“Something magical’ happened last spring when an all-female cast worked together to create the “Vagina Monologues,” says Julia H. Fawcett ’04, a Harvard Radcliffe Dramatics Club (HRDC) member who acted in the play.

The racially diverse, all-female cast did more than act together, she says. They bonded and formed a sisterhood, of sorts, a rare event in campus theater made even more so because of the cast’s unusually diverse composition, she says.

Before the production ended, Fawcett and two other Monologues cohorts—Heather J. Thomason ’04 and Julia C. Reischel ’04—decided to create that experience for others.

The result? The Athena Theater Company, the only campus theater group devoted to increasing the presence of women and minorities on Harvard’s stages as well as creating student community. It joins the Asian American Association Players and Black Community Action Student Theater (Black CAST), theater groups that put on shows featuring primarily Asian-American and black actors, respectively.

“There are so many talented women, but lots of the better parts are male,” Fawcett says, pointing to the greater number of male roles in this year’s Freshmen Musical as an example. “We wanted to offer an alternative, one that’s more diverse and that has more opportunities for women.”

The trio is trying to mark their company as different from the start. At Saturday auditions for their first production, Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize winning “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” the three sat on the floor, clapped after performances and offered chocolate to the actresses.

Athena Theater Company emphasizes that auditions for the all-female cast are color-blind. They are bypassing common casting, where actors audition for multiple plays in a five-day stretch, to run auditions at their own time and in their own way.

Other major differences that the three envision: giving a portion of the play’s profits to a campus women’s group of the audience’s choosing and sponsoring a competition for female playwrights in the spring. Athena would produce the winning script.