December 13, 2010 • 21 mins
In general, female playwrights are less likely to have their plays produced than their male counterparts. But why? In this episode, Molly and Cristen examine why there are gender disparities in the theater community.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop mom? Never told you?
From House top works dot com. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. We
(00:20):
have said this before, We say it to ourselves all
the time. We have the best listeners in the world.
Oh gosh, I know, from the emails you write us,
to the funny and awesome things you guys post on Facebook,
and even the mean emails, well those are my least favorite.
But by and large, we have awesome listeners who help
us put together great podcasts. And a while back on Facebook,
(00:41):
I put off the call what are some ideas people
have for the for the podcast because it saves us
some work, honestly true, and our listener Karen suggested female
playwrights and disparities between men and women in the theater world,
the theata, and it became all the more pressing to
do this podcast that very same week when there was
(01:02):
a shake up. I mean, these people are dramatic, but
even for dramatic people, this was a This was a
world change. I think that you're referring to the walser
Stein Prize Kerfuffle. It's the title of my next play.
I won't be a good play. I think because yeah,
you read, you read some blogs this, some theater blogs
about this, and people are up in arms and and
(01:22):
even not knowing that much about theater in New York City,
I think this is pretty pretty disturbing. The Theater Development
Fund has ordered the walser Stein Prize to female playwrights
who are under the age of thirty two who have
not yet received national attention for their work, and it
gives them twenty five thou dollars to ease financial pressure
so that they can focus on their work in the
(01:44):
hopes of producing a show that will receive that national attention.
Not a bad prize, that's an excellent prize. Isn't a
sneeze A And this year, after giving out this award
for three years, this year they said, you know what,
we have all these nominations, but several dozen nominations, but
no one's no one's good enough. Yeah, we're just gonna
take a bye. This year they are not awarding a
(02:05):
prize to any of it. And of nineteen nominees. We
were reading about this and someone likened it to the Oscars.
Every year there's the best picture, even if the selections
are not that stellar, someone always takes home an oscar, right,
And you know, some people were like, well, they don't
always give a Pulitzer if there's not an artistic work
(02:25):
that deserves a Pulitzer. But it's hard to think of
any prize that's offered annually other than that that's ever
been revoked. And I'm sure you guys out there can
think of them. But the fact that this one was revoked,
and it's so significant for a young writer, specifically a
female writer, that I really thought it deserved our attention.
And this decision got so much attention that just a
(02:48):
week later, the group said, oh, you know what, well,
we'll consider we'll consider them again. We'll do it, we'll
take a we'll take them on too, we'll do a
do over. Well, we'll consider giving it out, but we're gonna,
you know, ask the non needs for more plays. We're
gonna you know, maybe maybe change some criteria. And they
were kind of shadowy about it, but it was kind
of interesting that the petitioning and the outcry it caused
(03:11):
in the theater world is causing these people to reconsider
their decision to not give the price, but also perhaps
reconsider the state of the female play right in today's world.
And I think one of the main reasons why people
were so within the theater community were so enraged over
the possibility that the wasser Scen price would not be
given out was because there has been this struggle for
(03:33):
years now and this uh conversation going on about why
female play rights are not getting more attention. We've talked
about the struggle of female directors, female chefs, certain industries
that are typically dominated by men, and female playwrights haven't
really pretty bad well. And also when you consider that
(03:55):
that some of these theater companies have the mission of
bringing a really diverse group of voices to the stage,
and some of these theaters are publicly funded, and uh
so it becomes this issue of why aren't they bringing
women voices to the stage if they have this mission
to you know, show bad a broad swath of humanity,
(04:15):
right and to underscore just what this means to some
of the people in in the theater community and especially
in New York, who were completely outraged by this. The
playwright Michael Lou who penned Roanoke wrote a letter to
protest of the decision to not give out the Washersteaon Prize,
and he said, this decision can only be interpreted as
a blanket indictment on the quality of female emerging writers
(04:38):
in their work, and it is insulting not only to
the finalists, but also to the many theater professionals who
nominated these writers and deemed their plays prizeworthy. This decision
perpetuates the pattern of gender bias. Outline and Julia Jordan
and Emily Glassberg sands study on women in the theater,
which we'll get to in a minute, and the message
it sends to the theater community generally that there aren't
(04:59):
any young female playwrights worth investigating. That's a lot, Mr
Lou And I think that his, uh, that prominent letter
maybe why there's a do over. Yeah, I mean, because
it really does kind of sum up this conversation that,
like we said, has been going on now for a while,
and the struggle of these young playwrights to try to
figure out why it is harder for female playwrights, why
(05:21):
their plays are not being produced and uh what what
kind of factors are going into this where this gender
bias or at least alleged gender bias is coming from Well,
you mentioned the name Julia Jordan Kristen. Let's so let's
start with her work. She is a playwright herself and
a few years ago she started organizing these town halls
between female playwrights and prominent theater professionals, the artistic directors
(05:45):
who make that decision to put on a play. Uh,
people who might be able to get more female written
plays produced. And some of the numbers she threw out
in one of her town hall was that thirty years ago,
this is in two thousand eight, seven percent of the
plays on national non profit stages were written by women,
and that currently that number is around seventeen. So she's like,
(06:05):
if this continues, we will finally be a female written
plays on the stage in a hundred years. Oh wow.
