Women theatre artists held a conference in New York last week to launch a new initiative called 50/50 in 2020. In response to the fact that women playwrights, directors, and designers still receive fewer than 20% of the professional production opportunities nationwide, our friends at the Women's Project, the League of Professional Theatre Women, and New Perspectives Theatre are organizing this campaign to achieve parity for professional women theater artists by 2020.
You can read a description of the kick-off meeting in Helen Shaw's article for Time Out New York - Parity for Women Theatre Artists - Report from the Working Group Event.
There have been several studies over the years that have documented that women do not have parity in theatre. In 2002 Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett did a study for the New York State Council on the Arts, Report on the Status of Women: A Limited Engagement. They found that of the 2000 plays produced by non-profit American theatres in the 2001-2002 season, only 16% had women directors and only 17% had women playwrights.
More recently, Emily Glassberg Sands, a Princeton economics student, did her 173 page senior thesis on the status of women in theatre - Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater." Among other things, Sands found that women write fewer than 1 in 8 shows on Broadway, and that it is harder to get plays produced if they have female protagonists.
Sands gave a presentation in June which was reported by the The New York Times in an article called, Theatre Has a Gender Bias? Do Tell. The Times reporter, Patricia Cohen, caused a controversy by claiming in the opening paragraphs of her article that Sands' presentation proved that women artistic directors and literary managers are the ones to blame for discrimination against women in the theatre - conveniently ignoring the fact that women artistic directors have not been a large enough group historically to be the cause of centuries of discrimination against female playwrights.
If you would like to find out more about this campaign for parity for women in theatre, please become a fan of the 50/50 in 2020 page on Facebook.
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The times article also got an important fact dead wrong. The female respondents did give lower grades on the artistic quality of scripts purportedly by women, they ONLY gave those scripts lower grades on questions that related to bias of others against the work, (whether the audiences would buy tickets, whether other theaters would produce the work, whether financial officers of their theater would support the choice to produce, and whether awards committees would honor the play.) The female respondents were not in and of themselves biased against work by women, they believed others were and would hamper it's ability to be sucessful.
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A performance qualifies as dramatic by creating a representational illusion. By this broad definition, theatre had existed since the dawn of man, as a result of the human tendency for storytelling.
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