Julia Jordan sets aside playwriting to achieve gender equality in theatre

One day in 2003, she recalled, Auburn came over “because I was really depressed about it. And he said, 'Why don't you try changing the genders of your heroes?'” (Auburn, reached by email, confirmed he was a good friend of Jordan's, but said He does not remember this incident.) Novels were, after all, a traditional strategy for women playwrights of the time.

“She literally took most of my autobiographical plays and made me male. I called him 'Boy,'” Jordan said. “Almost immediately people wanted to produce it.”

For Jordan, a longtime leader in the fight for gender equality in theatrical productions, all of this was context for the creation of the Lillies, which she started with playwrights Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. But the catalyst was their collective outrage, in the spring of 2010, when Melissa James Gibson's “This,” one of the best-reviewed songs of the Off-Broadway season, was snubbed by established award bodies.

the New medal It was for “both those who should receive awards, and those who should.” Owns “We got the awards and they didn’t get them,” said Jordan, who with Juliana Nash wrote the hit musical Murder Ballad.

At the 2023 Lilly Awards, held in late November in the “Stereophonic” set at Playwrights Horizons, hair and wig designer Cookie Jordan and actresses Lisa Colon-Zayas and Ruthie Ann Miles were among the honorees. Playwright Kirsten Greenidge and composer Georgia Stitt each received $25,000 in prizes, funded by Broadway producer Stacy Mendich, to give them time to write.