Superb scripts The 11th Women’s Playwriting Festival BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Now in its 11th year, Perishable Theatre’s International Women’s Playwriting Festival has come a long way. A mere 50 entries were submitted that first year. Last year the clamor grew to 270 submissions. This year — 374 scripts came flooding in from seven countries.

Many are called, but only three are chosen for a program of one-act plays, which will run October 2 through November 1. Specifically:

• Temporaria, by MF Unser, directed by Brooke O’Harra, is a comedic peek into a soul-sucking corporate underworld through the eyes of an innocent.

• Holy Broth, by Quiara Alegria Hudes, directed by Madia Mahdi, lets us listen in on a bilingual family through their mistranslations and misunderstandings.

• Johnny Hong Kong, by Kathryn Walat, directed by Bob Jaffe, presents a single mother coping with her energetic five-year-old son.

Perishable is also doing some novel outreach this year, in conjunction with RISD. A program called IMPACT (Intergenerational Mentorship Playwriting and Active Collaboration in Theatre) has been cultivating young women to write plays in high schools. It was designed by Perishable managing director Claudia Traub along with the program’s coordinator, Maythinee Washington. Playwright and actor Rose Weaver is also involved, as will be the winners at the festival.

This year, despite the greater selection to choose from, and despite the playwrights’ anonymity throughout the selection process, one of the three winners lives in Providence: Quiara Hudes, who is studying playwriting at Brown. In another coincidence, the other playwrights are both from Brooklyn.

" The submissions are read blind, but I think it’s interesting that two out of our three winners are from institutions where there is an emphasis on experimentation with form, " says Mark Lerman, Perishable’s artistic director. " One is from the Brown graduate playwriting program, which has an esthetic that’s very much like Perishable’s esthetic. One is from Yale’s MFA program, a recent graduate. "

The selection process starts with all of the submissions being read by two theater volunteers. Festival coordinator Washington winnows those down further.

" If there are really vehement responses, like, ‘Yes, this is amazing,’ or, ‘No, this is the biggest travesty of writing I’ve ever seen,’ then there is probably something there, " she says, sitting in the theater with Lerman.

It’s the plays that don’t excite their readers much either way that get dropped early on. Washington reduced the stack to 40 for Lerman to read. He boiled those down to the 10 that went to the finalist committee, which along with Lerman was composed of Vanessa Gilbert, Kathleen Jenkins, Trinity’s Amanda Dehnert, and Caridad Svich, who was artist-in-residence at Perishable last year.

By now the discussion has drifted to the entertaining festival poster, which has a Godzilla-size woman striding through the Providence skyline wielding pencils and laptop. In fact, how necessary does female empowerment remain in the theater world?

Washington, a 22-year-old Brown undergrad, replies that male playwrights still have far greater opportunities, " in spite of the fact that we have powerhouses in the public eye like Suzan-Lori Parks and Paula Vogel. " Vogel (who teaches at Brown), Parks, and Margaret Edson have won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in recent years.

One statistic Washington has found is that only 25 percent of regional theater productions in this country are by female playwrights.

" That’s a travesty, " she continues. " Women are half the population. I’m also an actor, and I know that although there are more women actors out there, there are more roles for men because there are more playwrights who are men who are produced, and they write about what they know. "

Hudes has come into the theater and adds a figure she came across about the lack of work for women actresses: that for every 10 male roles, there is only one female role. " Growing up, I remember being surprised if I went to a play and it expressed a female perspective, " says the 25-year-old Brown grad student. " That stood out as an unusual thing to happen in the theater. "

By this time, festival winner Mary Unser has arrived from the airport and chimes in: " We’re out there in the regular world too, and it’s really clear that they’re picking mostly men playwrights. "

Unser says she’s heard artistic directors at theaters quoted as saying that they passed over plays by Paula Vogel or Margaret Edson because they felt they were " chick pieces. "

So there’s still a need for the word " women " in the title of any international playwriting festival at Perishable?

" Ideally, no, it wouldn’t be necessary, " she replies, " but we don’t live in an ideal society. "