When Julia Jordan was a playwriting fellow at Juilliard in the late ‘90s, Wendy Wasserstein addressed the female members of her class, telling them, “When you get out of here, people will tell you that your plays are not commercial and I want you to tell them that I am the most commercial playwright alive.”Indeed, the market place into which Jordan and other women playwrights entered at the time was not hospitable to their gender. In a 2001 study conducted by the New York State Council of the Arts, only 17% of plays produced nationally were by women. But there has been substantial improvement since then according to “The Count,” a new collaborative study between the Lilly Awards and the Dramatist Guild and overseen by Jordan and Marsha Norman, among others. Surveying 2,508 productions at significant professional theaters over the last three years, the study concluded that 22% of revivals and new plays were written by women. Isolating new plays only, that figure jumped to 29%. “That’s definitely an improvement,” says Jordan.More proof was evinced at the last Tony Awards, when the Best Musical went to “Fun Home,” written by two women, composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Lisa Kron, who also went home with awards. And while for a long time, female playwrights of note were few — Wasserstein, Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, and Tina Howe — there is now a much larger sorority that includes Kron, Sarah Rule, Amy Herzog, Melissa Ross, Katori Hall, Regina Taylor, and Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker and Lynn Nottage.That parity is still a long way off is due to the fact, says Jordan, that “there is conscious and unconscious bias as well as systemic bias.” Yet one would think that the increase in numbers of female artistic directors at major institutions, such as Diane Paulus at American Repertory Theatre, might redress the situation. But Jordan counters that men run two of the most prominent theaters that have championed women playwrights: Tim Sanford of Playwrights Horizons and Jim Nicola’s New York Theatre Workshop. While every study has shown that there is no difference between responses from artistic directors according to gender, the study found that the bias was largely societal. “Their bias showed up when they predicted what the audience would think, what the critics would think, and whether or not the talent would want to work on shows [written by women],” says Jordan. “They were predicting the bias on other people but did not show it themselves.” In the 2001 study, artistic director Casey Childs, founder and producer of Primary Stages, admitted that he had passed on Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” and Margaret Edson’s “Wit” — two Pulitzer Prize winners — because he thought that his audience couldn’t relate to them.Furthermore, the system is stacked against women from a serious lack of infrastructure. Women invariably opt out of writing plays when they have children because it is a profession that demands a lot of travel and leaving home for weeks at a time. Says Jordan, “I constantly hear from women how hard it is because this is not a culture that says, ‘Bring your children and here is a list of babysitters and a list of day camps.’”However, spurred by studies like “The Count,” which will be an annual survey, some theaters have moved to address the problem. Jordan says that the Williamstown Theatre and Sundance have put just such amenities in place and the La Jolla Playhouse was recently given a million dollar donation, part of which will go towards child care. “It’s going to make a huge difference,” she says.One of the more intriguing discoveries of the study related to the position of women of color. Because of the visibility of playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tanya Barfield, Regina Taylor and Lynn Nottage, there is a perception that women of color are more likely to be produced. The statistics showed the contrary: at 12% they were in fact the least likely to be produced compared to the percentage of the population. “When some playwrights of color acquire success, it seems that there are many opportunities for us,” says Chiori Miyagawa, an Asian-American playwright. “This can be dangerous because it can lead to neglect or outright attacks on the small piece of the pie obtained by playwrights of color.”As such, playwrights of color must grab their piece where they can, even at the smaller theaters that may not have been included in “The Count.” For example, “The Antigone Project” — a play in five parts by women writers including Miyagawa, Nottage, Barfield, Caridad Svich, and Karen Hartman — will be produced next winter at the Rep Stage in Columbia, Maryland, which is celebrating “The Year of the Woman.”One of the other reasons that the situation may be improving for women, says Jordan, is because female characters are simply more compelling. “This is my theory, but you can take almost any story and if you make the lead character female, the conflict goes up. You put a woman in a war zone or in a situation of protecting her children and the dramatic tension goes up. Against any odds, she’s going to be an underdog. That just makes for a better story.”
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