 Honestly, you never think that's going to happen when you start something. I don't know. I don't think of the future as being something like this, but here we are, and I can be happier. This organization is exploding at a never-increasing rate. So two years ago we combined all the awards and created this celebration just to match this growing size and impact, and to hold it here at the beautiful Signature Theatre Center, who's executive director, is a league member, Erica Mallon, and tonight the Signature Family is represented here by Christine Millen from the Executive Board, welcome Christine. It isn't very often that a person like me gets to be on the stage with all these people, and maybe if I had a piano player I could audition for some of them right handers. But the director and bugger told me to keep it moving, so I'll spare you my auditions. But it's wonderful to be here with all of them for holding up very so much respect. And of course in the audience tonight as well, past Donnery's, past President's, Office of Board Met Officers and board members and memberships. The membership of the league is a wealth of fabulous women, and now I am delighted to introduce you to the two new presidents who have worked so hard this season to keep the league wheels turning, the current co-presidents, Pamela Hunt and Carmel Ode. As Estelle said, the league is continuing to expand our reach and impact the conversation about the theater today, especially the conversation about the representation of women in the theater. In the past year we released an update of our much discussed report on the hiring of women off-progress. This report has been widely disseminated and reported on in newspapers, magazines and all over the web. Also this year, as part of our mission as advocates for women in theater, we inaugurated the League of Professional Theater Women Seal of Approval in two flavors, regular and bold. We're going to announce the 2016 recipients of the seal, off-roadway theaters in which 50% of playwrights and or 50% of directors hired in the most recent season were women. To the following, Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, MCC Theater, the Flea Theater, the New Group, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Roundabout Theater Company and Signature Theater Company. And the Gold Seal, which is awarded to off-roadway theaters in which 50% of playwrights or 50% of directors or both hired in the last five seasons were women. This award is going to the Ensemble Studio Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep and the Labyrinth Theater Company. Congratulations to all of you. Do what you do about the fabulous folk up here, the gorgeous flowers and star-bride floral design. I'm going to call you down. No room. Please. We are very grateful for the support of the Betty R. and Ralph Schaeffer Foundation, Edith Meiser Foundation, Schwab General Fund, Dorothy Strelson Foundation and the Wollin Fund for making what we do possible. This year we want to particularly thank the New York Women's Foundation for investing in our strategic planning and our future. The award we present tonight has glorious history and honors extraordinary theatrical accomplishment. You'll hear a little bit about this award when it is presented and you can read more in your journals. Our awards committee, led by Joan Firestone and Shirae, are the serial tele-awards committee held by Kara Weichel and Heli-Ling Harrison, have done a tremendous job. Each of the 2016 recipients, as you'll soon see, truly exemplifies the spirit and values of her award and the presenters are a pretty amazing array of talent and accomplishments as well. Including our esteemed host, longtime lead member and luminary among theater artists. The award recipients, a number from their new musical. Here we have Lauren Patton, who will be accompanied by Chris Fenrick at the piano. It will change and to presently raise direction of Fun Home, Sam Doe. It's an opportunity to do a thing that I think a lot of people do sort of late night at home with their computer, which is I typed Lisa and Jeanine's name into the search engine in my email and then just went all the way back to the very beginning and sort of sifted through like ten years of a lot of stuff. Actually the very first email on the list is an email from a woman that I had gone on one date with who wrote, it was really great to go on this date with you, in order to get to know me a little bit more, I'm going to send you a play that I wrote for my professor, Lisa Crone. It's an autobiographical performance in which I stars myself and in which deals with my complicated relationship with my ex-boyfriend and my mother a lot after her first date with me. But I think the theme is that Lisa is always really pushing everybody to do very big, honest, raw things and put themselves out there. And anyway, over the ten years of the correspondence, there's also my marriage announcement to lead such a woman in honor of two children. Also, but I also started opening up old drafts, a fun whole, which there are a lot of, and you know, the first draft they sent me, the draft that they realized, oh the first draft they sent was actually a really cool draft and they've done a lot of work since then. I'm throwing that draft out of the reading of this draft and the drafts we talked about to our first reading, to then going to the pointo, going to Sundance, us doing a workshop, and many, many, many, many drafts over the course of the lab at the public theater to the first productions, changes made on Broadway, and I sort of had them all open. I mean, open ten word, I mean, two thousand word documents, I can sort of see them all like a stack. And I thought, if I took all of those documents and kind of filled a library of either of their hometowns, it would be like this, I'd like to give it to everyone who's about to write a musical and say, this is the chaos and the bravery and the originality that you should approach this with, or you want to make something original and historic, you know, look at what it takes. And I also wanted to, this never gets said, so I don't know, publicly, I just wanted to list this. These are some of my favorite songs that were cut from Fun Home. Things go glimmering, heat and light, draw, the lore moves, and there's a litany of opening numbers here. Life in boxes, which at that time contained the lyric, in real life there's no plot or arc, just pattern shapes made of light and dark. That's something that, you know, Lisa just threw out. It's only paper and pen, and take me in Vermont 4.30 in the morning, I'm still just reading opening numbers. There's also a song that was done in a full production, recorded on a cast album and then dumped, called Alper Short, among many, many other things. It was just to say, looking back, it's an amazing thing to look back because what they did, I mean, it was a mess for a really long time. Lisa would send me a new draft of the preface that would say, like, sorry, this is a little disjointed, or this is really different than the last draft I sent you, I hope it makes sense, or something like that. There was a lot of that as I went through all the old stuff, and to think that they, I think what Lisa and Jeanine did, that this very brave and very real kind of