So then the question becomes are women not writing plays?
Are women not writing good plays? And if they are,
are we not putting them on? And she says, by
every measure that you can take into account to figure
(06:27):
out if women are pursuing playwriting, it appears they are.
They're getting graduate degrees, they're taking fellowships, they'll win awards,
but they can't get those plays on the stage. So
it's it's not a level of she says, lack of,
lack of quantity. Yeah. And the interesting thing too, is
that at theater festivals around the United States, out particularly
(06:49):
outside of New York. Uh, these festivals, including um, those
that Humana and Louisville and the Eugene O'Neil fear Center
in Waterford, Connecticut, are dominated by women's It's not that
women are completely inactive within the theater community. It's not
like they aren't producing works, but there does seem to
be especially when we're talking about New York, when we're
talking about off Broadway and especially on Broadway. UM. I
(07:12):
think Julia Julia Jordan's tossed out the statistic that their
male counterparts in the two thousand and eighteen thousand ninth
season were produced at fourteen of the largest off Way
off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women
were being produced. So then the question becomes, if women
produce these plays, they're doing fine in these little festivals,
(07:32):
if they're doing fine outside of New York City, are
they just not trying hard enough in New York And
she goes to the agents. The agents say no, women,
women submit their work just as much. Um. And then
the question becomes, well, maybe it's the ticket buyers, Maybe
they don't want to see plays written by women, But
women make up the bulk according to research of Broadway
and off Broadway ticket purchasers and the top two most
(07:55):
successful plays of each of the past ten years. According
to Julia Jordan's there twenty four plays. Fourteen had female
protagonists and seven had male protagonists, and the rest were
ensemble work. So it's not that there's some stereotype that
female playwrights, right, female characters that you know, men don't
want to watch. They are already successful plays that have
female protagonists. Um. So it's it's not that they're writing
(08:17):
work that people don't want to see. It's not that
they're not submitting their work, and it's not that they're
you know, just not ryan plays at the same level
of men. Uh, they're just talking on the stage. So
what is that disconnect? Well, there's also within the sort
of on the on an internal level, there's an idea
that maybe since a lot of theater directors are male,
(08:38):
they just don't jive with um, females works. And there
was one playwright who said that women's plays often did
not resolve as conclusively as those by men, and they
don't follow the more standard model of dramas, and directors
aren't as comfortable. I guess it sounds like, actually, women
play rights are thinking a little bit more outside the
box and maybe, um, the male directors aren't comfortable going
(09:00):
into those spaces. But again it's just hypothesizing, and I
think there has been this tendency Kristen to blame the
male directors and the male artistic directors as this reason
why women aren't getting produced, and that completely shifted in
two thousand nine with this really groundbreaking work by Emily
Glassberg Sands, who at the time was just an undergraduate,
(09:22):
but a very impressive undergraduate. As The New York Times noted,
she went to Princeton and she was heading for graduate
work at Harvard. In just her undergraduate career, she had
gotten uh the co author of for economic Stephen do
You Lovett collaborating with her. She had Cecilia Rouse, a
member of the White House Counsel of Economics, working with her. Uh,
you know, she had she had the big wigs working
(09:43):
with her, and she decided to look at this issue
of discrimination against female playwrights and uh, and she found
that there may be in a surprising culprit in the
and the reason that women aren't getting produced. So a
Glassberg Stands did was she she started out reviewing information
on twenty thousand playwrights who were in the Dramatist Guild
(10:04):
and duley dot com, which is an online database of playwrights.
And while she did find that there were twice as
many male playwrights as female ones and the men tended
to write more, that wasn't the most interesting thing that
she figured out, because what she did next was she
wanted to find out, Okay, well, even if women are
are not producing as many plays with the ones that
(10:26):
get into the hands of artistic directors and literary managers,
are they just being discriminated against? And that do people
really not want to produce women's plays? So what she
did was she took some plays that had already been
written but just hadn't been produced, right, but by pretty
acclaimed playwrights, So we're not dealing with you know what
the washers team priz Kripfuffle might have writ by Molly
(10:48):
and Kristen. Yeah, I mean these were there. I mean,
let's not lie, Molly. I mean, we are headed for
the Tony's, but it's just gonna take a little while.
