’s Comfort Women, developed by Urban Stages, was published in New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2005 and has been produced internationally. 27 Rue de Fleurus, a musical about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas cowritten by Lisa Koch (with Ted Sod), had an extended run last spring.
Urban Stages’ history also includes several acclaimed plays about women that were written by men, among them 2005’s Marion Bridge, which told of three sisters returning home to tend to their dying mother. The author was Daniel McIvor, and Hill says his “unbelievably sensitive” work proves “you can’t say a man cannot write a woman’s story—or a woman cannot write a man’s story.” (She’s workshopped McIvor’s new play His Greatness, about Tennessee Williams’ final days, and hopes to produce it in the future.) Another woman-oriented but male-written hit was John Picardi’s WWII homefront dramedy The Sweepers, about three Italian-American wives; it was produced at Capital Rep in Albany and Boston’s Huntington Theatre after its 2002 Urban Stages run.
Last fall’s New Play Festival at Urban Stages was dominated by women writers and directors. Trezana Beverley (of For Colored Girls... fame) directed Warriors Don’t Cry, Davis’ account of the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock. Brigitte Vielieu-Davis directed both her own play about Frida Kahlo, Frida Liberada, and Adriana Rogers’ Rosie, a solo show about Rosie the Riveter. Jo Tanner wrote and performed a biography of pioneering African-American businesswoman Madam C.J. Walker, and Shana Gold directed At the Pole.
Most of those plays are history-based because they originated in Urban Stages’ community outreach that presents original plays in NYC libraries and schools. The company also develops new work in readings (some open to the public) and workshops. Its outreach program was formed when the theater itself was still known as Playwrights Preview Productions. “We started this outreach in libraries and schools and we called that Urban Stages, so finally we decided to put the whole theater under Urban Stages,” Hill says, explaining that the cumbersome original name reflected her mission when she established the company in 1984: “There were so many small theaters at that time that were for the actors—to get them to be shown. I said: You know what? There’s no play unless there’s writers. This was before people were doing much development or readings or any of that kind of thing. So we started it as Playwrights Preview Productions—we were previewing playwrights.”
