|
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 |
November 1996: Oberlin, Ohio. Our well-meaning theater professor has assigned us a silly, insipid 2-woman scene from Star-Spangled Girl. I am merely uninspired by the scene; my partner Sarah is offended by it. Sarah is a year older than I am, and more brazenly feminist—unafraid to ask the professor if we can find another scene. He sends us to the library, where we fall in love with Last Summer at Bluefish Cove by Jane Chambers. We proudly choose a scene and make an extra copy for our professor.
Two years later, I am a Women’s Studies major looking to direct a play that combines my interests in feminism and theater. By this time, my orange paperback of Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre is well worn. (My boyfriend bought it for me at a used book store; this convinced me I loved him.) I am eager to direct a play written by a women, that contains only female characters. The only plays my professors can come up with are Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls… (already slated for production that year) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. I direct Top Girls.
Last night: Times Square, NYC. Blocks from where Top Girls has just completed a Broadway revival, I am in a sweltering room with a flock of female playwrights. The landscape is dire for us—among living playwrights being produced in NYC this season, 40 are white men and 10 represent the rest of the city. There are zero plays being produced that have lesbian content. There are no plays by Asian, Latino, or Middle-Eastern playwrights.
The landscape is dire, yes, but the wine and conversation flow freely. Luminaries Julia Jordan and Sarah Shulman have gathered this group to generate concrete ideas of how to approach the theaters that are not producing women. Looking around the room, I am star-struck: my first sighting is of Theresa Rebeck (my favorite play: The Butterfly Collection). Then I see: Marsha Norman (‘Night, Mother)! Susan Miller (My Left Breast)! Gina Gionfriddo (After Ashley)! Winter Miller (In Darfur)! The Guerilla Girls, complete with gorilla masks!
How does one cope when every female writer or primate activist she emulates is in one room?!?!?
Perhaps I exaggerate. But as I sit there, my little Oberlin Women’s Studies heart is beating in the rhythm of the syllables out of their mouths. The suggestions range from practical to fantastical: get our male colleagues to fight with us, distribute statistics to shame the offending theaters, rally female audience members, create more bad press to get noticed, write more plays where the women have guns.
One suggestion I particularly enjoy: encourage women subscribers to raise a stink when the theater does not produce 50% of its plays by female writers. (“The women are the ones who watch the plays, anyway. The men frequently fall asleep.”) And see more plays by women. And convince your friends to see more plays by women.
So, there you go. Please see a play by a female writer this season, friend. The great Jane Chambers would want you to.
|
|
|
Sunday, 19 August 2007 |
|
So many plays, so little time...
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Wednesday, 15 August 2007 |
|
I can't decide what to think about Practical Playwriting by Leroy Clark.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Tuesday, 31 July 2007 |
|
I've had the good fortune of stumbling across many good plays in the past few weeks. I particularly love: |
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Play Blog 
