By Natalie Johnsonius Neubert, Kari Bentley-Quinn, Samantha Fairfield Walsh, Abby Rosebrock, Saviana Stanescu, Winter Miller, Laura Rohrman, Micheline Auger, Kara Lee Corthron, Maybe Burke, Cecilia Copeland, Jody Christopherson, Amy E. Witting, Jessica Almas
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The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.
Transcript of the recorded Introduction;
Hi. I’m Jody Christopherson, the creator and photographer of Necessary Exposure: The Female Playwright Project, which you are listening to and/ or viewing right now.
We are a series of photographic portraits and sound installations. I take these photos, do this work to bring visibility to playwrights. This is what a playwright looks like. I want you to see them. When you seek plays to produce, artists to commission, curriculum to teach, I want you to remember.
Martha Goode has recorded and designed these sound plays you’ll be hearing so that we can amplify the voices of female identifying playwrights, writing at this time in history.
As I write this, it’s Feburary 7th, 2017 in New York.
A lot has happened this year already. A lot has been happening for decades. History, culture, change are made by those who control what is written about them and what access the public has to that information. Theater is an opportunity, like no other, for writers to connect directly with our audiences and create worlds together. Yet only 1/5 of the plays produced in America are written by female playwrights. Why are so few women produced when they account for over 50% of ticket sales? There is a belief that there simply aren’t enough in the “pipeline” right now.
My father was a well driller. So I know, as do you, that a pipe is structure that runs underground. I don’t want these voices underground. I want them in our theaters, I want them our non-traditional site-specific spaces, I want them in our audition rooms, our schools, our conversations. Necessary Exposure is an amplification system for that purpose. We share these words, these artists with you, and ask that you become our speakers.
If you like an excerpt you hear and want to see more, read the full play, get in touch with one of our playwrights, commission or bring an installation to your city contact us at [email protected] and visit us on line at thefemaleplaywrightproject.com
View the current exhibit while you stream the plays at Dixon Place, on view through March 6th.
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt from Shasta Geaux Pop, read by Shasta Geaux Pop. Sound Design by Martha Goode.
https://thefemaleplaywrightproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ayesha-jordan.mp3
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Casey’s play O’Earth, read by Casey Llewellyn and Ren Evans. Sound Design by Martha Goode.
“I am staging the worlds I want to inhabit.”
Casey Llewellyn is a writer and theater maker whose work interrogates identity, collectivity and form. Works for theatre include: O, Earth (commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre at HERE, January/February 2016), The Body which is the Town, Zaide!, Obsession Piece, The Quiet Way, Existing Conditions (co-written with Claudia Rankine), and I Love Dick, an adaptation for theater of the book by Chris Kraus. Performance works include: I Am Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour (conceived by Brooke O’Harra, co-written with her, La Mama June 2016), Come in. Be with me. Don’t touch me. and Piece for Vibrating Chair. Casey is a New Georges Affiliated Artist. Her essay “What We Could Do With Writing” appears in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap. Her collaboration with Claudia Rankine “Theatre of intimacy and abandon” is forthcoming in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, edited by Daniel Sack (Routledge 2017).
http://www.caseyllewellyn.com/
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Chisa’s play Alondra Was Here read by Chisa Hutchinson. Sound Design by Martha Goode.
” . . . it was telling me to keep it small. Keep it small, stay insignificant. . . ”
Chisa was born in Queens, New York to young, irresponsible parents. She spent majority of her formative years under the care of a much more responsible, but chronically broke woman who was technically her godfather’s mother, but who would later—in the fine, it-takes-a-village tradition of the broken family—simply become “Ma.” Chisa grew up in the company of what seemed like hundreds of unofficially adopted brothers and sisters in Newark, New Jersey, where she excelled in school and philosophized with cockroaches about the ultimate merits of poverty. Her favorite six-legged pest, who called himself Swifty on account of his uncanny ability to elude the bottom of any shoe, once told her with a wistful chuckle,“One day, you will be able to look back and romanticize all this shit.”
That day appeared on the horizon of Chisa’s future when, at fourteen, she got a scholarship to what she thought was a boarding school. It turns out, however, that having more than one building—indeed, having a campus—does not a boarding school make (Chisa was naïve and probably should’ve read the brochures more carefully). So she moved about ten miles and a whole galaxy away from Newark to Short Hills to live with a host family comprised of a quirky, Buddhist psychologist, her then husband, a nature-loving, piano-playing Jew, their three kids, and an ancient dog named Baboo. It was a rough transition. But one which has, nevertheless, shaped Chisa and her writing for the better. She thinks.
