The percentage of plays penned by women that get staged is barely in the double digits in any given year, a gender gap that continues to plague the American theatre scene. But for the ninth year in a row, the Seattle Repertory Theatre (SRT) and Whidbey Island’s Hedgebrook Retreat are doing something about it with their Women Playwrights Festival. Celebrated New York writers Ellen McLaughlin (Iphigenia and Other Daughters), Naomi Iizuka (Skin), Caridad Svich (Any Place But Here), and Kathleen Tolan (Memory House) have been lured away from Broadway for one of the few national women’s drama festivals. In an environment that returning participant Tolan describes as “amazing, rich, generative, supportive, stimulating,” each of the four playwrights will spin their latest works-in-progress (see www.seattlerep.org for schedule), most far from complete, for their peers, the SRT dramaturges, and the lucky flies on the wall in the audience. After receiving input from all of the above, the playwrights will be whisked off to pastoral Hedgebrook to complete the creative process in seclusion.

Sept. 20-23, 2007