The New York Times: Ordinarily, plays written by men dominate stages in the nation’s capital, just as they do in the rest of the country — an imbalance that female playwrights have been agitating to change for a while. But for the next couple of months here, the usual rules will not apply.
3 comments:
Diversity is so essential to art. It’s so easy to distinguish a good television show from a bad one just by looking at the writer’s room. In a show like Modern Family, where there are such a diverse set of characters in terms of gender, age, and race, there has to be a diverse set of writers to match. A show needs a variety of writers with a variety of experiences in order to write for a variety of characters. If the writer’s room is full of people with the same exact backgrounds, then every character in the show is going to sound exactly the same.
Women need to be represented in the world of writing, then they can be accurately and equally represented in the production itself. Our society and people in power can forget how important equal representation is, sometimes they have to be actively reminded of the imbalance. Once we start turning the wheel towards diversity, it will become the norm of our society.
I think this is an awesome idea. It’s funny because just today, a play write whose musical I designed the set for this past summer posted on Facebook about her creating an annual “Women’s Work Festival” in New York City through WEBroadway, which she says will be the only theater festival in New York City dedicated to full- length plays, musicals, and adaptations written by women (she even mentioned how DC has a festival like this, and I assume this is what she is referring to). This article makes an important point about how so many production companies not hiring female play writes is a reflection of a larger societal problem of not respecting women. I liked the point they made about how a festival like this makes people think about something directly that they may not have thought about before consciously. Gender disparity is such a deeply ingrained part of American culture that I don’t think many people make the effort to sit down and try and process why certain things happen, why they have always been that way, and what we can do to fix them. The line of thinking of “It’s always been this way, so I’m not going to waste time being bothered by it” is, I think, very dangerous, especially in regards to theater, which hopefully serves the purpose of breaking down these boundaries. Also, it’s crazy to me that Chicago holds the title for the highest amount of women play writes in recent productions, at a measly 36%. I’m so glad that there are people in the industry making decisions which will not only help women to be recognized, but help others see why these changes need to happen.
I used to work in D.C. a lot and I had a bunch of friends who were female playwrights who actually had a lot of opinions about this when it was in the first steps of being formed. It was kind of half-heartedly announced on Twitter and there was a very long twitter conversation that went on between one of the festival's creators and some female playwrights he knew. The issue that they brushed over at the end of the article is that this festival treats being a female playwright like it's special. I have mixed feelings about it, personally. I think it could be really great for getting plays out there that the audiences of D.C. don't normally get to see because they aren't included in typical seasons. However, I don't think it's going to do anything to give the upcoming female playwrights in D.C., or anywhere, much of a chance. I worry that all this festival will serve to do is a give a small snapshot into the, currently, totally foreign world of female playwrights, and after this festival all theaters will go back to producing plays written by men.
Post a Comment