Seattle Repertory Theatre and women writers' retreat Hedgebrook present the event that is scheduled to play the Washington company's PONCHO Forum, Sept. 20-23.
New plays by the aforementioned scribes will undergo readings while they are still in the earliest stages of development.
The lineup for the 2007 WPF (subject to change) follows:
"Based on a true incident which occurred between the wars in France," McLaughlin (Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Helen) pens this "story of an unidentified amnesiac veteran. For several years he remained in an asylum, unable to remember who he was. Finally his photograph was published in the newspapers in an attempt to identify him, triggering a kind of national hysteria when he was claimed by hundreds of desperately grieving families as one of their own."
"An American woman hitchhiking through Southeast Asia strikes a bargain with a mysterious stranger. Twenty years later, she's an acclaimed chef specializing in Asian cuisine with an adopted Vietnamese-born daughter and a life that is successful beyond her wildest dreams. Into her life the stranger from her past reappears collecting on an old debt," states show materials. The retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fable is penned by the author of 36 Views and Polaroid Stories.
"In a city turned upside down, a woman searches for her missing brother while a blind architect dreams of an imagined past reconstructed from censored shards of books. In a world of surveillance and terror, safety is a comfortable lie." The playwright of Any Place But Here and Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell... creates a tale of "suspense and identity."
In the new work from Memory House and The Wax playwright, "an aging professor of Early American Literature, a new professor of World Literature and a college student find themselves navigating the intricacies of academia, legacies of violence and loss, and a dangerous love." The Women Playwrights Festival was established in 1998 "to acknowledge and nurture the talents of women playwrights." Each selected playwright enjoys a public reading at Seattle Rep followed by a week-long retreat at Hedgebrook, located on Whidbey Island. Past participants have included Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel), Theresa Rebeck (Omnium Gatherum), Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House), Julia Cho (99 Histories) and Tanya Barfield (Blue Door).
Tickets ($10 per reading or $30 four-play pass) to the WPF at Seattle Rep, 155 Mercer Street, are available by calling (206) 443-2222 or toll-free at (877) 900-9285. For more information visit seattlerep.org or hedgebrook.org.
