Now in its 17th season, the Centenary Stage Company Women Playwrights Series is dedicated to providing a working forum for the unique and underserved voice of women writing for the theatre today. Through a playwright residency and workshop program sponsored in part by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, each year WPS showcases new works by a women playwrights in a developmental program that offers each playwright the opportunity to work for a short, intense rehearsal period with professional directors, actors, and staff, mounting and rewriting the play for a public forum.

The Centenary Stage Company is accepting submissions for the upcoming 2009 Women Playwrights Series (WPS) which will feature TWO initiatives:

• Project 1
  3 new plays are selected for a collaborative workshop process, with a professional director and actors, which takes place over a period of a approximately 1 week, allowing time for the playwright to hear their work and make any adjustments they would like to make.
• Project 2
  A short-play “challenge” contest, based on The Harvard Mastadon
  

Plays presented in the developmental WPS program are under consideration for full production in a subsequent season at the Centenary Stage Company, the professional, Equity theatre in residence on the campus of Centenary College. The many plays which have successfully transitioned from development to production now include the popular Tillie Project about local legend, Tillie Smith, Inventing Montana, by Jeanne Murray Walker, Dreamhouse, by Darrah Cloud (recently named as an exciting new playwright to develop works for Broadway for Disney), Alice in Ireland, by Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding co-creator, Judy Sheehan, and this year’s The Strange Misadventures of Patty…, by Allison Moore. Many of these works have appeared on the stages of New York, Louisville's Humana Festival, Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Carnegie Mellon and many more.

Each workshop performance, open to the public at no charge, is an exciting exchange of new ideas, public feedback and conversation with the playwright, which can often inspire subtle and defining alterations to the script for the final rewrite. Past playwright residents have included a wonderful array of talented writers, including: