American Theater magazine recently announced that David Ives’ Venus in Fur has been chosen to be performed in the most theatres around the country during the upcoming 2013–14 season. They also discovered that female playwrights make up half the list of plays being produced in the upcoming season across the country. This hasn’t been the case since the 2005–06 season.
While this is great news, this DOES NOT MEAN that women playwrights get produced at the same rate as male playwrights. It means that a bunch of plays written by women are resonating in a big way and that theatres around the country want to stage them. Information from colleagues around the country made it clear that women still make up about 30% of the plays produced in NY last season.
Some of the most produced female written plays for 2013–14 include:
Katori Hall’s Mountaintop — 13 productions
Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles — 12 productions
Nina Raine’s Tribes — 12 productions
Katie Mitchell’s adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat — 8 productions
Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit — 7 productions
Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage — 7 productions
Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful (which won the Pulitzer) — 7 productions
This information was found through surveys of over 500 member theaters of the Theater Communications Group. They are an organization of regional and nonprofit theaters as well as the publisher of the magazine.