Women Onstage and Directing. It's a Thing that Needs to Happen a Lot More Often.

First off,  I just want to thank Geoffrey Nauffts for writing the wonderful play, "Next Fall" that I just closed a couple of weekends ago with the Village Theatre Guild.  We had a top notch cast and crew and the audiences loved and raved about the play and our performances.  It was material that was a delight to make come alive, and I am in show mourning because it is over.

It's great, though, to go on to the next thing, and look for something to match or replace the experience, or to create something new.  My experience lately, though, is so disheartening to me as a woman and a theatre-goer.

I look at the Chicago theatre listings and see nothing but calls for men, and a smattering of women roles.  And when I say smattering, I mean, like, on average,  21 parts for men, 6 parts for women, any age or phenotype.  And of those numbers, a fair number of the parts for women do not have much to do with the actual driving force of the plots of the plays, but are almost superfluous to them.

Sure, there are only 2 women in "Next Fall," but at least they were well written and important to the play.  There was meat in those parts that were essential to drive the action forward.

Many times in the past couple of years,  a part for a women in my age range will come up, one that could be fairly meaty, and they decide to gender-bend and have the part played by a man, to be "edgy." Because men need more parts, right?

It just seems to be getting worse, and despite the women-centric theatre companies out there like the 20% Theatre Company and Babes with Blades trying their darndest to get women's writing and women's parts out there, the disparity is maddening.

I ran across an excellent article about this very subject here, and felt vindicated, somewhat. It isn't right, and it hurts the viability of live theatre when it doesn't truly live up to the needs of the core audience.  The key section:

"Now, are we story-telling artists catalyzing a better world, or are we tractors hauling the old guard forward? Are we defining our age or merely maintaining the status quo?

I’m not saying all theater needs to address this issue, and if it does, that it be with serious, frowning faces. Feminism can be fun, funny, heart-warming, thrilling, suspenseful, and poetic. We needn’t be righteous to be right. We can still have fun, and entertain, and do the great old plays of yore. But for the love of god, if theater’s stats on women are as bad as the US Congress’s, then we are not doing our art right.*

This is happening in London theater too, as this article from The Guardian presents:

This failure to represent women, argued the actor, writer and director Stella Duffy, was deeply entwined with society’s wider failure to put women’s voices on an equal footing with men’s. A sense of responsibility to the world was, she said, being ducked—particularly by our larger national stages. In an impassioned blog post, she wrote: “When we do not see ourselves on stage we are reminded, yet again, that the people running our world (count the women in the front benches if you are at all unsure) do not notice when we are not there. That they think men (and yes, white, middle-class, middle-aged, able-bodied men at that) are all we need to see.

This wouldn’t be as deeply infuriating if the audiences for our work weren’t decidedly female. Seventy percent of theater ticket-buyers are women and at least sixty percent of the audience members in every theater are women. And yet our female-driven audiences are, over and over again, given male-driven stories, written and directed by men.**"

- See more at: http://www.howlround.com/we-are-not-a-mirror-theater-must-lead-with-women%E2%80%99s-stories#sthash.4eINNP2U.dpuf

She goes on to say that theaters need to look at their programming with a stronger eye towards gender parity, both in the play itself and it's directorial and backstage staffing.

It makes sense to me.  Theatres are struggling to get audience members engaged, to get more butts in the seats, to create meaning to their work.  How can this truly be part of their mission if they dismiss and demoralize the majority of their audience?