Ladies' room

A STAGE OF THEIR OWN Bogart, left, and Crosby present a Virginia Woolf premiere.

Photograph: Carol Rosegg

For heaven’s sake, girls, surely the revolution has been won by now? Women got the vote in 1919, burned the bra in ’68 and—as of this writing—have a lock on the State Department. Do we really still need places like the Women’s Project, a venue devoted to female playwrights?

If you talk to female artists, you’ll get a resounding “Lord, yes!” After playwright Theresa Rebeck’s indignant Guardian blog post pointed out last September the small proportion of shows by women writers on New York stages (a mere 12.6 percent last year), there was a flurry of activity and protestations of innocence from male programmers. The kerfuffle has died down, but the numbers haven’t moved.

So we must be grateful for the Women’s Project—even if the name sounds depressingly like a charity. Don’t tell that to Julie Crosby, 44, the producing artistic director with her first season now tucked under her belt. After a decade of the venue seeming virtuous but dull, the tiny, ferocious Crosby has put the theater back on the map as a go-to place for exciting—not merely worthy—work. Pieces on stage since her ’07 arrival include Saviana Stanescu’s Aliens with Extraordinary Skills and Catherine Trieschmann’s Crooked, a play that rocketed to the attention of the Pulitzer committee. The group’s latest project has the highest profile yet. Anne Bogart will premiere her SITI Company production of Virginia Woolf’s only play, a bizarre lark called Freshwater that the modernist titan composed for her friends and family while she was plugging away at Mrs. Dalloway in 1925.

Crosby had the discombobulating script in a drawer for years, while still pursuing her earlier career as a Broadway manager. “I also earned a Ph.D. in medieval drama,” she notes. “I’m a sort of closet academic.” A thread of affable stubbornness runs through both of Crosby’s careers. After an advisor carelessly asserted that no women wrote during the 10th century, Crosby researched an entire thesis to prove him wrong—looking at the many plays attributed to an Anonymous, since nameless playwrights were often women.

At Columbia, Crosby tried to teach Freshwater to undergraduates and failed resoundingly. “I felt I had to produce this play because I have to see how it works,” she says with a laugh. Eventually, she handed it to Bogart, a director who had never worked at the Women’s Project.

Revered actor Kathleen Chalfant has said that the greatest boon of the Project is its creation of an “old girls network,” and certainly the addition of the high-profile Bogart goes to that end. Her presence confers an air of gravitas on the building on West 55th Street, despite the unrepentant goofiness of Woolf’s script. But even as actor Tom Nelis shimmies out of his Queen Victoria costume at the end of rehearsal, Bogart stays serious. “I’ve just always felt very close to Woolf,” she says. “For me, my formative heroes are these women who cut a swath for me to try on. Susan Sontag did it. So did Gertrude Stein. Virginia Woolf is one of the women who gives me permission to be who I am.”

Crosby herself has quietly, almost stealthily, become a model of inspiration. After the departure of her predecessor, Loretta Greco, the theater found itself in dire need of rescuing. Though years on the production and financial side had, bizarrely, made her an unlikely candidate (“People still have a hard time seeing producers as artists,” Crosby complains), champions on the theater’s board brought her around.

In 2006, many assumed the Women’s Project was on the brink of failure. “To be perfectly frank, I wasn’t that interested at first,” Crosby remembers. “I came in, looked at their financials and was horrified. But then I was seduced by the idea that for women, the struggle continues. And I do love a good challenge.”

They still have far to go, which Crosby readily admits. She salivates at the idea of gut-renovating the Julia Miles Theater, which has a difficult, high stage and a certain air of dankness. The cursive-and-pink logo gets under her skin, but rebranding would be expensive.

The company does throw the occasional bake-off fund-raiser, at which men, naturally, do all the baking. But in these nasty economic times, the Women’s Project is lucky to have a hard head at the helm. Crosby sounds calm, even when all about her are losing it. “I think women theater artists always work under the recession-era mentality, which is what makes them so poised to take over,” she says. “They’ve been doing a lot more with a lot less for a long time.”

Freshwater is at the Women’s Project through Feb 15.