artistic practice, is that they were willing to live in this mess, in this chaos, and to be okay with that, and to be brave about that, and they had a kind of inner strength to face that abyss and to keep throwing out material even if it was good, because they were searching for something very ambitious, and they had so much respect for the material and respect for themselves, and I keep going back to the idea of giving everybody all those drafts and seeing, so that I could say, do you have the kind of bravery that those two had to make through the process? The other thing I wanted to say is, looking back over the years, that it's kind of amazing that in the pressure cooker of having to write that, to have the burden of the book, the burden of each other, the burden of producers, and an opening night, and all that, and the way that that can get very intense, they also somehow were always the kindest, most collaborative, most patient, most available, most empathic collaborators I ever worked with, which is something I wanted to say publicly, so I'm very happy to have the chance to come up here. We all entered so much over those years, and looking back at the emails, we sort of see the way we share not just the show, but our lives with each other, and that's very important, and the way they gave themselves to me personally, and to the work is sort of the same thing, they gave all of themselves very bravely, and I'm very happy to have the chance to say that. In front of you guys and to Lisa, who now has to come up on stage, over to me. So beautiful, Sam, thank you so much. And I'm here representing myself and Jeanne, we're both so pleased and honored to get this award. I really feel like I've just been, just had a trip back to the past seven years, so I'm a little, maybe I have a little PTSD right now, actually. I was just thinking, Sam was saying that, when we did our first workshop, I said to Sam, do you want me to, I probably have a lot, as the actors are working out, probably have a lot of notes, I can hold them, you know, and give me a time when you want to hit them. He said, no, no, no, just as we go along, I was like, are you sure? And he was like, yeah, no, totally, totally. And I would say, there's maybe two hours in. He was like, okay, all right. Everyone at your set, I was like, yeah, not like that, you need to be like this. Okay, you need to calm yourself down. But anyway, he was really, well, like, everything he said back at me, I could say more except I'm the one getting the award. Myself and Jeanine, how much it means to get this award. And I think, you know, the thing that gets said a lot about Fun Home is that it was the first, you know, the first, the first, the first, the first musical written by an old woman team of composers to get the trophies. And that's interesting and it's helpful in some ways and whatever, whatever. But the fact is, Jeanine and I both know that we come from a legacy of women theater makers who have always been here. And I think the more I hear that first, the more resistance I have to because there's a way that we keep going back to the beginning somehow. And so part of what I think is so meaningful to both of us about getting this award is receiving it with this group of people, all of them. I mean, I'm looking at Mickey Grant and you'll hear more about her when she wins her award. But, you know, you look back and you see that there have always been incredible women in every part of the theater. And it's, you know, I'm just going to really briefly read you a thing that I wrote about when I was in college and I didn't know about any of those women. And what happened was I came to New York and found the women's project actually and I remember sitting in that office and reading these plays but I'm going to write to you and read you just a short thing that I wrote about what happened to me when I was in college. It was a senior in college sitting on the edge of my dorm room bed in the middle of the day, paralyzed by the sudden realization that the extraordinary role that had just begun to discover the world of theater was closed to me. During the preceding three and a half years I had honed my talents in the array of bit parts as old women, neighbor ladies, and the occasional animal. I even told him I had to go to the theater department and he couldn't use me in bigger roles because in his indelible words you just don't convey any sexuality on stage. I was told I was a character actress, which I later decided was actually a code word for lesbian. But this was my senior spring and I had paid my dues and the show was William and just Picnic and the lead role was Rosemary, an old maid, which, come on, that's a lead role for a lesbian. But that part went through skinny sophomore and I was given the part of Mrs. Potts, the elderly neighbor lady. I had no actual scenes, just crosses where I would utter quick epipital phrases like, I baked a lady Baltimore cake. And at the end of the play all the women sit in the yard devastated because the young man who had wandered into the town and had given them reason to live had wandered off again and then I had my big speech. He walked through the door and suddenly everything was different. Everything he did reminded me there was a man in the house and it seemed good and that reminded me I'm a woman and that seemed good too. And on this day suddenly occurred to me that this speech summed up everything I might be given to do in the theater. I would never play a character who grapples with work or love or friendship or politics or religion or sex or power. My job would be to reflect upon the actions and importance of the male characters in plays that seemed not to even notice that the elevation of one type of character seemed to hinge on the diminishment of whole classes of others. Theater was the most compelling powerful thing I could imagine but it was becoming clear to me that this power to affect, to transform was in someone else's hands and the best I could ever hope for was to catch a ride on someone else's view of the world. I came to New York. I came to the Women's Project and read all those plays. I came to the East Village and saw the Split Bridges Company which changed my life. And I wrote here that the Split Bridges Company taught me the most important lesson I had ever learned about theater. It's a lesson that I see reflected in these women here and in all of the women who I work with and Jeanine works with who make theater and who always make theater. We make theater maybe shut out of institutions but we work in an art form that gives us total unfettered, imagined power to recreate the world on our own terms. I'm very grateful to be part of this legacy and I'm very grateful and I know Jeanine is too to be honored tonight. Thank you so much. It was just a ceremony and she was so funny all the time that you see when she gets speaking about herself it becomes heart. The Ruth Morley Design Award. Ruth Morley died much too soon. She was an extraordinary designer. She created the Annie Hall look and every time I was in a play or directing a play or whatever I would call Ruth first and she would always be there. She wasn't a huge award winner and we all used to say she wasn't a huge award winner because people looked like they were wearing