A couple more awesome, supportive parents and several scholarships later, Chisa has earned a B.A. in Dramatic Arts from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from NYU. She’s landed some pretty cool gigs since then, such as writing and performing with the New York NeoFuturists and being a Staff Writer for Blue Man Group. As she tends to write plays about underrepresented folks that require a minimum of five actors, she doubts very much that you’ll see any of her plays on Broadway any time soon, but encourages you to support the intrepid companies that have presented her work, which include the Lark Play Development Center, City Parks’ Summerstage, the New York NeoFuturists, Partial Comfort, Mad Dog Productions, Atlantic Theater Company, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, New Dramatists, the Rattlestick Theater, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, Midtown Direct Rep, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), the Working Theater, Project Y, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, National Black Theater and FilmGym.
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Kathryn’s play They Are Gone but Here I Must Remain read by Kathryn Hamilton. Sound Design by Martha Goode.
“What kind of times are these, when
– Brecht
Kathryn Hamilton is a performance maker based in New York and Istanbul. She is the founder and director of the New York-based company Sister Sylvester. Recent productions include They Are Gone at The Public Theater for Under The Radar’s Incoming! series; Welcome at Alt Bomonti gallery in Istanbul; The Maids’ The Maids at Abrons Arts Center; The Fall at The Park Avenue Armory, as part of the Under Construction Series; Dead Behind These Eyes (NYT critic’s pick) at Sing Sing Karaoke; Science Fiction at Köşe. Her work has been reviewed by New York Times, New Yorker, Time Out, Village Voice, American Theater Magazine, Performance Art Journal, Hyperallergic, Culturebot, among other publications. She has received grants from LMCC, BAC, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and has been a resident at The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group; Salem Art Works; Park Avenue Armory; Flux Factory, Queens; and Spread Art, Detroit, among others. She is currently a part of Lift Festival’s Urban Heat program for social practice artists. She has taught or mentored students at Columbia University, NYU and Boğaziçi, Istanbul; and she spent the years 2011-13 in disguise as a french diplomat in New York.
http://sistersylvester.org/
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Kristen’s play The Heart in Your Chest read by Jill Frutkin and Jody Christopherson. Sound Design by Martha Goode.
“Humans need to be heard, to be seen. We must get the mess of our minds and hearts and histories into a form that we can recognize deeply or it will overwhelm us – it is overwhelming us. This transformation is the artists job. This is the necessary action.”
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Juliana’s play The Reenactors read by Juliana Francis-Kelly. Sound Design by Martha Goode.
https://thefemaleplaywrightproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/juliana-francis-kelly.mp3
These portraits were on display at Dixon Place. They are part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Hilary’s play Ghosts of Lote Bravo,
https://thefemaleplaywrightproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/hilary-bettis.mp3
Hilary Bettis writes plays, TV and movies. Her work includes: Dolly Arkansas, Blood & Dust, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo, The History of American Pornography, Alligator, Dakota Atoll, Mexico andAmerican Girls.
She is a two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center and is a 2015 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright Fellowship at The Juilliard School. Bettis has received fellowships and residencies at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, New York Theatre Workshop, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Cape Cod Theatre Project, La Jolla Playhouse, New York Foundation for the Arts, Playwrights’ Week at The Lark, NNPN’s National Showcase of New Plays, Audrey Residency at New Georges, Two River Theater, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Kennedy Center/NNPN MFA Workshop and a Sloan/EST Commission. Her plays, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo and The History of American
Pornography made the 2015 Kilroy’s List as the most recommended new plays by a female writer. She has been a Runner-Up for the Alliance Theatre’s Kendeda Award, Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition, American Blues Theater’s Blue Ink Award and the Leah Ryan Prize. She is currently working on a commissioned adaptation of Miss Julie with Michel Hausmann/Miami New Drama.
The Ghosts of Lote Bravo received a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, MO, Borderlands Theater in Tucson, Arizona. Her play, Alligator, received an Off-Broadway production this past winter with New Georges and The Sol Project.
As a screenwriter, Bettis has written and produced two short films, B’Hurst and The Iron Warehouse, which have screened at multiple film festivals across the globe. Hilary is currently a writer on FX’s hit show The Americans. She is developing a project at The Weinstein Company with Alyssa Milano producing, as well as another project at Fox 21 TVS with producer Bob Levy.
