HISTORY

The Upstart Crow Project is the brainchild of playwright and prose writer, Maria Dahvana Headley.

In a period of about two months, Headley happened to attend an unusual number of productions of Shakespeare plays - The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and finally, a production of Shakespeare's infrequently produced play, Pericles, in which a friend was playing Marina. Headley started muttering to herself about what would happen if Marina got the floor, instead of just having to be virtuous and non-vindictive all the time, even while being kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel. (!!) This led her to wishlist of female writers who might do the adaptation.

Coincidentally, Headley was working on plotting out her own very non-traditional adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. She knew she wasn't the right writer for Pericles, but someone was. She thought about women who'd already turned Shakespeare plays upside down - Paula Vogel, for example, with her terrific take on Othello, Desdemona - A Play About A Handerchief. She thought about her own playwriting heroes, and the fact that a lot of them were women.
 
All this plotting and muttering converged into the Big Idea, soon to be known as The Upstart Crow project, which arrived in the middle of the night, hitting Headley like a ton of bricks crossed with five million lightbulbs.

She woke up, leapt out of bed, and started doing what she, as a writer,
specializes in - creating something out of nothing. And now:

Writers are signing on.
Thinkers are signing on.
Generous people are promising their services.

The Upstart Crow Project is in its beginning stages.

It's going to be LARGE.

Stay tuned for further updates.