their own clothes. They didn't look like they were wearing costumes. I think you know what I mean. And for all in the theater night she has two wonderful daughters and I hope to see when this program is over. It's the Ruth Morley Design Award given to not just costume design but other designers as well and to present the Morley Design Award the director of the current Broadway revival of the color and I hope to keep purple as well as the new artistic director of the classic stage company and so many other things we won't even talk about it. Read your program. This is John Boyle. In 2008 I was looking for a lighting designer for a production of Steve Sondland's road show at the Public Theater. Ruth Stoenberg had a production down there and wanted me to and one of Ruth's splendid suggestions was Jane Cost. Now I've been making theater for over well over 40 years and I've worked with a rich variety of talented artists I've worked with some of the greatest living set designers and costume designers but I'm ashamed to say that until 2008 I never worked with a female lighting designer and I don't think that what I'm any in the UK and the irony is that I had to come to the US to find one from my own side of the ocean. I absolutely knew in that small interview room at the public that I had found somebody with whom I could share all that I enjoy in collaboration. Humility, humor, honesty and while sharing a common belief in the importance of theater as a form that can create change recognizing that we are all only small halves in the week. We both come from backgrounds where our Celtic grandmothers would have taken no nonsense and would have quickly put us in our place should we overstep the mark or get too big for our boots. Putting on a new show is never easy. Putting on a new songtime especially a troubled one in New York City is a form of madness. Very quickly I realized that I had a life mind in the madness. Jane has a wonderful eye, a great sense of style and good taste. Perhaps most importantly she thinks deeply and sees theater as part of our contemporary experience. This depth influences the way she operates primarily because she listens. The way she has been exploring lighting design is much, much more than elimination. It's art. It helps us to feel. It needs deep emotional and intellectual vision to make it work. Being in the room together for the Making of Rocho at the Public Caucasian Chalk Circle at ACT The Three Sisters of Merrily we roll along at Cincinnati to visit second stage. The Cheer de la Mambore at the Sydney Opera House 10 cents a dance at Williamstown, Passion and Allegro at a classic stage and most recently The Color Purple on Broadway. I have always treasured the laughter of sitting by Jane in a dark, tired auditorium mutually finding a way of making the story live. Poor Jane. I had bacon by lighting sets that I also designed so thanks Jane for making Passion and The Color Purple so classy. So often in the theater, ego overwhelms craft. This is never the case with Jane. She puts the story first and is totally honest in all that she does. A few years ago, Jane asked me to meet with Stacy Wolfe, a colleague of hers at Princeton University. This led to my joining in the faculty and so becoming a colleague of Jane's on another level. We often teach on the same days and have shared many dreary, new Jersey transit journeys full of fun and laughter. Now a new era begins. Jane has become director of the theater program at Princeton and so I better start behaving myself. Those students are so lucky. They have a working artist and a great human being who will help them find love in an art form that has given us all so much. Jane understands better than most the place and the purpose of theater today. Nobody could be better for those students than Jane Cox. She will care, she will challenge, she will be rigorous and she will be loved. As I begin my tenure as artistic director of the USC, I'm excited about further collaborations with Jane bringing together art and education. Two Europeans, lucky enough, to make a small mark on the American theater. So much has happened in these few years, Jane. You have your lovely family, Evan and Beckett. You've been so supportive to Rob and I during some difficult personal times and we share many wonderful friendships. I'm so happy that you've been with me and I'm humbled that I was asked to speak in tribute of you. We share a time when we have together made an important story on Broadway. A story that celebrates women in their strength and in their glory. Who would ever have thought that two Celtic dreamers would have been some part of telling this great female African American tale. Thank you, Jane, for all you give. Thank you, Ruth Sternberg for your very astute introduction. And thank you, League of Professional Theater Women, for honoring my pal, Jane Cox. Thank you so much, League of Professional Theater Women for this wonderful award and thank you, John, for the incredibly generous speech. It means an enormous amount to be honored by my fellow women the hands of the human race who, if I'm honest, had taken a long time to properly appreciate. I thought this would be a good moment to unpack that story. I grew up in Ireland in the 1970s and like many smart girls in patriarchal cultures I grew up thinking that girls were terribly interesting. The stories we told about women were steeped in things that I didn't understand or didn't care to understand and often were told in whispers. Stories about boys and men filled the pages of the books we read in school, the lyrics of the songs we listened to on the weekends, and male words were spoken out loud in the plays and the films we watched. Gender was totally primitive. I'm probably the only person in my classroom secondary school whose future career could have made use of technical drawing but I had to take home economics instead. On the other hand, if anyone at school had been particularly concerned about my making a living instead of making babies, I probably wouldn't have ended up in the theater. I had an unpressured childhood and a lot of times spent staring at collabs in an ever-changing Irish landscape of light. Because of my childhood I was drawn to imaginary landscapes and because of my childhood I didn't notice when I started my career in America 20 years ago that I was almost exclusively working on stories about men, with men, in institutions run by men. Thank goodness at some point in my 30s my work life started to fill up with these extraordinary women so much so that I had to look up and start paying attention. Since then I've become the families my mother wanted me to be and I look back in horror at the number of women I looked past to find a brilliant man in the room in my 20s and early 30s. It's been so exciting actually and thrilling to realize over the last 10 years there are twice as many wonderful, brilliant, opinionated, creative, fabulous people on the planet that I thought when I was 18 years old. So I'd like to take this opportunity to do a roll call of a small handful of the extraordinary women who've made my journey in the American theater so far. So wonderful. Penny Remsen, lighting teacher at UMass Amorous who told myself and Justin Tenzen and Ben Stanton that we should be lighting designers when we didn't even know what that was. Testament to the power of brilliant teachers. Incredible designers I've had the fortune to explore theater with including but not limited to Mimi Vien, Christine Jones, Beverly Evans, Rachel Hauck, S. Devlin, Laura Jovling, Deb Bryden, Anya Kupakov, Kriston, Wendell Harrington, Kelly Hansen. Amazing young women who've inspired me and supported me, young designers who've supported me in their roles as my associate, Tess Jennings, Cecilia Durbin, Alex Mannix, Vic Brennan, Isabella Bird, Portia McGovern. Brilliant female writers, directors, and other women of the theater who inspired me and hired me, including Anne Washburn, Annie Baker, Bashkaren, Lisa Loomer, Sarah Ruhl, Susan Larkar, Tia Corthran, Monica Bell Barnes, Lindsay Turner, Pam Bikin and Annie Ryan, Larry Woolery, Carol Fishman, Lisa Peterson, Maria Stryer, Joanna Settle, Amanda Denner, Denise Thoron, Vivian Benish, Marcella Lorca, Denise Cooper and many, many, many others. The brilliant women in many professions and these incredible women here at the league who have fought for the proper recognition of women in the theater, in the workplace and in the theater, whose tireless work I'm clearly the beneficiary of. Finally, though, I do need to circle back two men in the room to say thank you of whom hate having their attention called to them. John Doyle, we've learned that I met eight years ago in an interview set up by a very smart woman who showed me how to access my own creativity really to trust my own judgment and who has really led me to where I am as an artist. Thank you. And that very same year, almost the same month I think, eight years ago, I had the unbelievable good fortune of having a kind and brilliant partner Ed and Alexander sitting in the front row. A man who has helped me to understand myself, who's taught me to laugh at myself, and who always understood that my career needed as much nurturing as his did before a rapture, we had a child together. A man who is, as all theater spouses are, one of the true heroes of the theater business. A person for whom every additional preview is that it's an evening alone at home with a small child. May that same small child, our four-year-old daughter Beckett, grow up into a world where the stories we tell represent the stories of 51% of the planet. The story of service is, how's Mariah all started or had down at the public a festival for women, by women, at the time I was doing a lot of Dario for a feminist place, one of which was a one-person, small Italian village, Medea, and Elsa asked me what I like to do at the festival, which I did. And the response of that audience was so astonishingly different from the response of a regular two or four or six or eight, or however many sexes there are today. It was so completely different. It was an experience that just shows me up even now. I didn't really expect to get checked up even though I am an actress, but it was an experience never to be forgotten by me, and I hope for everybody who was in that audience where the women could truly enjoy Medea and her life and my performance. So, tonight, Elsa Raelle is about to get this special award for Meritorious Service, and it will be presented by the League's Vice President of Programming. In fact, she designed this whole event tonight and co-produced it. Writer, director, Sheldon Lubin. We are getting a lot of history tonight, so I want to tell you another story. Before the League of Professional Theater Women existed, Elsa Raelle, on her own, created this one-day event of the 53rd Street Y, a whole day of panels, and then in the evening there were performances and brought together people from different aspects of the theater industry, all women discussing and illuminating ideas of how to support each other in this business. We're talking around 1980. And at that event, Julia Miles and Margot Lubin were up on the stage together, and they were talking on the stage in front of the audience, and we're discussing how men network and how most networking is done in bathrooms and on golf courses, and they said they needed to get together the important women in theater so that women in theater could network the way men did. That was before even that meeting. Estelle was talking about at the American Place. So that's how long ago Elsa was working on this stuff and these issues. That festival at the public that Estelle mentioned, that was a few years later, and this will tell you another thing about Elsa. When Elsa Raelle won a cap's grand in playwriting, she took that money and turned around and created this festival, gave it all away as prize money, got Joe Papp to produce this three-day event of plays at the public theater all featuring major roles for women over the age of 50. The person she is and the kind of person she has always been, a generosity you cannot believe and cannot be matched. The night I met her, she offered me her country home for two months so I could finish writing music, I know. I had to struggle to finish music. The night I met her, I am not kidding. That's how we became in its early years, but still, Elsa enlisted me to participate with her whenever possible, including writing a song together with Mickey Grant, standing in an early event, and writing together for Lucille Lortel's 90th birthday at Sardis that believed made a party for her, an entire mini musical that the two of us wrote together that was started by Mimi Turp, who is out there tonight. It was a vision over 20 years ago to bring together all the unions and guilds in our industry along with other women's organizations in the arts and media to become a coalition of organizations working for the voice and vision of women in the arts and in media she brought me along to that too. And in fact at one point we were together co-presidents of that coalition about 15 years ago and I am now co-president with Leslie Shriek who is sitting there next to her. So Elsa is always doing her own writing and creating plays and musicals and festivals and children's books and now a novel she is always supporting other women reaching out her generous heart and hand to help others. So many of the people here tonight have a story about how she has supported them. Just ask. How she has encouraged them, asked them, cared for them. She has been on the board of the league a number of times. Served on the awards committee, the international committee and for a number of years she was the sunshine committee all by herself. But she can do that. She can be sunshine all by herself. She holds the writing group of the league in her apartment. The discipline circles all started in her apartment. She's there, she'll walk in her apartment and she'll make you lunch or dinner. I gotta take her. And on the work front I'm pleased to say that we are almost done writing a musical based on her award-winning children's book when Zeta danced on Eldridge Street but by Elsa lyrics by me, music by Matthew Gandolfo. This woman never stops. She never stops creating. She never stops doing. She never stops caring. With all my heart I am so pleased to present the LPDW special award for meritorious service to one of my dearest friends for over 35 years. There is no one who has been more devoted to this organization and to all women in theater else