3GT Programs:
Developing women theatre-makers
3GT started with a single project, the Salon Reading Series: monthly staged readings of new plays written by a small cohort of seasoned Bay Area women playwrights “in their prime.” Under the leadership of Executive Artistic Director and Founding Playwright AJ Baker, 3GT has grown into a company that offers development opportunities to an ever-expanding group of women theatre-makers who reflect the uniqueness and diversity of our region. Our programs now include readings, works-in-progress, full productions and a New Works Festival drawn from five development projects: the Salon Series, GirlWrights, LezWritesBTQ, 3GT Innovators, and 3GT Investigates. These projects develop new plays written by Bay Area women for both traditional and experimental theatre, empower young women and girls, and nurture LBTQ playwrights. Hundreds of Bay Area theatre-makers who share our vision – across ages, perspectives and genders –now collaborate each year with 3GT to “put women’s work onstage, where it belongs.”
3GT Presents:
Connecting our community
3GT’s performance initiative, “3GT Presents!” invites audiences to experience the voices of Bay Area women playwrights at the venue that suits them best, whether that’s a traditional downtown theatre or an alternative performance space around the Bay (including community meeting places, parks, schools and workspaces). We offer all staged readings and our New Works Festival completely free to the public, and we invite audience members to “pay what you wish” at the door for our full theatrical productions and scratch works-in-progress. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to join us.
“[It’s] worth raising a glass to the brave, talented, often undersung women who’ve paved the way forward to this moment against great odds. . . Change is possible.”
-R. WEINER-KENDT, AMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE (2018)
We’re the change!
3GT was founded in 2011 for the express purpose of challenging the cultural bias that favors men’s voices over women’s on stage. At that time, fewer than 20% of plays produced by the American mainstream theatre establishment in any given year were written by women. Although change was afoot, in 2017 industry watchdog Theatre Communications Group noted “when it comes to the status of female playwrights in the American theatre, the long arc of history is bending toward parity-but so slowly, almost imperceptibly, that you’d be forgiven for despairing.” But recent data is more optimistic. Despite the Dramatists Guild’s findings that as of 2018, national production of plays by women overall is still languishing below 30% , TCG says the percentage of new plays by women getting production “has leapt breathtakingly in recent years.” 3GT is a part of that leap!
