Current playwright Catherine Weingarten just wrote a piece for the theater website Howlround. The piece is called “Creating Complex Female Characters” and discusses female character tropes and ways to break away. It also gives a little bit of writing advice for people who want to make their female characters a little more dynamic!
Here’s an excerpt:
Here is the kind of female character I want to see onstage: the flawed female character, the complex female character, the hot mess in search of something better female character. I want to go to plays and see women who aren’t “perfect” or “strong” but have humanity. In my own plays, I tell stories about myself and the women in my life. I love writing female characters with flaws because that’s real. I don’t want to go to a play about some perfect chick who does her nails and fights crime and has no insecurities (just thinking about that makes me wanna sleep). I write plays about girls who make really really bad choices (like sleeping with their karate teacher or therapist) and then have to figure out what to do next. Also, writing flawed women is way more fun for actresses to play since they have some meat.
Read the whole thing here
More about Catherine
Catherine Weingarten hails from Ardmore, PA also known as the area that inspired the preppy sexy TV show “Pretty Little Liars” and is a NYC friendly playwright. Catherine’s comedic plays delve into the societal pressure placed on young women to be both impossibly good looking as well as ridiculously intellectual, humble, kind as can be but sexy. Her plays usually include some hot fantasy sequences which helps attract the common man into the theater! She graduated from Bennington College in Vermont where she studied playwriting with Sherry Kramer. Her 10 minute sex fantasy play “Pineapple Upside Down Cake” was a National Semi-Finalist at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Her full length playwriting credits include: staged reading of Are You Ready to get Pampered!? produced at the Dixon Place, Less Than Rent and Last Frontier Theater Conference Playlab series; staged reading of This Car Trip Suckss produced by Piper Theater Productions; and Karate Hottie produced by West of 10th in NYC. She is currently the playwright in residence for “Realize Your Beauty Inc” which promotes positive body image for kids by way of theater arts. Catherine is thrilled to pursue her MFA at OU and thankful for the awesome opportunity for baller mentorship. catherine-weingarten.squarespace.com
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