around. Especially the members that I sponsored. Many of you are here today and especially one very special group. My writing group and some of you are here tonight. I can't tell you how that group just together once in a while had a rough year this year. I felt like it was hospitalized pretty well. So we haven't met as frequently as we should together again very shortly. Thank you, thank you all for covering me so generously, so so sweetly, so very, very kindly. I love you all. I love this group and Sheldon incidentally is now writing she's now president of the coalition of the United States and let me tell you this is someone that she is some friend I adore her. I adore you all. Josefina Abadi a leader of the non-profit theater movement in the United States it's given to an emerging artist who has created work of cultural diversity to present the Abadi Award I'm so very happy to be able to introduce the co-artistic director of the city company Anne Bulger to introduce Laird Bassamlee the most second woman in the world she's pregnant with a boy and it's very exciting but she's been present in many ways and I would start by saying aren't you pregnant with projects and then you're pregnant with little people I would start by saying that I have discovered what probably everyone else knew all along that what makes the theater unique from any other art form is that the subject of the theater as opposed to visual arts or dance or music is always community it is how are we getting along not only how are the people getting along in the play you know, you killed your father and slept with your mother there's problems and thieves but also at the same time how is this group of people on the stage getting along together and how is the audience getting along and how is the audience getting along with the actors and that question is the basic question of the theater is about how we create social structures and how we can get better at it and one of the things when we go to a play we see two plays at the same time we see that and this but we also see the stories is not on the executive brain part where you're watching a story but on a deeper, more atavistic level you're actually experiencing how a group of people are getting along on the stage I think that what Lierve has done in terms of making communities visible is extraordinary and unprecedented in many ways and she's doing it in ways where she's reinventing the form and not only with her work with large community groups but also with her group of every community she works with of artists and that's amazing another and is about enthusiasm and we all in this room know that the most horrible thing to fake is enthusiasm you know that how hard it will feel and yet enthusiasm is one of the major ingredients to actually making work that has presence and it turns out that enthusiasm etymologically comes from the Greek and theo to be filled with God and it is our it is our obligation as theater people to actually to cultivate enthusiasm a love of the art form and I would say that Lierve de Bessonet it expresses enthusiasm in such a tremendous way and that it's contagious and it's a contagious enthusiasm which is good for the field and good for the world and rather extraordinary now this is all fine and good this ability to to animate communities this enthusiasm but the other thing that Lierve de Bessonet brings is her artistry and without that and it's not just technique it's that the T word we can't talk about called taste it's not really talent you think the T word is talent but taste aesthetics aesthetics I am an old professor I'm always talking about etymology but aesthetics actually means sensation the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic which we under everybody the best theater has I used to think of aesthetics as some highfalutin idea of compositional integrity but actually just means sensation and the artistry that Lierve brings to her work and to her relationships with people which is the foundation of our field is highly aesthetic and artistic and I just wanted before I bring her up I want to say how thrilled I am that this award is named the Josephine Abadie award and for those who remember Josie Abadie who died far too early and she was an extraordinary force I was thinking of her tonight and I thought I would call her the Wendy Wasserstein of directors for those who know her she had that similar quality of enthusiasm and I'm so happy and since our job in the theater is to remember here I go again things back together again to pick the members in honor of Josie Abadie for and Lierve never I asked Lierve she knew Josie and Lierve's too young Josie died much too young but I'm so happy and I hope you can remember her as part of the acceptance so without further delay Lierve best night very exciting so I have to say quickly that I actually owe my entire career to Ann Bogart she's tried to downplay this fact when I brought it up before but the reality is that I moved here to New York from Louisiana when I was 21 because Ann Bogart gave me a chance and made me her assistant director and she changed my life forever and I will thank her every chance I get for that also in the conversation in which we established that I was going to become her assistant director she did talk about the root of the word ecstasy ecstasies which is to stand outside of oneself it's not a totally new thing but you know I came here today straight from the Bronx where we were doing auditions for the fourth public works show that's happening this summer so we've now the past three years we have done these 200 person spectaculars in the park we saw a couple pictures of them bringing together New Yorkers from all over the city this summer will be the first time that I'm not directing Kwame Cuayama is directing 12th night so the first year we did the Tempest the second year we did Winter's Tale then the Odyssey and now 12th night and actually because I'm in the process of both sort of equipping Kwame to go into this room with 200 people and direct this show and also we are public works sort of branching out in other ways as well we have branches that are starting in Seattle with Seattle Rep and in Dallas at Dallas Theater Center becoming this national movement of civic pageantry and in the process of doing that I've had a lot of opportunity to think about well first of all what that form is but even more broad than what theater is and why it matters and I feel like the process of working with people citizens who are having their first ever encounter with the theater having that experience is the greatest masterclass of all because it teaches me what in the most elemental form what is happening when we gather in the theater and I think that the thing that has become clear to me is that it is a fundamentally humanizing impulse behind the theater and at these auditions well today and yesterday we had auditions with our veterans organization Military Resilience Project and I got to see 19 veterans and their families come and audition and again have their first ever experience in the theater and the material that people prepare for these auditions is so unexpected and amazing we had one gentleman performed a monologue from Casa Blanca he played both roles we had a father and his 11 year old son did a