 Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I'm, Tim Sanford, is my honor to welcome the Lily Awards, once again, to Playwrights' Horizons. It feels really great that even though this award, which is the only really feel good award of this season, that you may have outgrown us, but you're still here. And you're going to come to our warm embrace every year as long as you want to be here. So let me introduce our host for the evening, I think, at Julia and Wendell. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Marsha Norman and Julia. Tonight, the Lilies are celebrating partnerships, friends who have worked together for years, like us. We are also here to announce that the Lily Awards Foundation is partnering with Space at Ryder Farm, Williamstown and Sundance, all of whom are working to make their programs more family-friendly, places where artists with kids are not excluded for any reason, financial or otherwise, beautiful places where artists and children can thrive. We have also begun a new partnership with Samuel French to honor a theater every year that has achieved parity. Also here to celebrate and announce the Count, a profound study initiated by Julia and conducted by the Lily Awards and the Dramatist Guild. We have counted all the productions in the American theaters over the past three years. We know which theaters are producing the work of women and which are not. And in July, we are going to name, name, but here's a happy spoiler alert. Thanks to the efforts of the Lilies and the Kilroyes and everybody working for parity in the American theater, we have moved this parity needle forward 10% since 2001. Tonight's band is part of the all-female jazz band Diva. We had intended to join with them to protest the 30 years of the all-male band Jazz at Lincoln Center. But just last week, Lincoln Center put out a statement saying that they had heard the call and they were finally instituting blind auditions. This has the Tony party to get to, and the rest of us have to get to the West Bank. So let's get this party started. Please welcome to the stage our MC for tonight, Lisa Fros. Each time I see a little girl of five or six or seven, I can't resist a joyous urge to smile and say, thank heaven for little girls. For little girls, get bigger and write plays. Plays, people, we write plays. Thank heaven for little girls. We grow up and also direct plays, design plays, produce plays, star in play, stage manage plays, compose music for plays and musicals, and, hello, we build motherfucking sets in the most delightful ways. Those little eyes so helpless and appealing, but every day we kick the shit through the glass ceiling. Thank heaven for little girls. We are gathered here to set aside that antiquated view that plays are just what little boys do. Welcome to Lily's Folly. I'm Jean Rosenthal, and I invented the art of lighting design. I'm not kidding, it didn't exist before me. Shows I designed include West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cabaret, just to name a few. I'm Margo Jones. I co-directed the original production of The Glass Menagerie and founded the theater that launched America's regional theater movement. I'm Aleen Bernstein, a leading set and costume designer of the first half of the 20th century, and first woman admitted to the United Scenic Artists Union where I was sworn in as Brother Bernstein. Nell Nugent, I'm Liz McCann. As McCann Nugent, we dominated Broadway for a decade, winning five Tonys in five straight years. Good job. I am Susan Glassbell, one of the most celebrated playwrights of my generation, winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize and founder of the Provincetown Players, where I discovered Eugene O'Neill. British critics consider me a better writer. Any idea who wrote six commercial blockbuster hits for Broadway, including Gentleman Prefer Blancs, Gigi, and The Social Register? That would be me, Anita Loose. Things I did. Let's just say almost everything significant that ever happened off Broadway was either started or influenced. Tension must be paid to these great, goes to one of the greatest of the great ladies of the theater, Ms. Chita Rivera, and presenting her with Lili Award, four-time Tony Award winner, and a worshiper of great ladies, Terrence- Really a tough act to follow, wow. Oh, God, I was supposed to be, already I fucked up, I was supposed to be scorching, pardon, come here. It's a classic theater story. In 1954, Chita Rivera went with a friend to audition for the touring company of Call Me Madam, and ended up winning the role for herself. From there she went to Can Can and Guys and Dolls. If there was a crack dancing ensemble, she was in it. But then, on September 26, 1957, she created the role of Anita in West Side Story and became a star. This is embarrassing. There is no star like Chita. She's received the Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She won her first Tony for The Rink, and she is nominated for a third this Sunday for her masterclass of a performance in The Visit. Thanks to you, Terrence. Now, this part's a little more personal, so I want to look at you while I say it. I try to read it too, because I'm a terrible actor, and I can't remember what I wrote. Chita, thank you for teaching me that great acting is something done with the entire body, not just speaking the playwright's lines. And thank you for always setting the moral bar of excellence in theater. Discipline, respect for your scene partner, unending good humor, and above all, hard work. A bar so high that it's always there to challenge and inspire us, including the playwright. You are the mother of everyone in this room today and a great, great teacher. It takes a life to become a legend. Your life. And for the gift of that life, the first ever legendary Lily Award goes to Chita Rivera. But I get to hit it on your neck. Wow. I'm glad I hung around this long. And it's a long time, even though it doesn't feel like it, but I have had an absolutely blessed life. I've hung around with the best people. I've met and worked with the best people. Two of them are sitting on the stage right now. Graciela is my soul sister. Absolutely my soul sister. And Terrence, I don't think I've said an original word since I met you. Everything that comes out of my mouth is Terrence's. And I sing candor, and it's just a blessed life. And the visit is just something that I