Tony nominee and Oscar winner Estelle Parsons; The Tank Artistic Director Meghan Finn; hair, wig, and makeup designer Cookie Jordan; lyricist and librettist Sheilah Rae; director Taylor Reynolds; performer Stephanie Berry; and director and dramaturg Mei Ann Teo are honored at the Theatre Women Awards June 7. The League of Professional Theatre Women’s virtual gala begins at 7 PM ET.
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Parsons is receiving the LPTW's Lifetime Achievement Award. The multi-hyphenate was last seen on Broadway in The Velocity of Autumn in 2014, for which she received her fifth Tony nomination. Although she has spent most of her professional life in the theatre, she is most widely known for her Oscar-winning performance in Bonnie and Clyde and her recurring role on the sitcom Roseanne. Her most recent NYC appearance was at Playwrights Horizons in Michael Friedman’s musical Unknown Soldier. As a director, she created the New York Shakespeare Festival Players for Joseph Papp in the 1980's.
Berry is the recipient of the Lee Reynolds Award, an award given to a female stage actor whose work has helped illuminate possibilities for social, cultural, or political change. Among her credits are Donja Love’s Sugar in Our Wounds and Emily Mann’s Gloria: A Life.
The Lucille Lortel Award is being bestowed on Taylor Reynolds, a New York-based director and one of the producing artistic leaders of The Movement Theatre Company. The award is reserved for a theatre woman with creative promise deserving recognition.
Finn has directed both nationally and internationally, and is being awarded the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award, for a woman artist showing great creative promise. Finn’s work includes premieres by playwrights Mac Wellman, Caitlyn Saylor Stephens, Julia May Jonas, and a film by Peggy Stafford.
The Ruth Morley Design Award, given to women theatre designers of all genres, is being presented to Jordan. Her work on Broadway includes Slave Play, The Cher Show, and Once on This Island, among others.
Rae is receiving a LPTW Special Award for her service to the industry as a lyricist and librettist, as well as her service to the League as former president. A Broadway alum, she has written a number of musicals with Michele Brourman and Debra Barsha, is a five-time Heideman Award finalist, and is currently working on a musical that she’s hoping to launch as a TV series.
Teo, a queer immigrant from Singapore, creates theatre across genres, including musical theatre, intermediate participatory work, reimagining classics, and documentary theatre, and is receiving the Josephine Abady Award as a woman theatre artist who has created work of cultural diversity.
The League of Professional Theatre Women has been leading the gender parity conversation in professional theatre for over 35 years with its mission to champion, promote, and celebrate the voices, presence, and visibility of women theatre professionals and to advocate for parity and recognition for women in theatre across all disciplines. To learn more, visit TheatreWomen.org.
