Out of nearly 400 applicants from 23 states and 22 countries, comprising TONY and Emmy (and other) award winners as well as those new to playwriting - covering subjects from Cannibalism to Nude Dinner Parties, Drag Kings to Godhood, Birthwork to Assassinations, our 2026 ROO Applicants have it all!  We are thrilled to introduce the 2026 ROO semifinalists! Adina Aaron - Textiles Lindsay Bourne - Some Place You Don't Have to Take Your Body with You  Ella Rose Chary - The Wrong Question Jayne Deely - Legacy Steph Del Rosso - Damage Control Penelope Gould - Untitled Women's House of Detention Play Zoë Kim - Famished Megan Medley - I'm God Mamie Parris - The Circle Sandy Rustin - Ladies Home Journal Project M.D. Schaffer - Untitled White Woman Militia Play Kimberly Senior - The Reinvention of Annie Besant Melisa Tien - Antidotes to Patriarch - A Series of Theatrical Events Ania Upstill - Ella, Annie, and Stella - a Drag King Musical Liza Wyles - The Raft

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...