Check out www.coloredgirlconfidential.com for career advice for women of color.

BERKELEY, CA – Women make up half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce, but you would never guess that from watching plays, films, or television.

To raise awareness about this issue, WomenArts has challenged 36 playwrights from PlayGround, the Bay Area’s leading playwright incubator, to write 10-page plays about women at work for SWAN Day Bay Area. Since California’s workforce is quite diverse, we have asked them to reflect that reality in the plays.

Six winning scripts will be selected by a team of feminist readers – Martha Richards, Executive Director of WomenArts; Lily Tung Crystal, Founding Co-Artistic Director of Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company; James A. Kleinmann, Artistic Director of PlayGround; and Annie Stuart, PlayGround’s Casting Director.

The six scripts will be presented as staged readings at the prestigious Berkeley Repertory Theatre with some of the Bay Area’s best directors and actors. The performance will be Monday, March 21 at 8 p.m.

WomenArts board member Christine Young will lead a pre-show discussion with the playwrights.  Order tickets online at: http://playground-sf.org/boxoffice/  ($15 in advance or $20 at the door).

Our Challenge to the Playwrights

(Please feel free to take this challenge yourself or give it to others!)

Self-portrait by Kim Abeles (www.kimabeles.com)

Your play can be about an issue the woman faces at work, the differences between the ways women and men do the same jobs, the challenges of balancing work and family life, or any other angle you can think of.  Here are the rules:

• Your play must have at least one female protagonist of any species.
• She must be earning money for her work.
• She must communicate with another female character about something other than men at least once.
• Try to include roles for women of color, since they are very under-represented on stage and in other media.  (For instance, a recent study by Martha Lauzen showed that in the top 100 U.S. films of 2015, women were only 33% of speaking characters, and that 76% of those female characters were White, 13% were Black, 4% were Latina, 3% were Asian, 2% were other worldly, and 2% were other. In reality – as of 2015 California is 50% female, 39% Latino, 38.8% White, 13% Asian, 5.8% Black, 3.4% Other.)
• Try to show women working in jobs that they do not usually have in plays, films, or television shows. Do not write about sex workers.

See what the PlayGround playwrights come up with on Monday, March 21 at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.   Order tickets online at: http://playground-sf.org/boxoffice/  ($15 in advance or $20 at the door).