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Friday, September 12, 2008
Theresa Rebeck Sounds Bugle, Female Playwrights Charge?
The Clyde Fitch Report: "The New York Times tells us this week that this is the Year of the Man. This year is nothing like last year, when there was actually one new play, written by a woman(me), on Broadway. At the tail end of the season a revival of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill snuck into the lineup too. And then lots of awards went to Tracy Letts -who is a man, but whose name sounds like it could be a woman's name. So that's TWO women and one guy whose name sounds like a woman's. It was exhausting dealing with all that estrogen. Time to give the men a chance."
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2 comments:
so this article is commenting on a post written about an article i read in the times last week. when i read the original article i had a few qualms with the way some things had been phrased but overall was not offended by anything. and when i read the article i took it to mean that the main characters, the really interesting roles were womens characters, as opposed to this years strong lineup of interesting and equally screwed up men as opposed to comparing the gender ratios of the two years. plays are about screwed up characters. plays about a male protagonist feature men who are screwed up. plays with a female protagonist usually feature women who are screwed up. most actresses would probably rather play a more interesting screwed up character like momma rose than any old engenue from gilbert and sullivan.
The article makes a good point that shows on Broadway can not just be summed up into the narrow categories of "The Year of the Man" or "The Year of the Women", but about people with different types of problems. Its true that there are not a lot of plays on Broadway that are written by women, but Rebeck's article sounded as if she just wanted to correct the assumption of being it being all about the man. It was more of a grudge then a fact based article.
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