never, even though it was 14 years getting here, I never ever expected for it to be the piece that it is at the Lyceum Theater right now. Now, I wrote something and I'd like to read it. I prefer speaking from my heart, but this is from my heart on the paper. Thankfully, and this is so good. Times have changed since the great Lillian Hellman and other women achieve have barged through doors marked men only. Today, we have a sewing bee of women, not only in the arts, but also politics, medicine, and sports. They do not plead to be heard, but demand to be heard. Their persistence obviously pays off, judging from the awards received for their efforts. The Lillian Awards is to be commended for celebrating these contributions. For me to receive the legendary Lillian Award is an honor to be cherished. And I shall cherish it for the rest of my life, which I hope is another 81 years. Do you believe that? I don't believe it. There's nothing we can't do, gals. There's nothing we can't do. And everything still works, so all you have to do in the morning is just wake up, pick it up and put it down, and you've got plenty of time left. So all I can say now is let's go grab a beer and watch the Yankees. Let's see, ow. It's not the same for everybody. Mr. Rivera, it's just not the same. I want to say that for that opening number, I was very excited to use this top hat that I stole from the costume shop in my college 30 years ago and was saving apparently for tonight. And I just noticed right before the show started that it says inside, Mr. Rivera. So I believe we might be married. I would like to thank our Follies Girls in the opening number, Amanda Green, Charlene Woodard, Heidi Schreck and Issa Davis. Also, Georgia Stitt, who arranged that number, Lee Silverman, who staged it. This amazing band who played it. And the Ziegfeld Club and Laurie Sanderson, who lent, not only lent those incredible headdresses, their vintage headdresses from the actual Ziegfeld Follies, and they lent them from their collection. But this year, they have launched a new award, the Billy Burke Ziegfeld Award for Female Composers. Next, Lily, is going to be presented by the collaborator of this recipient. We are celebrating tonight a cellist and a composer who, since the 1970s, has brought jazz to the American theater. One of her most thrilling pieces was Running Man, which she wrote with Linda Twine and the celebrated poet Cornelius Edie. So please, to present this award, welcome Cornelius Edie to the stage. Deidra Murray has lived a life of pure passion. Come on. Come on, take your medicine, come on. I hope she isn't leaving. Deidra Murray has lived a life of pure passion and devotion to the cello and jazz. She has composed without ceasing and has performed all over the world, establishing the cello as an instrument for jazz and new world music. This is not a life that has put her in the spotlight, which she would probably hate anyway. But it puts her in our spotlight tonight. A brilliant woman at work every day. At the Whitney, in Holland, in Harlem, in Santa Fe, with the Manhattan Brass Quintet at the Walker Art Museum in Santa Fe, at the Japan Society in Switzerland at Bard College. Whenever they care about jazz, Deidra Murray has been there, writing for performers who love her and performing for audiences who are eager to hear what she hears. I was fortunate enough to write three pieces with her. One of them, Running Man, was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. This has been and also has been, personally, one of the grandest adventures in my life. One of the things that I think I hear over here sometimes is that African-American males and women don't always get along. You can't prove it by me. So, for her life, producing work of rigor and beauty for the path she has cleared for young women composers, wherever they are, for the terrors she has faced and the triumphs she has achieved. The Lely Award for Distinguished Musical Composition goes to my friend, Deidra Murray. Surprise, this is like crazy. It's funny when I was sitting here with my husband and I almost didn't come today, it was like, I'm serious. I was listening to the ladies play and I was saying, wow, they really sound great. Really, and you know, it's really weird. I spent my whole life as a musician in jazz and I remember many years ago I was a curator at this place called PS 122 and I saw theater for the first time and I said to myself, I think I could do that. And so, it's been really a long journey and I'm just really kind of surprised. Thank you so much and thank you, what a surprise. Thank you, thank you. As you probably know, every year at the Lilies we look for a son, a hardworking son who is the president of something like Jujamsen theaters so that he can present an award to his mother who is also a producer. Luckily this year, once again, we did it. So please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage, Jordan Roth. One of the great perks of my gig is getting to give an award to my mother. And let it be known that Marcia Norman reported that I said yes faster than any other presenter as it should be. Among her 90 productions over almost 30 years, my mother has produced a record seven Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. Count them, seven. And she has been fiercely devoted to every single one of them. From finding the peace, to nurturing the writer, to assembling the perfect team, to courting the investors, to bringing in the audience sometimes one by one by the hand. She comes from the whatever it takes school of producing. She has two musicals on Broadway right now, Kinky Boots, and it should have been you. And on any given night, you can find her knocking on dressing room doors offering a hug, a shoulder, an ear, or even a dress for the Tonys. She also comes from the mothering school of producing. I actually think she invented that one. She runs a theater complex downtown where she hosts small musicals for the next generation and big happenings of sensory delight, fully supporting others' rights to get splashed during their theater experience even as she stands off to the side in the dry zone. Among the many awards and grants she gives her annual Creative Spirit Award. And then there are the many things she receives. Honorary trustee of Lincoln Center Theater, one of Crane's 100 most influential women in business, twice, a New York living landmark, a