She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her cat and her actor-fiancee.
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Lisa’s play Persephone in Retrograde
https://thefemaleplaywrightproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/lisa-huberman.mp3
Lisa Huberman is a playwright and storyteller based in Astoria, whose work has been produced throughout New York City and New Jersey. Her full-length play, Sex and Charitable Giving was produced in The Brick Theatre’s inaugural F*ck Fest and was recorded for Elephant Run District’s hERD Podcast. She recently performed her solo show, The Worst Zionist in the Room, Lounge Series at Dixon Place. Lisa is an Artist in Residence with the Queens-based artist collective Mission to (dit)Mars and a member of their playwriting group, The Propulsion Lab.
This portrait was on display at Dixon Place. It is part of Necessary Exposure’s 3rd installation which explores what it means to be writing for the theater as a woman at this moment in history.
Click below to listen to an excerpt of Chiori’s play I Came to Look for You on Tuesday
https://thefemaleplaywrightproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/chiori-miyagawa.mp3
After November 8, 2016, my soul became homeless. Every day since then, I’ve been looking for a road back to being American. In 1993 under the Clinton presidency, I became a US citizen, giving up all rights to my birth country, Japan. I didn’t have any sentimental feelings about the decision at the time, but on the morning of November 9, I thought about the original citizenship I lightheartedly let go many years ago, when I woke up without a definition of myself.
The road to American was always rocky for me. At fifteen, I had to rebuild myself, learn an entirely new culture (still an unfathomable one) and a brand-new language. I hadn’t managed to become quite all-American before November 8. Instead, I’d made a bizarre culture of my own, an amalgamation of imaginary Japanese sentiments and acquired American beliefs. Perhaps because of this personal history, my plays—whether they take place in Chekhov’s Russia or on death row in a prison in Texas—are in the end, about memory and identity. Possibly because my time line did not flow in one direction (starting over as an immigrant) I view the stage as a place where the time is unpredictable and malleable, and we live with all kinds of “ghosts”.
I’ve had a fortunate journey in theater. My plays have been produced by off-Broadway theaters (Vineyard Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Women’s Project), at renounced performance spaces in NYC (Performance Space 122, HERE, Ohio Theater, Culture Project) and regionally (in recent years, This Lingering Life premiered in San Francisco at Z Space and Antigone Project had a revival at Stage Rep in Baltimore). Twelve of my plays are collected in two books: Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays from Seagull Books and America Dreaming and Other Plays from NoPassport Press. I’m grateful for many fellowships I’ve received that supported my work, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, a Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship, a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency in Italy, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, and a New Dramatists Residency (2006-2013.)
In addition to writing plays with magic realism and collaborating with amazing theater artists, I’ve been lucky to experience some magical events in my life. I was granted a private audience with The Dalai Lama and visited him in Dharamshala, India. For seven years leading up to the seventieth anniversary of atomic bombings, I collaborated with several Hibakusha—survivors from Japan–on annual theater retreat with NYC public high school students. I worked with survivors of domestic violence to create solo shows based on the women’s childhood memories.
I created a fellowship program for emerging writers of color at New York Theatre Workshop, designed and managed Asian American Playwrights Fellowship at The Public Theater, produced two performance festivals which included many interesting artists of color and women at the former Dance Theater Workshop, and designed a rigorous undergraduate playwriting program from scratch at Bard College under director JoAnne Akalaitis, where I continue to teach after her retirement. I’ve travelled extensively in East and South East Asia with a support of National Performance Network and Asian Cultural Council.
At the end of 2016, I spent three days in Moscow and visited Chekhov’s house, Dostoyevsky’s childhood home and saw Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theater. Growing up in a small snowy town called Nagano, I saw a Bolshoi Ballet Company production on tour every year. As a child, I never dreamed that one day I’d visit Moscow to see it at their home theater.
Everything I’ve done as an adult so far was made possible, I still believe, by living my life as a playwright in New York City. But on a fundamental level, I felt that my identity was threatened at the end of 2016.
I haven’t felt the disparity between who I think I am and who the nation identifies me so severely since I was a teenager.
As I was conceptualizing Jody’s project with her, my mind was not clear about my future-self. I asked her if I could reflect on my identity and my home. I’m married to a wonderful human being and visual artist, Hap Tivey. We have a little puppy Dandy Lion. Every day, I think—tomorrow is another day.
chiorimiyagawa.info
The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.