Manhattan Theater Club is bringing two women-written plays to Broadway. Per The New York Times, Lucy Kirkwood’s “The Children” and Anna Ziegler’s “Actually” will run during the upcoming 2017–18 season.
About “two retired nuclear scientists living in a small cottage after a nuclear disaster,” Kirkwood’s “The Children” will open Manhattan Theater Club’s season in December, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Kirkwood won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2014 for her play “Chimerica,” a moral and political look at Chinese-American relations seen through the eyes of fictional photojournalist Joe Schofield. “Chimerica” also earned Kirkwood the Olivier Award for best new play.
“Actually” focuses on two undergrads whose “moral mettle is put to the test” after they meet at Princeton. Previews start in October. Ziegler’s other credits include “Photograph 51” and “Boy.” Her next project is developing Allegra Goodman’s “Intuition,” about a female scientist working in an East Coast Lab, into a limited series for the Sundance Channel.
As the Times details, Manhattan Theater Club has previously been criticized for the lack of gender parity among its playwrights. “In 2015, prominent playwrights separately expressed frustration after Manhattan Theater Club scheduled a season in which seven of eight plays were written by men.” And playwright Lynn Nottage has commented that she was unhappy with the nonprofit’s decision not to move her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ruined” from its Off Broadway theater to its Broadway location.
Lynne Meadow, Manhattan Theater Club’s artistic director, “has strongly defended the theater’s record of producing plays by women,” the source adds.
Manhattan Theater Club made the announcement about Kirkwood and Ziegler’s plays the same day the Times ran a profile on Nottage and Paula Vogel. The playwrights are making their Broadway debuts this season with “Sweat” and “Indecent,” respectively, after they both have won “nearly every award their field has to offer, including the Pulitzer Prize.”
As the Times details, “Indecent” and “Sweat” are the only new plays from women on Broadway this season. “Such imbalance remains a striking incongruity for Broadway, where an estimated 67 percent of the audience is women.”
It’s worth noting that the Times discussed this gender disparity just a day before it announced that its departing co-chief theater critic, Charles Isherwood, would be replaced by another male critic. This isn’t a huge surprise, considering the Dudeocracy that is cultural criticism. While replacing Isherwood with a woman would not have solved Broadway’s gender problem in one fell swoop, there is a good chance the hypothetical female critic would have taken a special interest in the “striking incongruity” and used her voice to do something about it.
