Thursday, July 13, 2017
All Women, All the Time
WSJ: Do female playwrights get a fair shake? Not according to the numbers. The best available statistics indicate that somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the plays professionally produced in the U.S. are by women. And who’s to blame for this gender gap? Paula Vogel, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 but only just made it to Broadway this past April with “Indecent,” claimed in a recent tweet that white male critics “help close us down.” To which Lynn Nottage, another Pulitzer laureate who had an equally belated Broadway premiere in March with “Sweat,” replied, “The patriarchy flexing their muscles to prove their power.” I very much doubt it’s that simple, but whatever the reasons, there’s surely something amiss.
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I think that this is a very prominent issue in not only play writing, but in nearly all other areas of our day to day lives. Work should be treated as what it is. Work. No matter who did the work, it should still be thought of as work. The thought that just because a woman wrote a play means it is somehow less important or worse than if a man wrote it is simply disgusting. I myself do not know whether the fault lies in the critics being sexist, or some other area such as the producers, but it makes no difference. I am sure that many great plays are being hidden from the viewers because of some pre-conceived notion, and this can not continue. We must either find a way to simply clean up the current system, or create a new system all together, maybe having an equal number of men and women as critics for a play.
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