Looking for a great way to celebrate SWAN Day? How about gathering some friends to do a reading of short plays by women in your home, school, or other favorite spot?
There are lots of great scripts to choose from, and we would like to recommend two that would work especially well for SWAN Day: Seven, a play that presents the stories of seven remarkable women leaders; and We Are Theatre, “an evening of kick-ass plays that stand up for gender equality,” conceived and produced by the Guerrilla Girls on Tour and others.
Seven
Order the script from Dramatists Play Service ($9)
Seven is a documentary play conceived by Carol Mack and written by seven award-winning playwrights: Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith, and Susan Yankowitz. The play has been performed around the world, and it is a perennial SWAN Day favorite because the women’s stories are so inspiring.
A riveting piece of documentary theatre, Seven tells the true stories of seven women who bravely fought for the well-being of women, families, and children around the globe: in Russia, protecting women from domestic violence; in Cambodia, rescuing girls from human trafficking; in Guatemala, giving voice to the poor; in Afghanistan, empowering rural women; in Nigeria and Pakistan, fighting for women’s education and rights; and in Northern Ireland, promoting peace and equality. Read more about the women and playwrights>>
This month Seven has announced The March to MARCH, a grassroots campaign to inspire people worldwide to organize readings of Seven in March 2016. If you email them about your reading or performance, they will post it on their March to MARCH Calendar and social media, and provide you with their purple 7 logo. There are no royalties for private free performances. Please contact them for information about royalty fees for ticketed performances. Order the script from Dramatists Play Service ($9).
We Are Theatre
Order the script from Guerrilla Girls on Tour ($10)
Yvette Heyliger performs an excerpt from “Bridge to Baraka” included in “We Are Theatre”. Photo: Miriam Berkley
Since 2001 Guerrilla Girls On Tour! have staged an annual protest of the Tony Awards to highlight sexism in theatre and the lack of female nominees for Tony Awards in many categories. They have done marches, sticker campaigns, angry ads and funny fax blitzes, and in 2012 they asked 27 women playwrights to create short plays, songs, skits or spoken word pieces about sexism in theatre, which they performed at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York.
We Are Theatre includes plays by Tiffany Antone, Aphra Behn, Brooke Berman, Lynne S. Brandon, Paula Cizmar, Sarah Duncan, Jyl Lynn Felman, Lauren Ferebee, Dominique Fishback, Mila Golubov, Elizabeth Hess, Yvette Heyliger, Velina Hasu Houston, Penny Jackson, Andrea Lepcio, Marianne McDonald, Irina Merkina, Honor Molloy, Brighde Mullins, Vince Peterson, Sophia Romma, Laura Shamas, Mary Steelsmith, Caridad Svich, Kathleen Warnock, Sheilah Rae, Theresa Rebeck, Thelma Virata de Castro, Shay Youngblood and Guerrilla Girls On Tour! Pick a few of them to read or do a marathon of all of them! Read excerpts from We Are Theatre or order the script from Guerrilla Girls on Tour ($10).
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Guerrilla Girls interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert where they talk about the history of art as the history of power.