A woman's work is rarely done

On Saturday afternoon, Chicago Dramatists hosted a panel discussion on “The Feminine Dilemma: Getting Women’s Voices on Stage.” Since that’s a topic I discussed just a couple of weeks ago with playwright Julia Jordan, I headed to Chicago and Milwaukee to see what they had to say.

The moderator, playwright Mia McCullough, kicked things off with some statistics from Theatre Communications Group, the regional-theater advocacy organization. Of the plays being produced this season by TCG's 400 member theaters, 36% are written or co-written by a woman. That’s a big jump from the 2002 New York State Council on the Arts study Jordan cited to me, where women were only 17% of the 2001–02 season. But consider, as McCullough points out, that 23 of this year’s productions are by playwright of the moment Sarah Ruhl and 8 are by Theresa Rebeck (The Diary of Anne Frank accounts for another 7), and that jump seems less significant.

So what’s the problem? Several of the panelists, who included critic Kerry Reid, playwrights Tanya Saracho and Lydia Diamond, director Anna C. Bahow and the Goodman’s literary manager Tanya Palmer, cited a largely male power structure and “safe” programming tendencies, with theaters afraid to take risks on new plays or unknown names and instead programming a lot of “recycling.” (McCullough noted, for the record, that Shakespeare is getting 136 productions this season. Busy guy.)

The panelists also agreed that plays by women are often perceived differently—that, as Newsday’s Linda Winer and the Village Voice’s Alisa Solomon put it in the New York study (quoted by Reid), “stories about men are considered universal while those about women are not.” Reid read a passage from the study in which former Time Out New York reviewer Sam Whitehead admitted he’d been surprised by Margaret Edson’s Wit, expecting it to be a “whining victim play.” In the study, "Solomon wondered if anyone considered Oedipus Rex ‘a whiny victim play.’”

Theater critics, who are overwhelmingly male, took a big hit from the panel. Too often, they said, critics fail to engage with plays written by women, dismissing them instead of criticizing them the way they do with works by male playwrights. McCullough cited John Lahr’s New Yorker review of Rebeck’s Mauritius last October, in which he said the play was “in essence, David Mamet for girls,” as if the female playwright made it for women only. This prompted Saracho (who, along with Diamond, had plenty to say about the expectations foisted upon them as female playwrights of color) to recall that a critic once wrote of her, “Call Saracho a Mamet-cita, and not just a mamacita.”

As for solutions, well, you know what they say about how long it took to build Rome. Audience suggestions ran from including a survey in every program asking “Would you like to see more productions of female playwrights?” to self-producing with funding from non-traditional producers. Of course, the easiest way to address the issue is simply to keep addressing the issue. Bahow, an artistic associate at the side project, brought it up with artistic director Adam Webster when she noticed that the company’s six-play season contained just a single woman playwright. “Of course Adam recognized it was a problem once it was pointed out to him,” she said. “It just hadn’t been part of his thinking before then.”