The Alcyone Festival

Each season we produce The Alcyone Festival, celebrating female playwrights. Because female playwrights are horribly represented on stages across America,  we created the Alcyone Festival to combat this directly, by celebrating the depth and breadth of women writers.

For our first annual Alcyone Festival, in the summer of 2008, Halcyon Theatre produced the works of 10 early female playwrights spanning almost 1000 years in rotating repertory. These works have been seldom (and mostly never) seen on contemporary stages.

For the Alcyone Festival 2009 we decided to play with the notion that women only write small domestic dramas, picking a theme as far away from that as possible: terrorism, the cult of martyrdom and its effects upon the innocents.  The Alcyone Festival 2009 featured six phenomenal writers from across the globe.

The Alcyone Festival 2010 celebrates the work of María Irene Fornés.

The theme for the Alcyone Festival 2011 will be Remixed, creating new works by women based off of classical texts by women. We will present new works using/adapting/sampling/re-envisioning . . . remixing classical plays written by women from Hrosvita (c. 935 to c. 1002) through 1800. The Alcyone Festival 2011 will celebrate both new and (really) old writers and see how the lineage of female playwrights over the past thousand years can inspire and inform contemporary audiences and artists.