I mean it's I mean, we had to battle all
this discrimination exactly anyway, So Sands took took these plays
and changed the author names to something you know, some
pretty generic names, saying Joe Smith's versus Jane Smith. So
(11:08):
she gave these plays to the artistic directors and literary
managers and wanted to see if there was a difference
in how they responded to the same play from Joe
versus Jane. And those plays were rated differently, yes they were,
but only by women. Yes, So when it landed in
the hand of a female artistic director, she had the
(11:31):
tendency to rate a female written play lower than a
male written play. And Sands had included this list of
questions like do you think this work can be staged?
Like would your company stages blah blah blah. And it
was the female artistic directors who rated these female plays.
They had the names of the playwrights in front of
them that said, when they had you know, Joe Smith
(11:51):
versus Jane Smith, Joe Smith always ranked higher. The male
artistic directors always rated the men and the women who
had written plays of those those scripts in front of
them exactly the same, right, So this was a groundbreaking Like,
like we said, for for many years people are like, oh,
everything is so male dominated. These artistic directors are are
(12:12):
you know, they see a female name and they think
hormones and they throw it away. But it's actually the
female artistic directors. And you know, there was a lot
of discussion as to why this would happen. And I
think that you see this in a lot of professions
that because women sort of expect the females to have
a harder, harder time then they you know, it's almost
(12:33):
like you have to produce the best play ever for
a female artistic director to consider you because she knows
you've got this long, hard road that your name might
not may not open doors. And instead of you know,
helping helping each other out, you know, they're saying it's
not as good as this guy's, when in fact that
guy was actually a female playwright. And clearly we're not
(12:53):
saying that these artistic directors need to give female playwrights
an unnecessary hand up. I mean, the work should stand
for itself. But when it comes to the box office.
These artistic directors and managers might be shooting themselves in
the foot a little bit, because at the end of
the day, if people don't come to your play, if
(13:14):
they're not buying tickets, it's not gonna go anywhere. You know,
no one's it's just gonna die. Right. So Stands was like,
are these companies losing out on money by not producing
the female written plays? And the answer is yes, plays
and musicals by women sold sixteen percent more tickets a week,
and we're eighteen percent more profitable overall. And shows that
(13:37):
were written by women that were profitable were cut shorter
than less profitable plays that were written by men. And
she compared this to uh the nineteen sixties and seventies
when they did a lot of work on discrimination in baseball,
and there are the studies from that time that showed
that black baseball players had to just have astronomically higher
and better batting averages and statistics than the white players
(14:00):
just to get to play. When they played, they were
so much better. And it's the same thing with female
play rights. According to this research, that when the female
playwrights get the chance to put on their work, you
can have magic. And I think we should note too
that those statistics come from her examination of nine new
plays and musicals produced on Broadway in the past ten years,
(14:22):
so clearly the numbers don't lie. She's doing some pretty
thorough research. So after finding that out, there's been and
this came out what around two thousand eight. This really
spark the big, the big conversation. So it left a
lot of these female playwrights and these women in the
theater community asking why and what what to do, and
(14:43):
then only to have a year later to have this
Wasser's Team Prize kerfuffle when we've just learned that if
it's female artistic directors who are not giving these female
playwrights a chance, it's it's very frustrating to see this
this prize being revoked because it's the same thing. It's
like dangling the carrot. Like female playwrights, the artists explore
the world but don't get rewarded. So one suggestion that
(15:07):
Julie Jordan's who we referenced earlier, had for addressing this
gender bias in the theater community is to perhaps take
a cue from orchestras. And this was pretty interesting. I
thought she was saying that in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
in response to a discrimination suit of gender bias in orchestras,
I guess, depending on decide on deciding who plays what
(15:31):
and who gets a chair and who doesn't, most major
u S orchestras began auditioning new members. Blind screens would
be used to hide the identity of the musician, and
sometimes they even went so far as to roll out
carpets to muffle the click of women's heels that would
give away their gender. And as a result, many orchestras
have achieved parity largely due to the screens and maintain
(15:52):
it by continuing to use blind auditions today. So and
that idea you know, is held up in Sand's research
that if you've got who plays, one of them has
a male name, one of them has a female name,
the male name does better with some artistic directors than
maybe having no names on on those plays could help
achieve more balanced Some other initiatives we've seen. One example
(16:13):
is fifty, which is a grassroots movement that is empowering
women and men to create positive change through a variety
of independent initiatives. And some of these initiatives just include
simple things like gathering people together and reading a bunch
of work by women so that people start, you know,
thinking about what is a work by woman? And hey,
(16:33):
that was pretty good. Maybe we should listen to more.
