Female authors, producers share their own perspective on theatre

Nearly 800 playwrights, directors, academics, stage technicians, and artistic directors filled Princeton University's James M Stewart Theater in the “Women in Theatre: Issues for the 21st Century” conference on September 26th. Some were angry and some were just happy to be under the same roof with some of the most powerful and successful women in theater today.Most of the speakers on the four different panels, which consisted of artistic directors, directors, and playwrights, were from Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theaters.

Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts held the all-day event in response to a 2008 study, Gender Bias in the Theater, done by economics undergraduate Emily Glassberg Sands.

Sands' findings proved that women playwrights have a harder time getting their work produced on both the Broadway stage and in smaller regional theaters.  Out of 43 Broadway productions in 2008, women wrote only five. Nonprofit theaters with 99 seats or less produced only 20 percent of work authored by women. The real shocker is that female artistic directors, not their male counterparts, are more often choosing not to produce other women’s plays.

Many of the participants wore a button proclaiming "50/50 in 20/20."

In spite of these negative statistics, Jill Dolan, the conference organizer and director of the Program for the study of Women and Gender, kept the proceedings upbeat in her welcome.

"Although the numbers continue to look grim, today's conversations are meant to accentuate the positive, by bringing together women who've achieved considerable success in American and world theatre," Dolan said.

The first panel was made up of artistic directors of regional theaters, a group of gatekeepers who choose the stories that get told on stages across the country.  There own stories serve as a blueprint of how women get access to the most powerful positions in theater.

According to Molly Smith, she knew from the age of 19 years that she wanted to start a theater. Smith did end up building the fittingly named Perseverance Theater in Alaska, dragging 50 used seats from the mainland of America. She also moved the 60 year old Washington DC Arena Stage to producing the work of American playwrights. When Timothy Near arrived at the San Jose Repertory Theatre as artistic director, she made dramatic changes including building a more intimate, womb shaped stage, and selecting work that attracted a wider audience, which grew from 6,000 to 14,000.

"The driving force behind our work should be to represent our community that was one third Latino, one third Asian and one third Caucasian," Near said. "I was very creative in selecting new work, I wanted to teach the audience how to experience theater and the design of the theater was meant to embrace the audience."

Emily Mann, whose 20 years as the artistic director of McCarter Theatre Center and resident playwright, was being honored at the conference as an example of what choices a woman could aspire to in this male dominated world, really would like to have more time to write.

"I knew from an early age that I was a lifer in the theater, I had been directing and writing across the country," Mann said. "I became an artistic director for practical reasons, I was a single mother and my son was no longer portable."

According to Mann, she never picked a play just because it was written by a woman or a person of color, but at the same time she has always gone under the radar to pick playwrights from these two groups.

"I make gut level choices and for each season I pick five plays that have more variety than if I had picked 28," Mann said. "I want to blow minds, I want each play to be brilliant, you just don't just pick a play, it has to be an event and the level at which we do it has to be first rate."

The most emotional moments during the conference came when playwright Danai Gurira, who co-wrote the 2006 Obie Award winning play Continuum and her new play Eclipsed, about Liberian women in war, spoke about what she will have to write next.

"I will have to write about Zimbabwe and what is going on there," Gurira tearfully said. "Then I won't be able to go home again. Luckily my parents will be out of there by then."

One of the angriest moments came during the last session when Alisa Solomon, a theater critic and political cultural journalist at The Village Voice for 21 years and the director of  the Master of Arts concentration in Arts and Culture at Columbia University, suggested blowing up the main stages of American theaters for not representing the stories of women.

Emily Mann didn't think that was a good idea and suggested that women continue to work from within the system to get there voices heard.

"Why don't we blow up the institution," Mann said. "Commercial theaters didn't allow women to write or direct, that's why we need a home base, we need the regional theaters, I was once told as a young woman that all I could hope to do was work in children's theater."

After hearing from more 25 women working in the theater, Stephanie Fleurantin, a young aspiring playwright who graduated from Princeton University in June, seemed to find some comfort.

“So many successful playwrights and directors are male, and this image has caused me to question the merit of my own experiences and potential as a writer," Fleurantin said.  “At this conference I was able to see women who realized success by being funny, fearless, blunt, intellectual-- in short, themselves . . . . I feel a renewed confidence because I learned that one does not have to fit the status quo to produce great work.”