Chicago Tribune: Oscar nominations will be announced in a couple of weeks. If history holds, the gender inequality in Hollywood will be on full display once again. But film is not the only medium where a marked gender gap persists.
I’ll be starting rehearsals soon at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for a new play I wrote. I’ve been writing plays for 36 years, but this will be the first time I have worked exclusively with women. The cast is comprised entirely of women. The director is a woman. The scenic, lighting and costume designers are women. This is no accident. It is by design.
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Gender parity in our industry is on the forefront of my mind whenever I think about my career. I recognize that I am a woman entering a male dominated field and that I have a hand in changing that in more ways than one. Of the statistics presented in the article, the one that shocked me the most was that 60 per cent of theater goers are women. I don’t find that hard to believe, but I hadn’t really thought about it, and the truth is that our money really is like a vote, and we need to learn to treat it that way. To spend with more thought put into what exactly we are supporting and what that might mean for the future. Though there are roadblocks and societal precedents in our way, there is an overwhelming amount of support for women in this industry right now, especially with our generation and the way that we are being educated – things are getting better. We have the tools that we need to make the final push for “equality” in the workplace. I would love to see it be 50/50 by 2020, but the skeptic in me doesn’t see that happening. The point is more-so that there is attention being paid to the issue and I have a good feeling about the progress we can make this year.
Women are involved more than we know and that’s why they need to be seen more. The article speaks to the film industry in the beginning and it reminds me of Oceans 8 in that it is an all-female cast and was phenomenal in itself and was seen as such by the members of our society. The article mainly is about theatre and theatre has yet to really see something like that yet it has very similar statistics, which are stated, to film about women. So why hasn’t theatre come up with such a production and why have the female playwrights written anything like that but maybe in a different genre with a different story. This also begs to offer that there are people calling for all of this throughout the whole industry of theatre and in all aspects and department. The facets of theatre want more female engagement, opportunities, and reality. So what is causing the hold up and what can we realistically do about it? Is there a hold up? We have the power to create this, so we should.
This is frustrating. The author is absolutely correct that audiences have the power to influence those who choose and produce theatre: if shows by women sell, they will produce them. The frustration occurs because it is the same sort of inch by brutal inch approach to progress that we hear so often. Around election time, everyone gets told to vote about a million times, and if many people listen to that plea, it can make a monumental change, but each individual hardly matters in all but the closest elections, so its hard to actually convince people that voting is important. The same holds true in efforts to increase recycling and composting, and in situations like this. Audiences could exert extremely effective pressure by moving as one to exert their will, and yet for any individual theatregoer, influencing season selection, hiring, or casting is flatly out of the question. A ticket does not change a production, only the movement of the collective. The incentive for individuals to cast their “vote” by seeing specific shows and not others drops to nearly zero. I hope that we will reach 50/50, and I believe that we will probably keep making slow progress. The notion that audiences will come together in some transcendent hive mind and demand change in the immediate future, however, seems to me to be a fantasy.
I think this article undersells the ramifications of this problem. It isn’t just women who suffer, everyone suffers. Yes, there is a bigger impact on women, but in the end it is better for everyone if women have more opportunities. Right now there are people who would be able to contribute to the theater industry (and many other industries) that aren’t either due to discrimination or due to cultures that push them away. This limits all of these industries.
I agree with the point this article is making about the importance of a wide range of stories being told and the fact that out focus on the stories of white men primes us to see white men as more “important.” I think live theater is part of this, but not the main source of this. TV and film reach a much wider audience than theater, and who is taught about in history classes in also a major factor. I think putting a more diverse group of people into positions of power in the theater industry can be part of solving this problem, but in the end we also need more women in positions of power is all industries. I hope that the theater industry can get its act together and lead the way.
The author’s play, “Twilight Bowl,” sounds like a great step towards achieving the gender parity that she talks about. It is not often that we see an all-female artistic team on productions in this industry, or any industry for that matter. I think this speaks to the continuity of determination the world has seen from women trying to be fairly recognized for their work over multiple centuries. As the theatre industry finally starts to grow towards include a more diverse collection of artists, we do have to recognize that it needs to grow in a lot more places than one. The world is a collection of seven billion unique stories, and in order for theatre to be able to speak to them, it must be able to represent more of them. If this is the generation to change what people see on the screen and stage, we need to represent not just more women, but also more artists of color, artists of the LGBTQ+ community, and artists with disabilities (among many more underrepresented groups). Every step towards achieving this allows more people to hear their long-overlooked stories be told.
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