Broadway association visionary leader, and enough lifetime achievement awards to fill many glorious lifetimes. But the Lily Awards don't give out awards for any reason other than that the winner totally rocks. And so she does. Darrell Roth, you make it. No wait, there's more. You make it happen. You make great plays, great musicals. You inspire people and you do it all looking totally chic. So, for keeping the American theater safe for playwrights, for making musicals that run and run, and for being such a producing pro, the Lily Award for ongoing achievement in an astonishing lifetime goes to the great Darrell Roth. The thing I do the best is make great sums. Thank you, sweetie. I appreciate your beautiful words and I appreciate this honor and I appreciate your being here. I know you have 17 other things that you have to do tonight, so it's great that you came out for mom. To Marsha, Julia, Teresa, Lisa, and everyone at the Lily Awards, I thank you. I'm very honored to be included in this occasion and I'm inspired by all of you in the room. I'm sorry I sound so stuffy now, he just makes me cry. Hold on, that's classy. Okay, okay. Anyway, one of the most fulfilling things about producing is having the opportunity to use my passion to affect people's lives by the work that I choose to present. I've always been inspired by stories that make people feel something and that can change minds and attitudes and have audiences leave the theater maybe a little bit smarter, a little bit more, enlightened, empowered, and hopefully encouraged to do something based on what they might have just seen and experienced in the theater. I also look for plays that shed light on women's stories, those that encourage my daughter and my granddaughter's generations to find their own strength, truth, confidence, and understanding. How I learned to drive, wit, proof, love loss in what I wore and currently it should have been you which has a wonderful message about family, about love, and about accepting oneself. That one thought, accepting oneself, for who you are is a theme that I now realize looking back has been woven through my career and in part I thank my son. So as I process lifetime achievement and what it means to me, I recall an interview in which Vera Wang said, survival is not a small thing. I feel close to failure every day and these words resonated so deeply with me, not to be morbid, but in our world of theater we live with that constant sense of possibility, the imminent failure. But what it all comes back to, I think for all of us, is the passion. It's not about failure, what defines that word anyway. It's about how much you love what you do. We all live with that sense of potential risk, the fear, the what if, but if we keep going for the love of the thing itself, then that's it. I love theater, I love stories, I have great admiration for writers and creative people and the possibilities of what can be when we all work together. I'm grateful for this award and I appreciate that it might be given to me for perseverance or tenacity or loving what I do and if so, I graciously accept on those terms. It's even more special for me to share the ceremony with such remarkable women who have given so much of their talent and their gifts. I look forward to the amazing work I know they will continue to create. Onward and thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure, I welcome to the stage a woman who is a distinguished Lily Award winner herself, a champion of the work of women and for over 500 years, the artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club. Please welcome Lynn Meadow. Almost ended just there on that entrance. God, that would have been dramatic. You have 500 years. Well, for 499 of them, I've known Marcia Norman and maybe 450, Julia Jordan and Teresa and I just wanna say before I go on to present this, what this means to me personally and to all of us here, what you've done for women who toil in the theater and yearn to toil in the theater. This celebration is not like anything else and we all deserve it. Thank you so much for doing this. So this is great, 500 years, that's the theme. But it took me about a second after Joe Mantello gave me Lisa DeMors' new script that he was directing for Steppenwolf to decide to bring her beautiful play, Airline Highway, to MTC's Friedman Theater. If you haven't seen it, I really hope that you will go see it because there's nothing else like it on Broadway now. The moment I began to read this play, I was transported to New Orleans, to Airline Highway. This wondrous play saw me through a whole night in a neighborhood I never could have found on my own. It gave me a woman's life there, her neighbors, her friends, the community and the family that she created and then it took her life away. The play, like all celebrations that erupt in life spontaneously or not and are then gone. It's a treasure this play, like all things that we value but cannot pass along to another generation unless a writer, a great theater writer, puts them on paper and gives them to us in the theater. Lisa brought to life a work that will endure. It's a gorgeous, bluesy counterpoint sung by the residents of the Hummingbird Motel in a parking lot. It's a choir of 16 souls whose voices seldom get heard and are seldom seen on the stage. Lisa created that poetry and that music and I'm so proud they're singing every night on 47th Street and I'm really proud to present the Lillia Ward in playwriting to the brilliant Lisa D'Amour. Thank you so much, Lynn and Julia and Marcia and everyone who works to keep this amazing organization going. This is a true honor. Yesterday I was standing out in this vast meadow at Longwood Gardens just outside of Philadelphia with my collaborators, designer Mimi Lien and Katie Pearl who's a director, working on a giant site specific theater experiment and part of the play involves the audience sitting on a hill and watching this giant futuristic megaphone get lifted up a 60 foot tower and then plugged into the earth. And as I stood there kind of watching Katie direct actors on walkie-talkies and Mimi like out there in the distance working with rigors to make this epic feat happen, I thought, huh, we actually really know what we're doing. And then I also thought, one of my second thoughts I thought about tonight was like, how did I get here in the middle of this vast meadow? And I was really