So that's that's one of them. And also, in response
to the lackless representation of women in the Tony Award nominations,
a group of people in the theater community in New
York got together and organized this year the first annual
Lillian Hellman Awards for outstanding achievements by women in the theater.
(16:57):
They just called them the Lily Lily. I'd rather one
to Lily len Antoni, although then you couldn't get an
egot exactly. Maybe the egal Yeah, an egal An eagle. Yeah.
Just free dirty rock fans out there who are trying
to get your egots right. So these women are, you know,
they're they're making some moves there getting headlines, but who knows.
I mean, one one comment we saw in these articles
(17:19):
is that the story has been written, you know, every
decade that female play rights are trying to get more representation.
So hopefully the Wasserstein Prize for Fuffle soon coming to
theaters near you. Well, we'll maybe keep this in the
conversation a little bit more, and I wonder if by
the time this podcast comes out, if the wasserstcene will
have been awarded. We will definitely make a note of
(17:39):
it on the blog, on Facebook and Twitter and all
our ways of keeping up with you guys. Indeed, so
theater buffs out there. Let us know what you think.
Send us an email Mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot com. And in the meantime, I've got a little
email here that we can read. Molly. It sounds wonderful.
This is in response to an older podcast that we
(18:01):
did on mail order brides, and this is from Michael,
and Michael says, I have to take exception with your
podcast concerning mail order brides. I understand the anecdotal stories
may not be indicative of the world at large, but
the personal experience of my friends and I with marrying
a foreign bride run counter to many of the points
(18:21):
you make in your podcast. So here is my comment.
My friends and I fall into the category of the
nice guy. We believe in being respectful and carrying towards
the women we love as a whole. We are hard
working men with established careers. Are I qus are above
average when we have good senses of humor or tech savvy,
which makes us nerds where average are less in appearance.
(18:42):
We are shorter than average. Rather than sitting on the
couch watching football, we go out and engage in life.
We snow ski, motorcycle and travel. We aren't afraid of adventure.
We don't live with our moms and don't play Star
Wars models play with Star Wars models. We're grown men
who lack something in our lives, and that is love. Well,
it seems superficial for a and to use a foreign
bride agency. It's driven by the fact that our choices
(19:03):
have become limited here in the US. Just go to
any of the dating websites and see how many women
want to date men who are tall. Look at the
shopping list of criteria posted on their profiles. We have
tried dating and are tired of the modern US game.
Most first dates, especially from dating websites, are more like
job interviews rather than having an enjoyable evening. I personally
refuse to do any more safe dates at Starbucks where
(19:26):
I'm sized up in the first three minutes as to
my suitability as a partner or even as a man.
Combine this experience with women who seek the dark triad
and consider guys like me only friend material. In fact,
my friends and I are baffled by the observation that
so many women are so willing to date complete jerks.
Unlike the eighteen hundreds of the world is a much
smaller place. In a few hours, we can be on
(19:47):
the other side of the world. We can. We have
phone and internet connectivity. It's easy to remain connected into
talk as never before. Just turn on the webcam. If
an agency is helping people connect, what's the problem. Yes,
bringing a foreign bride to the US is expensive. It
can cost ten to to do this. But rather than
thinking we are quote buying a wife, perhaps consider that
(20:09):
we have a natural desire to love and be love,
and that search for love, we're willing to search the globe.
How many love songs tell of a man's willingness to
climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest sea for
the woman of our dreams, And this instance, we are
willing to climb over a mountain of paperwork and navigate
the bureaucratic seas in the hope of finding love. Be
aware that we are cautious when we think about meeting
(20:29):
a foreign woman, we are aware of the fact that
we may be viewed as a ticket to a green
card or a path out of a difficult economic situation.
And then men I've met who marry a Russian bride
take great pains to avoid being used. There is a
risk on both sides, but it is also great reward.
Rather than being condescending about our choice, please consider nice
guys too, who deserve to be loved. Michael, I guess
(20:52):
say that's a it's a pretty greedy meal. Quite a story, yes,
and food for thought. So if you would like to
send us meals of food for thought in form of email,
email us and mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or head on over to you our Facebook page and
give us alike if you will, or check us out
on Twitter at mom stuff Podcasts. And then finally you
can head over to our blog stuff I've Never Told
(21:16):
You at how stuff works dot com for moralness and
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(21:41):
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop mom? Never told you?