reading from Beauty and the Beast they read all the parts, the little boy and his pots and he was the clock and they did all of this stuff we had a couple of incredibly angry poems that were including the word motherfucker more times and I thought that possibly something would happen in a poem and that's all part of like a public works audition and I think that the the invitation actually there's room for all of that in the theater there's room for all of those people and hopefully you'll get to see them on stage this summer at the Delacorte if you wonder who wrote the poem who did the Beauty and the Beast stuff but you know being in those rooms and witnessing people overcome their fear overcome all of the sense of what divides us from one another to stand up and say they want to be part of this unifying thing they want to tell a story together with other people for other people it just, it excites me enormously and I feel like in a world in which empathy is in such short supply and in which there's so much difficulty finding ways to fully see, recognize the humanity of people who have different presumptions about the world I just feel very honored to be carrying the banner of theater high the humanizing banner of theater so I love this work I love being a woman doing this work and I'm very grateful for this recognition thank you so much I was founded with a special request from Lucia Lortel and comes with a grant toward the recipient's work our Lucia Lortel committee used the work of many emerging women artists throughout the year to determine the recipient to present this year's Lortel award winner renowned playwright Tina Howe whoo! I'm a writer and I don't know if I've done that so I have to read a little something that I chord myself in but I can't do what these other extraordinary women have done so bear with me I must begin by congratulating the league of theater women for giving the Lucia Lortel award to Ari Laura Green I think she's got a silk-like mane who looks like a poet that likes verse plays or a liking designer who issues electricity in favor of candlelight or perhaps a hidden performer building an arsenal of shadow puppets both human and divine and what does that number understand for? Part of the street dress the number of seats in the house or the weight of her chair and the board none of the above it's the number of languages spoken in Jackson Heights where the theater is located so what does Ari do as artistic director in this Tower of Babel she rambles large numbers of runners and actors to create their own work what kind of numbers am I talking about? Her Jackson Heights trilogy encompassed three full-length plays collaboratively written by 18 playwrights featuring 37 actors playing 93 roles speaking 14 languages who does that? as playwrights actors, designers and directors it's all most of us can do to get one show from running even as a brilliant and sturdy professional theater woman we are but working with 18 playwrights in one room 37 actors playing 93 roles in 14 languages but look at this shape shifting young woman she's eerily serene perhaps her work is just an illusion created with smoke and mirrors she wasn't born Ari after all made herself after a lovely war car she'd seen hanging in the lobby of a theater titled Ari at the beach Ari had an extraordinary childhood as the daughter of refugee scientists growing up in 37 countries so the din of many languages was familiar to her as were the tensions that rise when different cultures collide guess what she wanted to be when she went to Yale as an undergraduate a diplomat so she had acquired the tools of negotiation and compromise on the highest level but having acted in a semi-professional production of the Shakespeare play at the age of 6 she also knew about the transformative power of theater so she went to get an MFA at the University of California at Davis but as a performer she became acutely aware of the challenges her fellow actors faced and realized she wanted to be a director why? because she's interested in the big picture not just a production of a play here and there but exploring the lives and harmonies of entire communities with the artists who make them up Ari Laurie Green is a one-woman band her accomplishments are all more astonishing in this downsizing age of ours when we're as teachers certainly we're encouraged to tell our students to play in one set with a minimum of four actors I saw a part of her Jackson Heights trilogy and it was one of the most avoidant theatrical experiences I've ever had all of those actors all of those languages all of that movement as a cast of 25 more into so many different characters on different sides of the law trying to disappear or be seen failing to be heard or loved succeeding and failing but never giving up creating the whole Jackson Heights trilogy with Ari at the helm that mysterious girl in the watercolor Ari at the beach guiding leave it to a dating soft spoken women to smash the conventional wisdom of how to make theater and leave it to the lead of professional theater women to honor her welcome Eric Lord I'm going to have Tina introduce me tonight because the very first thing my effort directed was a scene from one of her plays I don't even know how this happened because at a time I was determined not to be a director but somehow I found myself in a directing class and somehow I was the only woman in that directing class and I chose to direct the Elizabeth Barrow call out of the dining the one where she speaks her truth in an extremely awkward way sabotage her dinner date that makes all of us fell in love with her it's also a scene about eating disorders which was something no one was talking about at the time and somewhere in the midst of rehearsal I realized a director has to choose what we talk about and that realization was exciting and scary and presenting the scene in a room full of men who were directing Williams and Emile I've been telling and here's why it mattered huge for me of course I still didn't want to be a director I was scared to be responsible for other people to get help then we have things to turn down jumping from that early fear to falling in love with plays when they're just embryonic ideas and then bringing 37 people into a room and saying something's going to happen and then there are two things that made me take that leap a desire to tell stories and bringing her and a love of actors because somewhere in grad school I started reading plays that just needed to happen and I started watching my classmates and realizing they were capable of going deeper in the work that they were doing and I wanted to make a catalyst for that so I directed one play and I've embraced my identity as a director I was not going to be a female director I even changed my name partly because I wanted our audiences just to engage with the story and partly because I grew up in 37 countries and often the stories that interested me weren't the stories people expected of a long-grown California to tell we talk often about the coincidences that allow us to have one life for another but in theater we feel that we inhabit another person's skin feel the ways their lives could so easily be in our own and in so do we learn to live in a bigger world and we realize that we're all responsible