not sure who to thank tonight. Was it gonna be playwrights or was it gonna be teachers? And what I decided to do was make a list. I work in traditional theater and then I work in the museum theater touring circuit and site specific theater. So I made a list of all of the heads of organizations that have made my work manifest. And it actually doesn't take that long to read. So I'm just gonna go ahead and read it because it's really interesting I think. And many of these people you'll know. So check this out. Oh, and this is kind of in the order of their appearance in my life over the course of like 20 years, okay. Julie Abert, Vicky Boone, Susan Zeter and David M. Cohen, Alyssa Adams, Carlo Cuesta, Polly Carl, Todd London, Kristen Martin, Susan Bernfield, Maria Stryer, Phillip Byther, Steve Boussa and Miriam Must, Cindy Garrig, Peter Brocius, Eleanor Savage, Moira Brennan, Loretta Greco and Lisa McNulty, Gene Wagner, Ruby Lerner, Deborah Simon, Tim Sanford, Ancha Ogle, Vallejo Gantor, Karen Farber, Deborah Singer, Aimee Hayes, Martha Lavey, Howard Shawwitz and Lynn Meadow. So if you listen to that list, 70% of those names are women. And the men who are on the list are all men who have been incredible champions of women's voices. So when I look at that list, I don't see a theater that is male dominated or that is driven by money or that is scrambling for an audience. I see a theater that's filled with bravery and risk and vitality and that's looking to the next frontier. So it was really incredible. And I know that a lot of you know the names on those lists. And I feel like the theater that I am trying to make and trying to live in is actually here in this room. So I thank you so much for this award. And I think we should all have great hope for the future. And on that theme of the future to present the Leah Ryan Prize, please welcome the Lily's Director of Outreach, Kuzy Cram. Hello. So my friend, Leah Ryan was an award winning playwright, an essayist, a gifted teacher and a writer of post-modern greeting cards. She was smart and she was cool and she was funny and she was a true woman of letters. Before her death from leukemia in 2008, Leah had not yet achieved everything that she wanted to as an artist. And when I spent time with her in her last weeks, one of the things she was most concerned about was all the writing that she hadn't gotten to yet. After her death, her family and friends created the Leah Ryan Prize to honor her memory and to encourage an emerging female playwright to keep writing at all costs. And for those of you out there who are feeling perpetually emerging or submerged in rejection, I encourage you to write your plays no matter what. Our time here is short but good stories are infinite. And I feel like we need some more infinite stories by women in the world. So, and as per Leah's specific request, the fund is expanding its mission this year and offering a 5,000 grant called the Vladimir named after her IV to a writer facing a serious illness through a partnership with the Authors League Fund. Leah was an incredibly generous person. She was very generous and kind and I feel like we should follow her example in that way too. So, keep writing and also don't be an asshole. So, on behalf of Bukela Bru, can you come here? The winner this year is not an asshole, I'm so happy. So, on behalf of the board of the prize, I would like to introduce you to the wildly talented Bukela Bru. She is the winner of this year's 2015 Leah Ryan Prize for her astounding play. It is so good. It's called Miller Mississippi. You know how sometimes dumb people say that women write small plays about small things? Well, if they say that, I really, really suggest you point them to Bu's play. It is a searing and honest play which examines the violent legacy of slavery and racism in the South in a family over a 30 year period. This play is so timely and important and I just really want someone to produce it because I personally want to see it. And I feel like there's a lot of producers in the room. So, I haven't, you know, this is good. We're gonna do a really starry reading tomorrow at 7 p.m. at primary stages as part of it. And Bu, I have a check for you which I left at home, but I'm gonna give that to you too. And Bu, we're so, so excited that you're the winner this year and it couldn't be for a more wonderful person and a more wonderful play. Thank you so, so much. I am beyond honored to receive such a special, special award. And thank you especially to the Leah Ryan board for women writers. I am a playwriting fellow at Juilliard and Leah was as well. And through Marcia Norman and through Chris Durang, I've had the privilege to learn about Leah's spirit and wit and talent and of course of her strength. Every single opportunity that I have had in my writing career has come from the support of women. Every single one of them. I was thinking about it today and it's accurate. Women are the reason I started writing and women are the reason I'm gonna continue writing. When I was studying acting in college, I played Arlene in Marcia Norman's beautiful play Getting Out. And as part of my actor's homework, I researched Marcia and her body of work and I became enamored and a little obsessed. And now as my friend, and as my teacher, I can honestly say that Marcia has gone above and beyond my expectations, the expectations of an 18 year old girl's crush, which is huge because 18 year old girls' crushes are like no joke. And this year when I brought in this play to Juilliard and before we read it out loud, I was spazzing and I was just going on and on about how much I hate myself and all this kind of stuff. And I said, I'm sorry I'm being so weird, I'm just really scared. And Marcia looked at me and she said, weird is good, scared is good, let's read it. And we read it and with Marcia's support, I'm a lot less scared of it. Still really weird, but she says good, so it's okay. Okay, one last thing. My mother woke up at 3 a.m. this morning to fly for Mississippi to be here right now. And my mother has flown from Mississippi to New York every single time any of my work is done. And my mother who is Southern born and bred did not flinch when I told her I wanted to move to New York and be in the theater. And a couple of years ago I was really sad and I called her and I was like, I think I'm just gonna throw in the towel and move to Mississippi and open a yoga studio and she said, she said no, no ma'am. She said, I did not raise you to quit. And I wanna say to all of you who are many of my dear friends and my teachers and my mentors and mothers and daughters and sisters, thank you all for raising me. I promise you that I sure as hell won't quit. And Leah, I won't quit. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you so, so, so much. Thank you. And now we'll Shaquina Nefek come to the podium please. The 2004 met Arthur and stage door. She was like no one I'd ever met be just the beginning. Producer, writer, performer, director. She's got the best of taste, you know if you've met her. She's certainly not scared to offend her stage. Damn. Shaquina is a many splendored thing. Shaquina is a many splendored thing. Dancer, doctor, PhD starts her own damn factory. Shaquina is a many fender thing. Oh, Shaquina is a many splendored thing. I messed up the words but what happened? And then there was her vagina. Remember that one time, yeah. Kickstarted your vagina. And somehow found the time to give birth. To have an idea and build it. Eight thousands raised, you willed it. You said you saw a need and just filled it. But you're so much more to the rise of many splendored. Shaquina is a many splendored. Shaquina is a many splendored. That building and sustaining a loving and like-minded community is the greatest task and that our art is only as great as the person we become while doing it. You work in a studio, you pay for yourself, helping young women find their voices for the musical theater. So we thought we'd give you a little rent money and the first billy award for working miracles here to $5,000, Shaquina and I. Shita Rivera. Long time ago, a mentor of mine said that at every great moment in your life you have to face the fear that you're gonna be exposed as a fraud. And last year when I sat right there and watched Rebecca win this award and I had just hit the deadline of raising the money for my vagina. She so eloquently put in song. I looked around this room and the stage of this incredible community of women making theater and music and I thought, this is the community that I wanna be a part of and the community I've wanted to be a part of my entire life and I would just wanna thank you and all the Lillie Award nominators for recognizing the work that I've been doing. Boo asked me when we sat down, like what is working miracles? I didn't know that was the name of my award. You make things up and it's great. Um, so Boo said, what is making miracles? What miracles do you make? And I said, well, I guess I've done a couple things in the last year that feel a little miraculous. And she said like what? I said, well, I started a theater company and got a vagina. And that's kind of a lot to do in a year. There are a million women I can thank. I'm gonna thank two and then I'm gonna say one more thing. First I wanna thank my mom who's here also flew out from across the country to be here. Trust me when I tell you it hasn't been easy. So thank you for being here and standing by me the whole time. And I also wanna thank someone who I don't think is here today, but Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company, who took a wild risk when she plucked me out of the queer Chicana performance art scene in LA and gave me the chance to produce and direct and write and perform and choreograph at her company. So big ups to Julie Boyd for that. And I just wanna say something like the elephant in the room about transgender representation in the American theater and in feminism overall. I think we've come to a really, really exciting moment in feminism where we're realizing that the definition of womanhood is so much broader than we might have once conceived it to be. And I encourage you all of you to reflect on the fact that while not every woman's experience is a transgender experience, but every trans woman's experience is a woman's experience. And to factor that in to your understanding of feminism. I also think that there's something really unique that trans feminism teaches us because to me it's not just about changing genders. I talked about in one woman's show, it's about transcending, just going beyond. And it's about crossing this border that feels very real and is very physical, but is ultimately imaginary. And something about trans feminism that I think is so cool is that it can teach us all to be better advocates for anyone who finds themselves challenging an imaginary line drawn in the sand that tells them they're less than someone else. And that goes way beyond gender. There are a lot of borders that people are working to cross and they deserve the right to do that. So, thank you. Really great. Okay, please welcome a wonderful playwright and actor and a friend of mine. Please welcome for the next, to present the next Lily Award, Heidi Shrek. I have to prepare the medal. Recognize Quincy Tyler Bernstein from her unforgettable performance in Lynn Nottage's play, Ruin. Or maybe you saw her in Sarah Rule's play about the vibrators or in the misanthrope at New York Theater Workshop. Maybe you know her from We Are Proud to Present by Jackie Civil's Jewelry or The Ladies and Mr. Burns by Anne Washburn and The Civilians. Or maybe you saw her incredible performance in my play, Grand Concourse, right here at Playwrights Horizons last year. Or maybe you saw her first performance on stage as she sang Sunrise Sunset to her grandparents in kindergarten. No, okay, well. Then you saw her at Williamstown or at the O'Neill or Sundance or Willie Mammoth or Berkeley Rep or the Mark Taper Forum. You get what I'm saying. Every playwright wants to work with Quincy Tyler Bernstein because QTB is an artist who inspires playwrights. And despite how much TV you've seen her in, she loves the theater best. Rosalyn Russell said that acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly. Quincy steps on stage with that force of bravery and vulnerability every time, without armor or tricks, challenging all of us to drop the mask. I call her Mighty Bernstein, The Truth Machine. We are all looking forward to the next time we see you on stage, Quincy. But tonight it is our incredible honor to give you the Lily Award in acting. This speech that I wrote seems so inadequate now. But I'm just gonna read it. This is so inspiring. It's such an honor to be on this stage with these incredible women in this