From House top works dot com. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. We
(00:20):
have said this before, We say it to ourselves all
the time. We have the best listeners in the world.
Oh gosh, I know, from the emails you write us,
to the funny and awesome things you guys post on Facebook,
and even the mean emails, well those are my least favorite.
But by and large, we have awesome listeners who help
us put together great podcasts. And a while back on Facebook,
(00:41):
I put off the call what are some ideas people
have for the for the podcast because it saves us
some work, honestly true, and our listener Karen suggested female
playwrights and disparities between men and women in the theater world,
the theata, and it became all the more pressing to
do this podcast that very same week when there was
(01:02):
a shake up. I mean, these people are dramatic, but
even for dramatic people, this was a This was a
world change. I think that you're referring to the walser
Stein Prize Kerfuffle. It's the title of my next play.
I won't be a good play. I think because yeah,
you read, you read some blogs this, some theater blogs
about this, and people are up in arms and and
(01:22):
even not knowing that much about theater in New York City,
I think this is pretty pretty disturbing. The Theater Development
Fund has ordered the walser Stein Prize to female playwrights
who are under the age of thirty two who have
not yet received national attention for their work, and it
gives them twenty five thou dollars to ease financial pressure
so that they can focus on their work in the
(01:44):
hopes of producing a show that will receive that national attention.
Not a bad prize, that's an excellent prize. Isn't a
sneeze A And this year, after giving out this award
for three years, this year they said, you know what,
we have all these nominations, but several dozen nominations, but
no one's no one's good enough. Yeah, we're just gonna
take a bye. This year they are not awarding a
(02:05):
prize to any of it. And of nineteen nominees. We
were reading about this and someone likened it to the Oscars.
Every year there's the best picture, even if the selections
are not that stellar, someone always takes home an oscar, right,
And you know, some people were like, well, they don't
always give a Pulitzer if there's not an artistic work
(02:25):
that deserves a Pulitzer. But it's hard to think of
any prize that's offered annually other than that that's ever
been revoked. And I'm sure you guys out there can
think of them. But the fact that this one was revoked,
and it's so significant for a young writer, specifically a
female writer, that I really thought it deserved our attention.
And this decision got so much attention that just a
(02:48):
week later, the group said, oh, you know what, well,
we'll consider we'll consider them again. We'll do it, we'll
take a we'll take them on too, we'll do a
do over. Well, we'll consider giving it out, but we're gonna,
you know, ask the non needs for more plays. We're
gonna you know, maybe maybe change some criteria. And they
were kind of shadowy about it, but it was kind
of interesting that the petitioning and the outcry it caused
(03:11):
in the theater world is causing these people to reconsider
their decision to not give the price, but also perhaps
reconsider the state of the female play right in today's world.
And I think one of the main reasons why people
were so within the theater community were so enraged over
the possibility that the wasser Scen price would not be
given out was because there has been this struggle for
(03:33):
years now and this uh conversation going on about why
female play rights are not getting more attention. We've talked
about the struggle of female directors, female chefs, certain industries
that are typically dominated by men, and female playwrights haven't
really pretty bad well. And also when you consider that
(03:55):
that some of these theater companies have the mission of
bringing a really diverse group of voices to the stage,
and some of these theaters are publicly funded, and uh
so it becomes this issue of why aren't they bringing
women voices to the stage if they have this mission
to you know, show bad a broad swath of humanity,
(04:15):
right and to underscore just what this means to some
of the people in in the theater community and especially
in New York, who were completely outraged by this. The
playwright Michael Lou who penned Roanoke wrote a letter to
protest of the decision to not give out the Washersteaon Prize,
and he said, this decision can only be interpreted as
a blanket indictment on the quality of female emerging writers
(04:38):
in their work, and it is insulting not only to
the finalists, but also to the many theater professionals who
nominated these writers and deemed their plays prizeworthy. This decision
perpetuates the pattern of gender bias. Outline and Julia Jordan
and Emily Glassberg sands study on women in the theater,
which we'll get to in a minute, and the message
it sends to the theater community generally that there aren't
(04:59):
any young female playwrights worth investigating. That's a lot, Mr
Lou And I think that his, uh, that prominent letter
maybe why there's a do over. Yeah, I mean, because
it really does kind of sum up this conversation that,
like we said, has been going on now for a while,
and the struggle of these young playwrights to try to
figure out why it is harder for female playwrights, why
(05:21):
their plays are not being produced and uh what what
kind of factors are going into this where this gender
bias or at least alleged gender bias is coming from Well,
you mentioned the name Julia Jordan Kristen. Let's so let's
start with her work. She is a playwright herself and
a few years ago she started organizing these town halls
between female playwrights and prominent theater professionals, the artistic directors
(05:45):
who make that decision to put on a play. Uh,
people who might be able to get more female written
plays produced. And some of the numbers she threw out
in one of her town hall was that thirty years ago,
this is in two thousand eight, seven percent of the
plays on national non profit stages were written by women,
and that currently that number is around seventeen. So she's like,
(06:05):
if this continues, we will finally be a female written
plays on the stage in a hundred years. Oh wow.