for one another not just in the rehearsal room but in life we're responsible for the things that come out of our mouths we're locked back to people who are starving or being killed in this country or in others for the environmental crises we are facing so many things being responsible for a play is actually pretty small when you think of it but it's also huge because being responsible for a play means you get to choose what people talk about we get to choose the stories we tell and we get invited to the room to tell those stories with us we get to invite one another out of our discrete understanding of the world and into a malleable universe of shared experience over the past few years I've come to embrace the way I'm a female director my friend and collaborator Jenny Lindy are often said like birth plays members of the theater month 67 company created the hashtag 167 family to reflect their support of one another's work and I'm a mother which reminds me daily that the world we create through our work is not just for ourselves but for the future and I also realize as a director my responsibility is just to begin the conversation to ask the questions, to launch the process and then to listen to all the other voices in the room and the magic of what we do at theater month 67 is that we get to have conversations we hope can happen in the world at large we get to build a world on stage that challenges us to test four of our offstage ones and that reflects our collective hopes and dreams for what's possible Peter recently asked me about the number of languages spoken at theater month 67 and in my head I've heard three phrases do you come an afternoon that's been lovely from one to three seven times it means sister or brother how are you doing test the on tongue on heart from warning sun hope is not dead the common memory to chair off from career thank you, thank you very much and together they became like a little song and mini play do you come an afternoon test the on tongue the common memory it's what we do as artists we ask how are you my sister and my brother what is your truth in this world we say hope is not dead if we can tell these stories we can change our world and we say thank you thank you for your bravery in the telling and hearing of these stories with us and so thank you thank you thank you and thank you in all the languages I don't know yet brilliant achievers in the world that we all love so very very much congratulations you said yesterday you have to have your heart broken many many times to be a champion you just have to let it happen over and over and over again you know what a lifetime achievement award is I want to present the lifetime achievement award producing artistic director of the York theater James Morgan the recipient of a significant award such as this are generally lifelong friends of the honoree I'm humbled and touched and flattered because I've known our recipient more like seven months but within minutes of meeting her I felt as if we were lifelong friends because I knew her work I think she and her writing have that effect almost everyone she meets she has won so many lifetime achievement awards that she may well make you believe in reincarnation she has been honored so many times as a playwright a composer, a lyricist an actor, a producer and a director but it's hard to figure out how she had time between accepted speeches to create such a distinguished body of work she is admired she is loved and if you know her the way I have come to the elegant woman sitting there the one with the delicate features of the beautiful smile is respected throughout our industry and across our country because she is not afraid to fight full on a woman after seeing one of Mickey's new shows in its pre-Broadway tryout wrote her that Mickey's words had drawn blood but the incision was clean Walter Kirk opined that Mickey hits you hard but she hits you fair you'll think I'm making this up but just last night she was at an event with Donald Trump by the time Mickey was through with him he vowed to close down his twitter account immigrate to Mexico and build a 20 foot soundproof wall around his mouth which came through but if the Donald really did find himself in a room with our honoree I have no doubt who would leave bowed and defeated, shaking his head and muttering, don't bother me I can't cope yes, she's a tiger but that's not all she's also a gropotobie what you may ask is a gropotobie allow me to tell you a gropotobie is an individual who has won the Grammy the Cleo Yash Critic Circle Award the Drama Desk Award and the Odie add in her Tony nominations her seemingly endless roster of other awards honors and honorary degrees and whatever you might call and whatever you might call her becomes totally remarkable and utterly unpronounceable you may think that I'm making this up but she's had to move to larger apartments several times just to find enough metal space for all of her awards okay, I made that up too but there's a metaphorical truth to it although not the kind of grace or poetic metaphor our honoree would write you've seen her long list of works and accomplishments in various media all of these works these masterful Broadway and off-Broadway shows these extraordinary performances came from the mind pen, keyboard and the heart of the same extraordinary person Mickey's accomplishments were all put into perspective for me as we were about to open don't bother me, I can't cope at the York where it blew the roof off our theater I should say New York magazine wrote a laudatory assessment of the show and said that this was everyone's chance to catch this legendary musical which ran for more than two years on Broadway which was the first time an African American woman had single-handedly written a Broadway musical but New York Mac got it wrong in 1971 Mickey Grant was the first woman period to write an entire Broadway musical that, all on its own is a lifetime achievement let's know Mickey Grant watch this please I didn't mean to jump at your I was a little shaken by what I just heard rape is a very difficult subject but it has to be discussed I didn't know there were so many victims unfortunately there are and all too often the crime goes under the bullet I know they said that people are afraid or ashamed to go tell the police about it and it's sad when help is available but the victims won't come forward and the fact that rape isn't just a street crime statistics on rape within a family I just can't believe it they gave me some things to read I'm going to study a little I think this is close to where we should put up on the bulletin board on our floor I think that was a list of work and health care I shouldn't learn as much as we can about the subject that way we'll be able to help patients who have experienced the crime of rape that's in the family if we outlive the ribby boys we're getting all that work yes, that's one way to deal with all having us let you be in America until you'll see we really understand what you do and as well as what you often go through in order to do what you do I was speaking can I just say thank you you have a nice day no, you have to continue I was acknowledged that I understand I understand if you said it didn't matter so I'm excited maybe I would just tell you a short