theater, which is so very dear to me, surrounded by these incredible people for whom I have so much love and respect and admiration. Thank you to Julia and Marcia and Teresa and Lisa and everyone at the Lily Awards Foundation for this honor. Thank you, everyone who nominated me. I must admit, Julia, when she left me a somewhat urgent sounding voicemail several weeks ago, telling me that I needed to call her back right away. And I immediately assumed that an actress had dropped out of something and that you were calling me to do a reading, which I would have been happy to do, but I'm really happy to be here. I certainly wouldn't be standing here without my family. I wanna quit all of the time and they always encouraged me to keep going. My beautiful boyfriend, Rick, who's here with me. I just wanna say I wanna thank every single playwright I've ever worked with. Heidi, I love you. Truly from the bottom of my heart, you are the reason that I stand here in this moment. It is your genius and your vision and your faith in me that has landed me here. There are far too many playwrights to name, but Lynn Nottage and Anne Washburn and Lucas Nath and Kea Corthran and Jackie Zibley's Drury and Sarah Rule and David Achmi and Regina Taylor and Oni Faita Lampley, made you rest in peace. You all at some point in time have given me the opportunity to give breath and blood and life to your beautiful women and even Bart Simpson at one point in time. I've had the opportunity to play women much smarter and kinder and more patient and more generous and much stronger and far braver than I can ever hope to be in my own life. So I'm really lucky for those gifts. Thank you very much. I will treasure this. And not so fast, Heidi Shrek. I'd like to ask Stacy Midditch to come up on the stage, please. Hi. Hi, everybody. The Go Write a Play Award is just that. An award to a promising female playwright to go write a play. We need more good plays, especially plays by women telling the stories of women. Now in its third year, I am proud to report that we have an illustrious advisory council choosing the recipient, and our two past winners have had a productive year. Tanya Barfield, winner of the inaugural Go Write a Play Award, saw her play, Right Half Life, produced by the Women's Project this winter, directed by Lee Silverman. Anina Bieber, last year's winner, is putting the finishing touches on a draft of Suspending Disbelief, which is what she calls the play that I went and wrote. In addition to the $25,000 check that comes with the award, winners are entitled to a reading of their play at any stage of its development. They are also required to have lunch with me. At Orsa with the previous winners over the summer. The talk ranges from the challenges of writing and getting produced, to the challenges of raising kids and living in New York City while doing so, and whatever else you wanna talk about. This year it will be a table for four, and I'm excited to announce that the winner of the Go Write a Play Award is Heidi Schreck. I mean, obviously I didn't prepare speech, but I just wanna thank you. It's a huge honor, and I'm incredibly moved, and I can't wait to have lunch with you, and to write the play I'll do that too. But I just wanna take this moment actually to thank Maria Irene Fornes, who was the reason I started writing plays. And I know you're over there, and I just wanna say I love you. Okay. Next for yet another Unscheduled Award, I would like to invite to the stage Linda Chapman. What a great night. Really, what a fabulous night this is. I'm so happy to be here. Now, I've watched this special award go to any number of gentlemen over the last six years, five years, and many times I've said, well, why doesn't Jim Nicola get that award? He's a Miss Lily if I've ever seen one. Well, Jim, this is your year. Please, come on. Turn around. I'm gonna say a little bit about the award. For those of you who don't know, Miss Lily is given annually to the man in New York City Theater who's done the most that year to promote, celebrate, and produce the work of women. Oh, he broke the tiara. Jim hasn't just promoted women's work this year. He has without anybody, well, anybody nudging him or asking him to respect parody. He's done it all on his own. So he's some kind of a prototype man, right? Turns out that our record is 50-50, Jim. That's the whole, the whole, the whole career. So whatever the reason, however that came about, let's say we need more Jim Nicola's, please. Listen, Jim, I love you. We've been friends for over 25 years, colleagues for more than 20 years. What else can I say? I mean, I love you, congratulations. Well, I'm not someone who's accustomed to being up here. I'm much happier back there and cheering others on who do beautiful things every day. Wow, I think the first thing that comes to my mind like Linda said, this accomplishment we're being recognized for at the workshop is certainly to some degree a conscious action of trying to make the world a better place. But I think personally, internally, what comes to my mind is Cassandra, who when I first encountered her in college when I was reading my ancient Greek plays, something clicked for me. This is a teller of things that people don't want to hear and she's a woman. And some things rang for me, connected to my mother. So it internalized, and I think it has the voices of women, the perspective of women on the world's affairs that have been dominated by men for eons has always been powerful to me. So it has been only pleasure and truth in doing what I've gotten to do. And I have to say, I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet. So thank you for this wonderful thing. And my first official act being Miss Lily, if we might, is to make a Miss Lily. If we might do that, is that possible? Oh, yes, we might. Like Linda said, we have been friends and colleagues for many, many years and it has been really a remarkable collaboration. I can't think of another one like it that I know of. And all I can say is that the workshop, body of work, whatever it might be, would not be what it is without her. So thank you, Linda. I don't know what else to say. I think it's great. I know we all want to get this over with so we can go party. And, you know, I love this community. I love the theater. What else can I do? There's nothing else to be done. And I found the perfect partner in Jim. The presenter of our