One day, around 2003, she recalled, Auburn came to see me “because I was so depressed about it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you try changing the gender of your protagonists?’” (Auburn, contacted by email, confirmed that he was good friends with Jordan, but said that he does not remember this incident.) In any case, narratives were a conventional strategy for female playwrights of the time.
“I took my most autobiographical work literally and became a man. And I called him ‘Boy,’” Jordan said. “Almost immediately people wanted to produce it.”
For Jordan, a longtime leader in the fight for gender parity in theater production, all of this was the context for the creation of Lillys, which began with playwrights Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. The catalyst, however, was their collective outrage, in the spring of 2010, that one of the season’s best-reviewed Off Broadway hits, Melissa James Gibson’s “This,” was ignored by existing awards bodies.
The new award was for “all who should receive awards and who should have “I’ve been getting awards and I haven’t done it,” said Jordan, who, with Juliana Nash, wrote the acclaimed musical “Murder Ballad.”
At the 2023 Lilly Awards, held in late November on the Playwrights Horizons “Stereophonic” set, hair and wig designer Cookie Jordan and actresses Liza Colón-Zayas and Ruthie Ann Miles were among those honored. Playwright Kirsten Greenidge and composer Georgia Stitt each received $25,000 awards, funded by Broadway producer Stacey Mindich, to buy them time to write.
