Arts & Culture
Playwright Taps Abortion for Off-Broadway Drama
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Playwright Steven Somkin answers questions about what inspired him to write “Melissa’s Choice,” a play about an environmentalist’s conflict with an unplanned pregnancy.
Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/theatre/)
Playwright Steven Somkin answers questions about what inspired him to write “Melissa’s Choice,” a play about an environmentalist’s conflict with an unplanned pregnancy.
An unexpected part in the musical “Gypsy” triggered performance artist Stephanie Howell’s love of her body and shaped her career, she says in this excerpt of her essay in the anthology “Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction.”
Afghanistan’s amnesty for war criminals is not playing well in a therapy theater group for Kabul women victimized by years of violence. They wait for a form of justice while perpetrators of violence get impunity and a chance to hold positions of power.
Eve Ensler’s new play, “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls,” just had its global debut in India. Some audience members found it to be preachy, but others said it fit the times.
Women have only received nine Pulitzer prizes for drama, but in a sign of recent momentum, female playwrights are sweeping regional festivals and being produced across the country.
“Words of Choice” opens in Boston June 12. The dramatization exploring the “right to choose” abortion may be particularly charged after the arrest of suspected clinic bomber Eric Rudolph and last week’s House vote on so-called “partial-birth” abortion.
Today is V-Day–V as in Victory, Valentine and Vagina–the global movement that Eve Ensler launched to combat violence against women and girls.
At a recent off-off-Broadway festival, the brightest stars were two women writers who are the exception to the rule that women playwrights, composers and theater directors are finding fewer opportunities.
This month, Women’s Enews presents an excerpt of an interview with Pearl Cleage, an African-American novelist and playwright, as published in “Women Who Write Plays: Interviews with American Dramatists,” by Alexis Greene.