So then the question becomes are women not writing plays?
Are women not writing good plays? And if they are,
are we not putting them on? And she says, by
every measure that you can take into account to figure
(06:27):
out if women are pursuing playwriting, it appears they are.
They're getting graduate degrees, they're taking fellowships, they'll win awards,
but they can't get those plays on the stage. So
it's it's not a level of she says, lack of,
lack of quantity. Yeah. And the interesting thing too, is
that at theater festivals around the United States, out particularly
(06:49):
outside of New York. Uh, these festivals, including um, those
that Humana and Louisville and the Eugene O'Neil fear Center
in Waterford, Connecticut, are dominated by women's It's not that
women are completely inactive within the theater community. It's not
like they aren't producing works, but there does seem to
be especially when we're talking about New York, when we're
talking about off Broadway and especially on Broadway. UM. I
(07:12):
think Julia Julia Jordan's tossed out the statistic that their
male counterparts in the two thousand and eighteen thousand ninth
season were produced at fourteen of the largest off Way
off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women
were being produced. So then the question becomes, if women
produce these plays, they're doing fine in these little festivals,
(07:32):
if they're doing fine outside of New York City, are
they just not trying hard enough in New York And
she goes to the agents. The agents say no, women,
women submit their work just as much. Um. And then
the question becomes, well, maybe it's the ticket buyers, Maybe
they don't want to see plays written by women, But
women make up the bulk according to research of Broadway
and off Broadway ticket purchasers and the top two most
(07:55):
successful plays of each of the past ten years. According
to Julia Jordan's there twenty four plays. Fourteen had female
protagonists and seven had male protagonists, and the rest were
ensemble work. So it's not that there's some stereotype that
female playwrights, right, female characters that you know, men don't
want to watch. They are already successful plays that have
female protagonists. Um. So it's it's not that they're writing
(08:17):
work that people don't want to see. It's not that
they're not submitting their work, and it's not that they're
you know, just not ryan plays at the same level
of men. Uh, they're just talking on the stage. So
what is that disconnect? Well, there's also within the sort
of on the on an internal level, there's an idea
that maybe since a lot of theater directors are male,
(08:38):
they just don't jive with um, females works. And there
was one playwright who said that women's plays often did
not resolve as conclusively as those by men, and they
don't follow the more standard model of dramas, and directors
aren't as comfortable. I guess it sounds like, actually, women
play rights are thinking a little bit more outside the
box and maybe, um, the male directors aren't comfortable going
(09:00):
into those spaces. But again it's just hypothesizing, and I
think there has been this tendency Kristen to blame the
male directors and the male artistic directors as this reason
why women aren't getting produced, and that completely shifted in
two thousand nine with this really groundbreaking work by Emily
Glassberg Sands, who at the time was just an undergraduate,
(09:22):
but a very impressive undergraduate. As The New York Times noted,
she went to Princeton and she was heading for graduate
work at Harvard. In just her undergraduate career, she had
gotten uh the co author of for economic Stephen do
You Lovett collaborating with her. She had Cecilia Rouse, a
member of the White House Counsel of Economics, working with her. Uh,
you know, she had she had the big wigs working
(09:43):
with her, and she decided to look at this issue
of discrimination against female playwrights and uh, and she found
that there may be in a surprising culprit in the
and the reason that women aren't getting produced. So a
Glassberg Stands did was she she started out reviewing information
on twenty thousand playwrights who were in the Dramatist Guild
(10:04):
and duley dot com, which is an online database of playwrights.
And while she did find that there were twice as
many male playwrights as female ones and the men tended
to write more, that wasn't the most interesting thing that
she figured out, because what she did next was she
wanted to find out, Okay, well, even if women are
are not producing as many plays with the ones that
(10:26):
get into the hands of artistic directors and literary managers,
are they just being discriminated against? And that do people
really not want to produce women's plays? So what she
did was she took some plays that had already been
written but just hadn't been produced, right, but by pretty
acclaimed playwrights, So we're not dealing with you know what
the washers team priz Kripfuffle might have writ by Molly
(10:48):
and Kristen. Yeah, I mean these were there. I mean,
let's not lie, Molly. I mean, we are headed for
the Tony's, but it's just gonna take a little while.
