Saturday, February 25, 2012
What are we missing?
2AMt: What are we missing out on by not having more female voices and perspectives on our stages? As we make our way to the culminating event in Forum Theatre’s current Female Voices Festival, I thought it appropriate to step back and give some explanation as to what led us to producing this festival and what it means to the past, present, and future of both Forum itself and the American Theatre. It started with an embarrassing admission.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
In recent years, a number of news articles and studies have brought to light the fact that there is a staggering ratio between the number of males vs. females represented in the entertainment business, especially in the fields of writing and directing. With the political
"push" lately focusing so much on ethnic minorities and members of the LGBT community, it is evident that the struggle for female representation in the business may have gotten sidetracked. Having a woman finally win the Oscar for directing is less a victory and more a small step along the way. Similarly, the creation of this "Female Voices" festival is a good thing, but neither a victory nor the end. A time should come when just as many women get their artistic voices heard as men, and there isn't a need for a "Female Voices" festival since their voices would be adequately represented alongside those of their male counterparts.
Of course I don't think that every company needs to have an exact even amount of plays written by women and by men, or that plays should be chosen based on the gender of the playwright. Plays should be chosen because of the play itself. However, half of the population is female. In choosing plays for a target audience, women can be ignored. Women make up at least half of the audience. It's impossible for me to fathom how we have nationally even run into this problem. In this article, it is hard to believe that he simply didn't notice. How can a theater not notice that the seasons being chosen are not representative of those who it is targeted towards. It makes no sense to me. Why is this a problem and why is it a problem now?
In high school I had an English teacher that stressed the importance of disconnecting a book from its author because a. one does not know what the author intended b. one cannot assume what the author intended and c. the author is probably dead anyway so it doesn't matter. I believe that this principal should be applied across all genres; the creator should not be associate with their work. (This gets a bit messy with musicians as our culture tends to be very interested in them as human beings in a way we never do about written works. But, you get the idea.)
Following these standards, I think that the playwright should be viewed completely separately from the play; who wrote the play shouldn't matters. The gender of the playwright is especially irrelevant. Men can write about female issues and women can write about male issues... You can insert some other tidbits about my distaste with the gender binary here.
The real inequality lies in the fact that there aren't very many good plays by female authors laying around waiting to be produced. This is either because a. women cannot write good plays or b. gender constructs have prohibited women from writing. I think we can all agree that reason a is ridiculous. That leaves b. Men have had hundreds of years of time to contribute to the cannon (and if you read the Ten Things Theaters Need to Do Right Now to Save Themselves you already know how much we like to produce and reproduce those pieces) while it's only been socially acceptable for women to write plays recently. The ladies just need some time to catch up.
Pia's comment brings up an interesting question, do we need to disconnect works from their creators?
I say that you can never really completely disconnect creators from their work. While it is true that opposite groups of people can write about other groups of people, does that mean they should? If someone who is not of a certain group writes about another group are they making a comment on it, can they really write from that person's perspective and should they be writing from that person's perspective?
What if I a white person wrote all of August Wilson's plays, they would have a much different feel if nothing else. Even if they were word for word the same, they would mean a different thing coming from someone that was white and not black. Society has taught women to view the world differently then men. You have to think about how the playwright identifies in terms of gender, race, class, and origin. For better or worse we are a reflection of whats around us and that is always going to color our work, and color how people see our work, even if we don't necessarily want it to. Going back to the article there are multiple reasons why one wouldn't produce plays written by women, but I don't think that it is because people are bigoted I think that it is mostly because there are not a lot to pull from.
I really think that Zoe and Pia are bringing up interesting points: we need to focus on content rather than "character" of who created a piece, for stories and art to stand on their own, they need to be compelling as a body of work, despite what idea or personal history of creator is attached to that specific piece. Although, this becomes more and more difficult to realize, so much of my personal favorites in art or plays have to do with how compelling I feel the work is, mostly because of the context they were created in. So in hindsight, it was even difficult for me to establish myself apart from my art, to have them be independent in meaning from the feelings I invest within them. Therefor, I feel like women will have even more respect in things such as play writing if they can express the strength in their own pieces aside from the context of the difficulty it might have ensued to create such a piece.
To respond to this blog, I agree with some of the comments above in saying that nothing should be forced when it comes to choosing certain works over others. Content of a play is very important and I don't think there should be plays that are simply okay mixed in with great works. That being said, it is good to notice what kinds of diversity are being added to any festival or nominations, etc... Women and women playwrights will always have something to say, we are no different from men in that respect. In some ways, we might have a different angle and some ways we have a human reaction to something. We are not to be discounted but like anything else, there shouldn't be a quota for our representation. We just shouldn't be held at any disadvantage or overlooked at all.
Post a Comment