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The Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative is a new grassroots movement in its still-formative stages. So we welcome – no, we need – your ideas and involvement.
From "Yard Sale Signs" by Jennie Webb (photo by John Flynn)
- If you want to get updates about news, events and submission opps, sign up for our mailing list.
- If you’re doing something on behalf of women playwrights and want to connect, let us know at info@lafpi.com.
- If you’re involved in a production in the LA-area that’s written by a woman, click here
- If you’re a playwright or artist who has – or is looking to have – a working relationship with an LA-area theater or company, become an FPI Agent.
- If you’re interested in joining a group to see a female playwright’s work onstage in LA, check out our LA Theater Task Force.
- If you support our goals, get more information about our Logo.
- If you’re a female playwright, we’d love to connect you to other artists and organizations who’ll help get your work out there. Click here.
We’re here to provide a platform for recognizing the organizations that are already out there, and new solutions for promoting female playwrights in LA as soon as they’re created. So please help spread the word about what were doing and where to find us: lafpi.com
LA FPI Spotlight
Here are some words from playwright-activist Julia Jordan, on the movement to achieve gender parity for theater artists and and recent activities in New York.
From the beginning, I’ve been amazed by the amount of energy and the number of voices that have lent themselves to addressing the lack of female written plays on our stages. I firmly believe that the next step in the fight is t
o include directors, designers, choreographers, composers and importantly actresses in the effort, as we are all affected. The bias is across the board. We prove each other’s cases. We also create work for one another.
I recently read that cognitive psychologists do not like the word “bias.” They prefer to call the phenomena “predictable cognitive errors.” Theaters that show bias are making errors in artistic and financial judgement. The behavior has been documented in field after field. It is a human problem. But it can be addressed.
We had a huge rise in the number of productions by women this year in NYC as compared to last. A far higher percentage of those female written plays were hits than those their male counterparts. This is to be expected. It doesn’t mean women are better writers, it means that there is a backlog of superior work by women that has not yet been tapped into yet, where as the male written plays have been far more combed over. When theaters realize the errors they have been making in programing have lowered their chances of success…. They will change their habits. They also need to realize that if audiences have a bias, it is in favor of work about women. That’s all we need to do, show them the error of their ways.
Julia Jordan
Click here to read Discrimination and the Female Playwright, co-authored by Jordan with playwright Sheri Wilner, used with permission from The Dramatists Guild.
jenniewebb | 
March 30, 2010 9:21 pm
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