story about a little girl who decided to travel her very own yellow brick road on the south side of Chicago it's more of fairy tale fairy tales are plausible and improbable full of surprises unbelievable but this is except for one element you can't believe it on the south side of Chicago a little girl who slightly owned her sister would read the Sunday funny stories they were sprawled on the floor now this four year old was fascinated by the funny little black marks in these white circles above the people's heads because apparently what was in these funny white circles were words that the people were saying fascinated by this so by the time she reached the first grade long before Ed Starr had been thought about Bill Linden would have been surprised and delighted to hear her say I can read it myself now on weekends she attended a local community which was a couple of blocks from the house and two of them went there on Saturday afternoons to engage in various activities and games and keep them out of mystery of safe and in that community center one of her favorite things to do was the dramatics there was a dramatic class which was led by the dramatic teacher Susan Porsche actually went to class with one of her younger brothers and his name was Bobby Porch but Susan was very dramatic and so she was Susan Porsche and Susan Porsche taught this eight year old how to project and emote and this eight year old was going roll on down deep and dark roll it wasn't quite that deep but I did get the rolls but Susan taught her several points and she began to be a regular on the programs at her church and some of you will really understand that a lot of us starting date for us was the church after a while not only at her church this youngster was being taken around by her mother to other churches but it was especially best to recite her poems and pretty soon she decided I can write them myself and so then she became more of a personality because the person, oh it's young king is writing her own poetry and she's here as Susan Porsche and anyway like the church or the pastor of the church he cited and the church agreed that this young member that must have these poems published and at the age of 13 she acquired her first copyright and it consisted of a collection of 26 poems written between the ages of 8 and 12 and so to begin her journey along the yellow road now it's I must refer back to the time when Susan Porsche cast her as the spirit of spring in one of the projects and she had to go around to the magic wand and bring the daffodils to life the tulips to life and the roses and anyway she was in charge of bringing light to all the elements and this these few minutes on stage she was smitten well now she knew words and she knew the other stage words and the next thing she said by I'm just kidding you different phrases of this growing up this young kid's life on the piano school beside her father and he played by ear and listened to him play and sang the blues and we began to try and play what he played and then when she began to take violin lessons and found out there were notes we had to learn the understand that these were the sounds it's almost became possible to play by ear because my sister played the piano and I took lessons but I moved to the violin and from there to the double bass but it's important to understand that early influences can affect one's future for the rest of one's life and I was very fortunate that I had my parents who were very encouraging noticed this and we really later became my biggest cheerleader she loved the theater and fortunately all my beginnings were encouraging and especially my sixth grade teacher told me you are a poet and she even wrote down my report card and mixed huge letters that your daughter excels in writing poetry I must also remember my high school planned teachers and teachers who said he was going to teach this young girl to play as many instruments as possible and learn to play scales on the trombone on the trumpet on the bassoon and I even I had gone to the first person from the character and anyway I learned these I must thank because I became familiar with instruments so that the words became so important the spoken word the written word and finally the sung word and most of the evidence happened in Chicago but then the person known as Grant moved to New York and then that met a very dynamic director most of you know of if you had that better but anyway because that's terrible well it's one of the letters of association and that association I think changed the careers I know it certainly my career I think it got the careers of both of us and there were also some directors made both of them and I already got outside the box but they acted outside the box and of course I can't forget the great Woody King who Junior was in the Vandar of the women's movement and I think he still is because he would hire women the stage managers women backing directors he was just right there from the beginning hiring women I can't mention everyone of them if you remember people used to start up their noses at commercials until Lawrence Olivier decided to speak with Kodak and then it was quite alright but I must remember Roy Eaton who was gave me my first opportunity to start writing commercials then and performing on commercials and that's why there was all of us not involved at MR2 the founder of the Mass Repertory Theatre he seemed possible to mention everyone who's been self-inclusive and helpful along the way as I traveled this yellow rick road and the location it seems that the most resistance that I ever faced was not really because of my year round 10 but more or less because of gender and the case in point there was a time when Andrea or not many of you may know a French American and Elliot Tiger wanted to do a musical using the music of Jacques Brel that had not been heard in the States at that time and so when they first mentioned that they came to me and they wanted me to do the English lyrics to Andrea's translations because Jacques Brel had a great social conscience and when they first mentioned to someone I understand the first thing the person said, well she's a woman I wasn't sure but it meant because Jacques Brel was a man I shouldn't do the work or a woman to develop him in this project but if you recall my man's gone now who wrote that? my man's gone now women can write for for men just as men can write for women it reminds me of this incident but she's a woman that's just why it's so important to have the lead to set some point we came to realize and I'm glad I was there on the ground floor we came to realize that before we could ask others to appreciate us we have to appreciate ourselves celebrate ourselves and thank goodness that all of us came about I just want to say because of that support and despite the platforms and the detours along the way because of the community of women not only but the community of this form that began before the lead because of that community this skin from Chicago traveled along managed to stay on that road until she got to this podium and it's better to script to the script than the way they talk too much but I want to say from the bottom of my heart I thank you so much the profession of the other women and I'm so proud to be of you next year