Good to Go Festival Holds Gender Parity Summit for Women in Theater

On Wednesday, November 18 at NYC's Theater Center, the Good to Go Festival is proud to host their inaugural summit with industry leaders. The topic of the gathering is "Gender Parity: Where are we? Where do we go from here?"

While individually, many advocates have taken the lead toward gender parity in the theater, the summit will provide an exciting place to gather under one roof and inspire others to replicate or create original platforms that will work in communities around the country. Immediately following the summit there will be a reception.

The keynote panel at the summit features some of the team members that organized the enormously successful Women's Voices Theater Festival this past fall in Washington, DC, such as Nan Barnett, National New Plays Networks, Maggie Boland, Managing Director of Signature Theatre; Eleanor Holdridge, Head of Directing/Producer at Catholic University, and Jojo Ruf, Coordinating Producer of Women's Voices Theater Festival.

Panelists will also include innovators like Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Songwriter, Wendy C. Goldberg, Artistic Director, National Playwrights Conference at The O'Neill Theater Center, and Kent Thompson, Producing Artistic Director at Denver Center for the Performing Arts.�

"I am excited by the response from theater leaders around the country who are attending this summit, and I look forward to our powerful group giving birth to new collaborations that will help to move the needle closer to equality for women in the theater," said Judy Zocchi, Producing Artistic Director of the Good to Go Festival and Summit.

When Zocchi was doing the research for the festival, she discovered so many exceptional individuals, organizations and theater-makers that were already making a difference for women in the theater, so she created the summit as a place to forge new collaborations and have an open forum where leaders can commit to a new wave of advocacy and action.

"The focus is not to talk about or analyze the challenges but to highlight the solutions. From established projects with notoriety to smaller grassroot origins, the synergy of the evening should be powerful," said Zocchi.

The Good to Go Festival is a platform that features plays, musicals and songs written by women that are "good to go" and ready for full production. The Good to Go Summit is a gathering of organizations and individuals that have taken action to create equal opportunity for women in the theater.

The Summit 2015 will be held at 5 p.m. on Wed., Nov. 18 at the Theater Center, 1627 Broadway in New York City.