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The playwright Kirsten Greenidge, whose “Baltimore” is a beneficiary of the Big Ten New Play Initiative. Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
The New York Times highlights C1 playwright alum Kirsten Greenidge in a story about the Big Ten New Play Initiative:
Giving more such practice to female undergraduates is a major objective of the program that commissioned “Baltimore” and is rolling it out in productions at several universities this academic year. The Big Ten New Play Initiative — yes, schools better known for football or basketball are behind it — has begun seeding the canon with a fresh crop of works by women.
Naomi Iizuka, Rebecca Gilman and Madeleine George are the other playwrights tapped so far for the project, which is intended in part to address one of American theater’s most pressing concerns: the need to put more plays by women onstage. But the initiative goes a significant step further. Each script is bound by just one rule, said Alan MacVey, who oversees the $10,000 commissions: It must include at least six substantial roles for young women.
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A group of 27 women and people of color talk about what it’s like to work in Hollywood for a huge feature for the New York Times:
In 1985, I’m sitting in the casting office of a major studio. The head of casting said, “I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have black people then.” He literally said that. I told that casting director: “You ever heard of Othello? Shakespeare couldn’t just make up black people. He saw them.” I started carrying around a postcard of Rubens’s “Studies of the Head of a Negro.” The casting director actually was very kind to me. He referred me to my first agent.