next Lily award is the amazing Antoni award-winning Lynn Arons. I'm terrified to give this award because I don't think it will be good enough for the recipient, but I will try. Graziella Danielle is not only a world-class choreographer and director, a 10-time Tony nominee and a member of the Hall of Fame, but she is a woman of the world. And I mean that in the truest sense. She was born in Argentina. She self-educated herself to dance. She left home, I think, 12 or 15 to go and dance in Paris and study and learn and grow. And in Paris, she fell madly, passionately in love, not with a guy, but with a musical called West Side Story. And she learned that there was something called storytelling in dance and in movement. And she was so fascinated that she hurried to New York, where she learned from the likes of Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Agnes DeMille. She absorbed this knowledge and all her passion and her joy was turned to storytelling. And over the past however many years, she has shared this amazing wealth of her own talents and all the things she has learned as a woman of the world. Being open to new ideas, original ideas, daring ideas, scary ideas, she goes for it all. And she gives it to us, the many collaborators that she has worked with who just want to work with her again and again and again. In fact, we all hate each other because we're jealous of Grazzi and of her time. And we just want her for ourselves. We all call her my Grazzi, but she's really my Grazzi. She, my husband made a card with large type. I'm not even using it. Giving you an idea of how often one wants to work with her, my partner sitting down here, Stephen Flaherty, and I have done six shows with her. And the very first Broadway show that we ever did was called Once on this Island. It was done on this site in the, whoa. I thought it was electrical wires, but it's worse. It's the lilies. We did Once on this Island right here before this was this glamorous, beautiful building that it is. It was a hovel. And it had a green room with a couch that I'll never forget, smelled like a wet dog, it was scary. And Grazzi and Stephen and I, I think this was in 1990, did a little show called Once on this Island here and fell madly in love with one another and just have vowed to work together as often as we possibly can over these years. The next show that we did with her was a little show called Ragtime, where her work was legendary, magnificent, beautiful choreography like I had never seen before. Just unbelievable. And most recently we did a little show called Cheetah Rivera, The Dancer's Life, which leads me to the theme of tonight, which is collaboration and partnership and people working together again and again who love one another. We love Grazzi so much. Grazzi loves Cheetah so much. Cheetah loves Grazzi and Grazzi loves me. And we love Terrence and we all, just keep on loving each other in this theatrical circle of collaboration and partnership with women, with men. I'm making this up. I'm so excited to be here for her. I love her so much. So, did I say enough? Yes. The Lily Award in choreography, but also in my opinion in true humanity and true grace and true woman of the world, Ness, goes to Graziella Danielle. And I will add one more thing. In the lobby, there's a little snippet of lyric on that wall where all these quotes from the shows are and it's a lyric from Once on this Island. And I think it applies to this one here. Life is why, hope is why, you are why. We tell the story. Thank you. Let me start by warming up. I say that I'm thrilled in receiving the Lily. It grossly understates what I really feel. Let me tell you why. I was brought up by three extraordinary women, my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt Lydia, my mother's sister. They inspired me to dream, to passionately love life and work and people and to always try to be the best of myself, a task which I still today find rather challenging. Thanks to them, I study in the theater to Cologne in Buenos Aires, just like Lynn. She knows my life better than I do actually. And thanks to them, I went to Europe to, you know, dancing ballet companies. So, West Side Story came over here. I was very, very lucky. Within two months, amazingly, I was dancing on Broadway. From that moment on to today, I have worked with and learned from great teachers, great choreographers, directors, dancers, actors, and most of all, from my very favorite woman in the theater, who adopted me as her sole sister, the one and only Cheetah. I, later on, when I started choreographing a director, I had the privilege to work with some of the most brilliant people. Where are you? Hi. In the theater, creative minds in the theater. So, my life has been extraordinary. So fulfilling professionally and personally with a loving husband. However, as it happens in life, I lost my three women. However, today, surrounded by the sisters, my sisters, in the arduous but magical work in the theater. I realize that you have given me a gift, which is I have the honor of receiving this award in the name of my three beloved muses, my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt, whom I know bless you and thank you as deeply as I do. God bless. I would like to introduce the presenter of the final Lilly Award, and it is me. But, before I do that, I have been asked to tell you that there is a donation envelope for the Lilly's in your program. I am going to tell you some reasons you might wanna donate to the Lilly's. I had somewhere in all my pieces of paper a clean version of this. I no longer have it, so I'm gonna do my best to explain to you to give, no, no, thank you. Thanks, that's great. Thank you, but thank you, not gonna help. But I am gonna tell you, as coherently as I can, my reasons why you might wanna support the Lilly Awards. Number one, the Lilly Awards are making common cause with women artists in other fields who are facing the exact same barriers to parody. Women in jazz, for instance. Women in architecture, you might remember a couple years ago how incredible it was when Denise Scott Brown was up here talking to us. That, those are incredible connections and they're building a movement in that way. The Lilly's is also creating models to show theaters and writing colonies how they might make their programs workable for writers who happen to have young children. Most importantly, the Lilly's is also connecting all the women in theater who are coming together to fight this fight, like, for instance, the fantastic Kilroy's. The Lilly's did a series of reading of Kilroy's plays this year. Most importantly, the Lilly's is finally moving the needle on parody. 