Community Member Spotlight - Kate Danley
The women in our community are the reason we do what we do, so we want to celebrate them! Kate Danley is a brilliant theatre artist in Seattle who wrote one of the four plays for our play festival in June 2026!
She is a USA Today bestselling author and internationally produced, award-winning playwright. Her 1930s screwball comedy, Building Madness, won the Panowski Playwriting Award and had its professional world premiere at the Harlequin Theatre, Olympia, WA. Her female-led, workplace farce, Working for Crumbs, won the B Street New Comedies Festival and had its professional world premiere at the B Street Theatre, Sacramento, CA. Her one-woman show about Seattle’s most notorious founder, Madam(e) Lou, had its global premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026. Madam(e) Lou has been optioned for audiovisual adaptation. Kate has over 300+ theatre credits to her name wearing almost every hat. She got her writing chops hacking out sketch and standup in Los Angeles, but her playwriting career really began after a simple beginner’s class at Seattle Rep about a decade ago. From there, she learned Broadway commercial producing and attended the Dramatists Guild National Conference where she learned about The Count, an objective record of who was getting produced in America.
It was here that a fire was lit. Despite making up 51% of the population, only 20% of the playwrights being produced in America were female. 80% were male. To paraphrase the words of Lisa Kron: “Unlike global warming or poverty, the solution is easy. Theatres just have to make a commitment to program an equal amount of plays by women. You can’t tell me that in all of human history, you can’t find a single good play written by a woman.”
“I am drawn to Bleecker St. Theatre’s commitment to expanding female representation, onstage and off, especially for those women over a certain age who fought for the rights and advancements of women in today’s American society. Studies have shown that when a society leans toward hypermasculinity (where 10% or less of the represented voices are women), war and violence rise. And when a society leans the other way and women’s representation comes closer to 50%, violence rates drop and more equitable economic prosperity is experienced by all. That seems like a pretty important cause.”
https://www.buildingmadness.com/