Why Numbers Count: Looking at Producing More Women

Playwrights who identify as women and those who identify as feminists have been grappling for a while with the question of whose work gets done, so why aren't we there yet? A feminist future has to include and acknowledge where we have come from, as well as where we might go next. In a 2009 article, Marsha Norman bemoaned the state of the field for female playwrights in light of then recent surveys by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and renowned data scientist Emily Glassberg Sands. Norman pointed out that 80 percent of produced plays were by white men, with "everyone else [sharing] the remaining 20%," despite the fact that "women make up 60% of the audience."⁷ While my concern here is thinking through the challenges facing the enactment of feminist futures on primarily American stages, it's worth pointing out that this is not a uniquely American problem, despite Norman's claim that "no other developed nation [ignores its women writers]."⁸ For one thing, my contact with international students in playwriting classes suggests that many emerging female-identifying writers (if we want to use that fraught term "emerging") feel that the road to production in their home countries will be more challenging than their road in the States, where they have the ability to develop and stage work in pedagogical institutions. In the context of professional productions, at the time of Norman's writing, terms like "glass ceiling" and "theatrical boys club" were appearing in articles in the mainstream Sydney Morning Herald about the state of Australian theater.⁹ Perhaps closer to home, Elaine Aston has pointed out a similar bias on the British stage (with which we have a somewhat symbiotic relationship). For Aston, the prominence of male reviewers in British theater helps perpetuate that bias—a bias she noted in 1995 wasn't likely to change "in the foreseeable future."¹⁰

Has that bias changed? Yes and no—at least as far as American theater is concerned. The results of the most recent survey of gender and racial parity in the American theater, The Count 2.0, published by the Dramatists Guild in 2018, suggest that there have been gains in terms of race and gender, but they have been small. Of the sample counted (a sample with which there are some problems, as I will note), the number of playwrights of color getting professional productions went up from 10.2 percent to 15.1 percent, women from 20.3 percent to 28.8 percent.¹¹ The feminist reality we have now is not great for playwrights, or theater, or society. But burning all current structures, institutions, and theater-making practices to the ground probably isn't the answer.

One step toward getting diverse voices onstage means supporting a variety of writers before and during the writing process—though this is far from enough on its own, as my other colleagues here take up. Still, The Count 2.0 shows that 60 percent of BA degrees in the performing arts from 2012 to 2017 were awarded to women, although white women outnumbered women of color two to one.¹² New Dramatists and the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis both show more women members than men overall, and 24 percent of all their writers are reported as being women of color.¹³ The number of women who are members of the Dramatists Guild has also risen significantly in the last decade.¹⁴

Problematically, The Count 2.0 also reveals that women, nonbinary writers, and writers of color aren't getting produced in the same ratios, suggesting (somewhat unsurprisingly) that the most significant hurdles exist not in writing and training but in production selection in visible national theaters. The fact that women are highly visible in the Theatre Communications Group's inaugural cohort for the Rising Leaders of Color program may have some impact on that in the future.¹⁵

Writing residencies also pose opportunities for supporting a diverse group of writers (though the economic reality of taking a month to go write in...