I mean it's I mean, we had to battle all
this discrimination exactly anyway, So Sands took took these plays
and changed the author names to something you know, some
pretty generic names, saying Joe Smith's versus Jane Smith. So
(11:08):
she gave these plays to the artistic directors and literary
managers and wanted to see if there was a difference
in how they responded to the same play from Joe
versus Jane. And those plays were rated differently, yes they were,
but only by women. Yes, So when it landed in
the hand of a female artistic director, she had the
(11:31):
tendency to rate a female written play lower than a
male written play. And Sands had included this list of
questions like do you think this work can be staged?
Like would your company stages blah blah blah. And it
was the female artistic directors who rated these female plays.
They had the names of the playwrights in front of
them that said, when they had you know, Joe Smith
(11:51):
versus Jane Smith, Joe Smith always ranked higher. The male
artistic directors always rated the men and the women who
had written plays of those those scripts in front of
them exactly the same, right, So this was a groundbreaking Like,
like we said, for for many years people are like, oh,
everything is so male dominated. These artistic directors are are
(12:12):
you know, they see a female name and they think
hormones and they throw it away. But it's actually the
female artistic directors. And you know, there was a lot
of discussion as to why this would happen. And I
think that you see this in a lot of professions
that because women sort of expect the females to have
a harder, harder time then they you know, it's almost
(12:33):
like you have to produce the best play ever for
a female artistic director to consider you because she knows
you've got this long, hard road that your name might
not may not open doors. And instead of you know,
helping helping each other out, you know, they're saying it's
not as good as this guy's, when in fact that
guy was actually a female playwright. And clearly we're not
(12:53):
saying that these artistic directors need to give female playwrights
an unnecessary hand up. I mean, the work should stand
for itself. But when it comes to the box office.
These artistic directors and managers might be shooting themselves in
the foot a little bit, because at the end of
the day, if people don't come to your play, if
(13:14):
they're not buying tickets, it's not gonna go anywhere. You know,
no one's it's just gonna die. Right. So Stands was like,
are these companies losing out on money by not producing
the female written plays? And the answer is yes, plays
and musicals by women sold sixteen percent more tickets a week,
and we're eighteen percent more profitable overall. And shows that
(13:37):
were written by women that were profitable were cut shorter
than less profitable plays that were written by men. And
she compared this to uh the nineteen sixties and seventies
when they did a lot of work on discrimination in baseball,
and there are the studies from that time that showed
that black baseball players had to just have astronomically higher
and better batting averages and statistics than the white players
(14:00):
just to get to play. When they played, they were
so much better. And it's the same thing with female
play rights. According to this research, that when the female
playwrights get the chance to put on their work, you
can have magic. And I think we should note too
that those statistics come from her examination of nine new
plays and musicals produced on Broadway in the past ten years,
(14:22):
so clearly the numbers don't lie. She's doing some pretty
thorough research. So after finding that out, there's been and
this came out what around two thousand eight. This really
spark the big, the big conversation. So it left a
lot of these female playwrights and these women in the
theater community asking why and what what to do, and
(14:43):
then only to have a year later to have this
Wasser's Team Prize kerfuffle when we've just learned that if
it's female artistic directors who are not giving these female
playwrights a chance, it's it's very frustrating to see this
this prize being revoked because it's the same thing. It's
like dangling the carrot. Like female playwrights, the artists explore
the world but don't get rewarded. So one suggestion that
(15:07):
Julie Jordan's who we referenced earlier, had for addressing this
gender bias in the theater community is to perhaps take
a cue from orchestras. And this was pretty interesting. I
thought she was saying that in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
in response to a discrimination suit of gender bias in orchestras,
I guess, depending on decide on deciding who plays what
(15:31):
and who gets a chair and who doesn't, most major
u S orchestras began auditioning new members. Blind screens would
be used to hide the identity of the musician, and
sometimes they even went so far as to roll out
carpets to muffle the click of women's heels that would
give away their gender. And as a result, many orchestras
have achieved parity largely due to the screens and maintain
(15:52):
it by continuing to use blind auditions today. So and
that idea you know, is held up in Sand's research
that if you've got who plays, one of them has
a male name, one of them has a female name,
the male name does better with some artistic directors than
maybe having no names on on those plays could help
achieve more balanced Some other initiatives we've seen. One example
(16:13):
is fifty, which is a grassroots movement that is empowering
women and men to create positive change through a variety
of independent initiatives. And some of these initiatives just include
simple things like gathering people together and reading a bunch
of work by women so that people start, you know,
thinking about what is a work by woman? And hey,
(16:33):
that was pretty good. Maybe we should listen to more.
