Thank you all for coming today. I’d like to thank 59 East 59 Theaters and Primary Stages for making this event possible, especially Elisabeth Kleinhans, Peter Tier, Andrew Lensye, Elliot Fox and Tessa La Neeve. I’d also like to thank the Dramatists Guild, Princeton University and New Dramatists for all of their support.
Last fall, Sarah Schulman and I decided to organize a social evening for female writers at New Dramatists. We expected a turnout of about twenty of our closest friends. The email invitation however, went viral and a list of NY theaters that had announced all male seasons became attached to the invite. We had over a hundred attendees and a hundred more responses from across the country and England. At that event, the writers expressed a desire to talk directly to artistic directors about the problem. We assembled an impressive panel of artistic directors and literary managers and held a second event at New Dramatists.
We had statistics that showed that the ratio of male to female writers being produced in New York was more than four to one. That all male seasons were commonplace, while all female seasons were unheard of. Primary Stages is the first theater to have programmed an all female season that I know of… that is at a theater which doesn’t have the mission to exclusively produce women. Though the conversation at the townhall was lively and positive, not much was actually concluded. The theaters asserted that there was a low number of female written scripts worthy of production and the writers charged discrimination pure and simple.
Emily Sands is here to address both of these claims.
Sometime last year I was sitting at my kitchen table unscientifically tabulating and crunching statistics, preparing to give introductory remarks for that second townhall. When looking at the Theater Communication’s Groups yearly list of the Top Ten plays in the American Theater, which counts the number of productions a play receives (usually following the year in which the same play had it’s NY premiere.) I noticed that the percentage of plays by women on those lists was far larger than the percentage of plays by women that were produced in NY in the previous year. Luckily, I happened to have grown up with a man by the name of Steven Levitt who you may know as the economist behind Freakonomics. I emailed him at the University of Chicago and presented him with my crude data. He thought there was a possible case for economic discrimination and proposed we find a student to take it on as a thesis. Simultaneously, I had been emailing Cecilia Rouse of Princeton about her study of blind auditions in American Orchestras, which Emily will discuss in further detail during her presentation. As it turned out, Steven was courting Emily to spend a year on research at the University of Chicago after she finished at Princeton and before continuing her career at Harvard. Emily was also Ms. Rouse’s advisee at Princeton. All paths converged. Sheri Wilner and I drove out to Princeton to meet them and Emily agreed to take this on.
Cecilia warned us at the beginning that there were no promises that the study would serve our ends. The study could be inconclusive or show that discrimination was not the cause of the low numbers of productions for women. We forged ahead. Or I should say Emily did. And so finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Emily herself for devoting a year of her life to this subject which means so much to female writers and will hopefully help to instigate a change by broadening our understanding of what is actually causing our low numbers of productions.
What she has uncovered has ramifications not just for the writers but for all women in theater, who in the calendar year of 2008, in the nonprofit subscription houses of NYC, with 99 seats and up, held only 31.6 % of creative jobs (actors, writers, directors, designers etc. ) with men holding 68.4 %. Emily did verify and crunch that statistic for me outside of her thesis. And it is doubly shocking when you consider that it is women who dominate high school theater clubs and college drama departments and make up by every estimate 60 to 75% of the ticket buying audiences. As Emily will show, the low number of roles for actresses is driven by the low number of plays written by women that see production. In looking at those same NYC theaters in 2008, female directors were 35 percent more likely to be hired if a play was written by a woman. And though Emily will not say this without backing it up with another year-long study and computers and banks of data, I have no such qualms… The cultural phenomena that underlies the underrepresentation of female playwrights also causes the low numbers of female set designers hired (only 12% in 2008,) composers (non-existent in those houses in 2008,) lighting designers, choreographers and on and on. It underlies the underrepresentation of women in any field or place where there is no standardized test to take, for when there, is women measure up quite well, and then some, as all college and graduate schools will attest.
As Cecilia Rouse warned us last fall that Emily would present her findings no matter what our personal agenda for instigating the study was, I will warn you…
Emily is going to present findings that will not completely affirm the beliefs of either side. But could help us to understand the true cause of the underrepresentation of female playwrights, so that effective steps can be taken to address the problem and correct it.
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