Changing the Odds for the Women in Theatre

BY Kerry Reid

It might seem like the ultimate 180: on the heels of a celebration of a Great White Dead Male American Playwright (“A Global Exploration: Eugene O’Neill in the 21^st Century”), the Goodman focuses this month on women in theatre, with simultaneous world-premiere plays by female playwrights and directed by women for the first time in the theatre’s history. Regina Taylor’s Magnolia, which re-sets Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in civil-rights-era Atlanta, is directed in the Albert by Tony winner and Steppenwolf ensemble member Anna D. Shapiro, while Naomi Iizuka’s Ghostwritten, about an American woman, her Vietnamese-born daughter, and a mysterious stranger in the past, is helmed by Lisa Portes in the Owen. Along with these shows, the Goodman is shedding the spotlight on other work by women-oriented theatre companies in Chicago (see sidebar), and hosting several workshops and panel discussions on the ways in which women in Chicago theatre—playwrights, directors, administrators, and critics—are bucking the percentages. Collectively, the effort makes up “Taking the Stage: A Celebration of Women Making Theater.”

The numbers aren’t great. As pointed out by playwrights Julia Jordan and Sarah Schulman last fall, men were produced this season at the 14 largest off-Broadway institutions four times more often than women. The two held a town hall meeting last October to address the imbalance. And a 2005 study by Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the Women Arts Project found that while 52 percent of aspiring playwrights are women, nowhere near that percentage is produced on a regular basis. (In fact, 20% Theatre Company in Chicago took their name from one of the most commonly cited statistics about the number of plays by women produced annually in the United States.)

But Goodman’s education and community programs director, Willa Taylor, and the company’s TCG fellow, Julieanne Ehre, the former artistic director of Greasy Joan & Co., plan to accentuate the positive as well as highlight the inequities. Says Ehre, “We looked up and said, ‘Hey, the Goodman, a major regional theatre that is run by two very powerful men, is now organically producing all this work by women, and that is something to celebrate and really get excited about.” The rest of the Goodman’s non-O’Neill season has already featured the world premiere of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, which then moved off-Broadway to the Manhattan Theatre Club; and Goodman favorite Rebecca Gilman’s The Crowd You’re In With closes out the Owen season in May.

But neither Taylor nor Ehre is na·ve about the hurdles faced by women and minorities in theatre, starting with the canon itself. “It goes back to the educational system. If you study [theatre], you study the white men,” says Taylor, who is African American. “I can’t tell you what it was like to sit in a class and read Oscar Brockett, who was at that time the definitive theatre history textbook that you had to study if you were in school. There was nothing about people of color in Oscar Brockett’s book.”

Ehre concurs. “Writers like Maria Irene Fornes—I was just talking about her with Henry Godinez [Goodman artistic associate and curator of the Latino Theatre

Festival]—she never gets produced, and she’s brilliant.”

Asked about the existence of different standards for women artists, Ehre says that for women directors, “I think it can be a little bit harder, in terms of there being this bad-boy director mentality. When a guy does something that is maybe a little more avant garde or pushing the edges, they’re seen as auteurs, and I rarely see the term applied to women who are doing similar work. There is this mentality of marginalizing women that our culture isn’t even aware of. It’s acceptable that someone like [Rivendell founder and artistic director] Tara Mallen, who has been producing for a long time, or Ann Filmer [founder/artistic director for Berwyn’s 16^th Street Theater], who has been around for a long time, are struggling in these smaller companies and perhaps not supported the same way as a man doing similar work.”

As a former artistic director, Ehre says, “I had the advantage in that I was running the company, so I got to bring in people that I knew would be good to work with. But I think women get into situations where they are directing for companies that have men in charge, or male technicians, and they have to prove themselves in ways that a man wouldn’t. If a woman is asking questions, it can be seen as, ‘Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ whereas you wouldn’t necessarily say that about a guy.”

Taylor also notes the disparity in the technical side of theatre. “Normally, when somebody comes in to do lighting where I’ve worked [Taylor’s resume includes a stint at Lincoln Center], other than Jen Tipton, it’s been a man. If you are a young student and you see nobody who looks like you in this craft, how do you even get to know that you can do it? I think that’s one of the things that’s important about this festival, in particular for young female directors, to be able to just have that chance. This is something Jessica Hutchinson [artistic director of New Leaf Theatre] talked about a lot—just how valuable it is to be in a room with people who have done the work for a long time and have had some modicum of success.”

One aspect of the festival, a panel on April 16 at Columbia College Chicago, presented in conjunction with the Association for Women Journalists, focuses on the role of female critics. (Full disclosure: I am on the panel, along with AWJ members Martha Steketee, a critic and dramaturg, moderator Kelly Kleiman of WBEZ’s “Dueling

Critics,” and screenwriter, filmmaker, and Huffington Post contributor Alice Singleton.) The last time the AWJ held a discussion like this in spring of 2007, it led to the formation of the Goodman’s Cindy Bandle Young Critics Circle, named after the late Goodman publicist and dedicated to helping young women who are juniors in Chicago-area high schools learn about theatre craft and criticism. The AWJ provides mentors (this writer is one of them) to lend guidance and feedback on the girls’ writing and lead discussions every other Saturday at the Goodman on the shows presented by the theatre. Taylor notes that it’s still possible for critics to get away with the “kinds of comments about women in print that they would never be able to say about people of color.” (Consider, for instance, if the New Yorker’s John Lahr, who dismissed Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius as “Mamet for girls,” would have written “Mamet for blacks” and expected it to survive the editor’s pen.)

For women in theatre, the challenges of combining family and career can be even more difficult than that faced by their counterparts in the corporate world. Ehre, the mother of two small children, admits that having her second child made things “exponentially more difficult.” Still, she also points to the fact that more and more women are staying in theatre while raising their children, rather than dropping out of their careers while their children are small. Kate Whoriskey, the director of Ruined, gave birth shortly before the show opened. (Just a few local examples of women directors with small children are Jessica Thebus, Tara Mallen, Ann Filmer, and Kimberly Senior.)

Ultimately, what both Taylor and Ehre hope that patrons and participating artists for the “Taking the Stage” festival will come away with is an appreciation for both the great variety of work by women in Chicago and an awareness of the challenges these artists face, especially in the current economic crisis.

Says Taylor, “I would be really happy if women called up Ann Filmer and Tanya and Coya [Tanya Saracho and Coya Paz of Teatro Luna] and Tara Mallen and Babes With Blades and said, ‘I love your work. I want to see it thrive. I want to be on the board, I want to volunteer for whatever.’ And men. Not just women. Just recognize that there is this abundance of work out there that’s going unnoticed and that needs to be supported financially so that it can continue.”