So that's that's one of them. And also, in response
to the lackless representation of women in the Tony Award nominations,
a group of people in the theater community in New
York got together and organized this year the first annual
Lillian Hellman Awards for outstanding achievements by women in the theater.
(16:57):
They just called them the Lily Lily. I'd rather one
to Lily len Antoni, although then you couldn't get an
egot exactly. Maybe the egal Yeah, an egal An eagle. Yeah.
Just free dirty rock fans out there who are trying
to get your egots right. So these women are, you know,
they're they're making some moves there getting headlines, but who knows.
I mean, one one comment we saw in these articles
(17:19):
is that the story has been written, you know, every
decade that female play rights are trying to get more representation.
So hopefully the Wasserstein Prize for Fuffle soon coming to
theaters near you. Well, we'll maybe keep this in the
conversation a little bit more, and I wonder if by
the time this podcast comes out, if the wasserstcene will
have been awarded. We will definitely make a note of
(17:39):
it on the blog, on Facebook and Twitter and all
our ways of keeping up with you guys. Indeed, so
theater buffs out there. Let us know what you think.
Send us an email Mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot com. And in the meantime, I've got a little
email here that we can read. Molly. It sounds wonderful.
This is in response to an older podcast that we
(18:01):
did on mail order brides, and this is from Michael,
and Michael says, I have to take exception with your
podcast concerning mail order brides. I understand the anecdotal stories
may not be indicative of the world at large, but
the personal experience of my friends and I with marrying
a foreign bride run counter to many of the points
(18:21):
you make in your podcast. So here is my comment.
My friends and I fall into the category of the
nice guy. We believe in being respectful and carrying towards
the women we love as a whole. We are hard
working men with established careers. Are I qus are above
average when we have good senses of humor or tech savvy,
which makes us nerds where average are less in appearance.
(18:42):
We are shorter than average. Rather than sitting on the
couch watching football, we go out and engage in life.
We snow ski, motorcycle and travel. We aren't afraid of adventure.
We don't live with our moms and don't play Star
Wars models play with Star Wars models. We're grown men
who lack something in our lives, and that is love. Well,
it seems superficial for a and to use a foreign
bride agency. It's driven by the fact that our choices
(19:03):
have become limited here in the US. Just go to
any of the dating websites and see how many women
want to date men who are tall. Look at the
shopping list of criteria posted on their profiles. We have
tried dating and are tired of the modern US game.
Most first dates, especially from dating websites, are more like
job interviews rather than having an enjoyable evening. I personally
refuse to do any more safe dates at Starbucks where
(19:26):
I'm sized up in the first three minutes as to
my suitability as a partner or even as a man.
Combine this experience with women who seek the dark triad
and consider guys like me only friend material. In fact,
my friends and I are baffled by the observation that
so many women are so willing to date complete jerks.
Unlike the eighteen hundreds of the world is a much
smaller place. In a few hours, we can be on
(19:47):
the other side of the world. We can. We have
phone and internet connectivity. It's easy to remain connected into
talk as never before. Just turn on the webcam. If
an agency is helping people connect, what's the problem. Yes,
bringing a foreign bride to the US is expensive. It
can cost ten to to do this. But rather than
thinking we are quote buying a wife, perhaps consider that
(20:09):
we have a natural desire to love and be love,
and that search for love, we're willing to search the globe.
How many love songs tell of a man's willingness to
climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest sea for
the woman of our dreams, And this instance, we are
willing to climb over a mountain of paperwork and navigate
the bureaucratic seas in the hope of finding love. Be
aware that we are cautious when we think about meeting
(20:29):
a foreign woman, we are aware of the fact that
we may be viewed as a ticket to a green
card or a path out of a difficult economic situation.
And then men I've met who marry a Russian bride
take great pains to avoid being used. There is a
risk on both sides, but it is also great reward.
Rather than being condescending about our choice, please consider nice
guys too, who deserve to be loved. Michael, I guess
(20:52):
say that's a it's a pretty greedy meal. Quite a story, yes,
and food for thought. So if you would like to
send us meals of food for thought in form of email,
email us and mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or head on over to you our Facebook page and
give us alike if you will, or check us out
on Twitter at mom stuff Podcasts. And then finally you
can head over to our blog stuff I've Never Told
(21:16):
You at how stuff works dot com for moralness and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, cook on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
how Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two
(21:41):
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