10% might not sound like enough, but that percentage has not moved in years. It's finally moving thanks to the Count. The Count is the most effective tool we have ever had to finally sweep away the old wrong assumptions about why women don't get more opportunities in the theater. And Julia Jordan and all the women in the staff of the Lilly's and the Dramatist Guild have been doing the grinding work of compiling these eye-opening statistics that are finally moving that needle. And I'm gonna tell you my argument for why parody matters. Because I think sometimes we can't quite find the right arguments about parody even though we know we feel that it's the right thing. And that's because the argument for parody isn't actually about fairness because theater isn't about what's fair. We don't want to go to see a play just because it's someone's turn to write that play. We don't. We wanna see a play that will rock our socks. Thank you, we'll do something incredible to us. Yes, that's what we wanna see. We want opportunities in the theater to go to people who are most likely to create the world, the work that will set the audiences on fire. And how do we know who these people are? We do not. Nobody does. That is unknowable. But what we do know is that if almost all the plays are written from people who come from essentially the same perspective, that is not a recipe for theatrical dynamism. Is made out of difference. It's made when we set people of all different perspectives, all different characters spread across the stage in what my partner Madeline George has brilliantly described as a democracy of consciousness. The theater is not where we go to see ourselves, actually. If we want to see ourselves, we can stay home and look in the bathroom mirror. Theater is where we go to be with other people and to see other people who are different from us. Shows like Fund Home and Hamilton aren't lighting up audiences in spite of their non-mainstream perspectives. They're doing it because of their non-mainstream perspectives. That's why we support diversity. That's why we support parody because they make the theater better. Listen, producing is always a leap of faith. It's always a leap of faith and producing organizations always make choices that are based on all kinds of things like design requirements, scheduling, class, a cast size. Why don't we just add parody to that list of considerations? Why don't we just commit? Why, just commit to, we can do it in a five-year cycle so there's plenty of flexibility, but just do it because there's no good reason not to and there's a big reason in favor of it as Jim Nicola and Linda Chapman have shown us as Tim Sanford and Playwrights Horizons have shown us do it because it makes theater better. If you want to support an organization that's interested in that, you might want to send the lilies some money. Okay, now, our final award is the Playwright Awards. Goes to this goddess, this goddess of the theater, this gift to all playwrights. I know, as many of you know, that there are few things, there are few greater gifts you can have than having Didi O'Connell in your play. No. Didi received more nominations than anyone else has ever received, I believe, for this award. It does say that, yes, in the entire history of the awards. Didi O'Connell received more nominations than anyone else in the entire history of the awards. And why is that? Well, let me ask this question. How many people have ever had a reading in which Didi O'Connell read apart? Raise your hand. How many people have ever seen Didi O'Connell in a reading? How many people, there's a third question here. How many people have ever seen it? How many people love Didi O'Connell? How about that? That, Didi, I give you the devoted service to playwrights award. That's check off. Check off, like, once we get it. I'm gonna talk really quickly and I'm gonna say everything I have to say but I'm gonna say it really fast because we can go. Thank you for this, from the bottom of my heart, getting the sweet and strong enforcement that this beautiful award embodies has made me think a lot about what I expected my life and work to feel like when I became the age that I am now. And I think, say, 30 years ago when I was considering it, I expected a lot less in terms of, than what I have gotten in terms of challenging, enriching roles to play and interesting, form-breaking, tough-minded, beautiful plays to play them in. And I really believe that this good stuff has happened to me because I have been lucky enough to be doing this work during an unprecedented renaissance in the work of women in the theater. I have been growing up during a creative explosion. I remember when it was rare to feel the weird shiver of recognition and understanding and access to feminine sensibilities in the theater and so seeing Joanne Acolytus' dress like an egg or Maria Irene Fornes' mud or Emily Mann's still life was a shock to the system to see the way Susan Lori Parks or Marlena Meyer or Connie Condon lay the words out on the page was a shock to the system to see a woman director was a shock. We are no longer so easily shocked, we expect to feel the impact of women on how stories are told, on who they are told about, on how we experience time, on how we learn lessons, on how it feels to be in our skin and maybe most of all on how we do this work at all. And that has been very good for me. And it is not just because of the work that I have been lucky enough to do by and with some pretty amazing women who many of whom are here right now, but also because many more men in the theater have been trained by women, have women as heroes and mentors and creative partners and the art form and all of us are enriched by that soup. From my very subjective perch, I am here to tell you that the theater is getting richer, odder, more true and tough and challenging and beautiful, not because women are learning how to write, direct, design and run shit more like men, but because men are learning to write, direct, design and run shit more like women. Lucky me. Come on, we'll see you at the party at the West Bank and we'll see you next year.