BECHDEL PROJECT and Ensemble Studio Theatre Announce the   World Premiere Reading of Jeanne Dorsey’s play, THE KIT: MADE BY MARTHA, as Part of the Alfred P. Sloan 2023 First Light Festival. Bechdel Project and Ensemble Studio Theatre will present the world premiere reading of Jeanne Dorsey’s play, The Kit: Made by Martha, directed by Jackson Gay, on May 7th (3pm)  and 8th (7pm) in New York City at Alchemical Studios ( 50 W 17th St.) Reserve tickets here. Commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project , and developed with support from Bechdel Project’s year-long ROO Residency , The Kit: Made by Martha explores the life and work of Martha Goddard, inventor of the first standardized rape kit. While working a crisis hotline for runaway teenage girls in 1972 Chicago, Goddard ponders how rape could be investigated as an actual crime rather than a made-up story. At a time when sexual violence in America is rarely prosecu...

Bechdel Project has announced Jeanne Dorsey as the recipient of the inaugural Room of One's Own (ROO) Writer's Residency. During the residency, Ms. Dorsey will fully develop her new play "The Kit: Made by Martha," which was a 2021  Ensemble Studio Theatre /Sloan Commission. The play is inspired by Martha Goddard, whose sexual assault evidence collection kit revolutionized how cases against sexual assault perpetrators were built and standardized the compassionate treatment of rape victims without revictimizing them. This inaugural year the ROO Residency was open to feminist writers (of any intersection) looking to develop a new work based on women from history. Ms. Dorsey was selected for the ROO Residency from over 100 applicants from around the world. Jeanne Dorsey Jeanne Dorsey is a New York based writer of plays, screenplays, teleplays, and essays. Her work has been published by Seal Press, Smith and Krauss, Heinemann Press, and Applause Books and produced by Ensem...

Ever wonder why even many narratives written by women don't past the Bechdel test? Chimamanda Adichie explains the danger of a single story.

We all talk about the Bechdel Test all the time, because it's so simple: Does a story have two women who talk to each other, about something other than a man? But almost every time it comes up, we all dismiss it, because it's too simple or too arbitrary. But actually, the Bechdel Test is more important than anyone realizes. Alison Bechdel came up with the Bechdel Test in the panels of her comic Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985, and it was just in the form of one woman explaining her "rule" about movies to another: In the past, Bechdel herself has seemed weirded out by the attention to the Bechdel Test, and not sure whether she wanted some kind of all-encompassing metric named after herself. But she's recently become more open to the idea. In a blog post last year, she wrote: I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral... But in recent years I've been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is abou...

Audiences and creators know that on one level or another, there’s an inherent gender bias in the movie business — whether it’s the disproportionately low number of films with female leads, the process of pigeonholing actresses into predefined roles (action chick, romantic interest, middle-aged mother, etc.), or the lack of serious character development for women on screen compared to their male counterparts. What’s challenging is quantifying this dysfunction, putting numbers to a trend that is — at least anecdotally — a pretty clear reality. One of the most enduring tools to measure Hollywood’s gender bias is a test originally promoted by cartoonist  Alison Bechdel  in a 1985 strip from her “Dykes To Watch Out For” series. Bechdel said that if a movie can satisfy three criteria — there are at least two named women in the picture, they have a conversation with each other at some point, and that conversation isn’t about a male character — then it passes “The Rule,” whereb...