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A Theater Company's Bold Move: Women-Only Season

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Why are there so few plays by women being produced? Why aren’t there better roles for women? A national conversation about these subjects and more has been happening in the theater world, and actors, playwrights, and artistic directors in the San Francisco Bay Area have been a part of the discussion on gender parity. This year, the company at Berkeley’s Shotgun Players decided to do something about the problem—their season, starting this week with Antigonick by Anne Carson and ending in January 2016 with Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, consists of all women playwrights.

“There’s been a lot of talk about gender parity but not a lot of action,” said Liz Lisle, the managing director of Shotgun. “We could all blog about it forever or we could do something.”

Lisle says when the company put the call out looking for plays by women, they got so many great suggestions that in addition to the six full productions, they’re doing six readings of plays as well. They didn’t look only for plays written by women, but for plays with roles for women, and they also want to try for parity with directors and designers.

Shotgun company member Fontana Butterfield came up with the idea. For the 2013 season, Shotgun’s artistic director, Patrick Dooley, told company members that he was having a hard time finding great plays by women and asked how they would feel about all male playwrights. (In the end, the season included two plays by women.) Butterfield took a couple days to research the issue. She came back with a suggestion—how about a season of all women, in the same way that the company had done one of all new playwrights?

Butterfield says that thinking about all that she’d found out about the lack of plays by women and the scarcity of good roles for them onstage, she had posted a message on Facebook, saying she was thinking of starting a feminist theater group. “It sort of freaked me out, using the ‘f word,’” she said. “Then I wrote, ‘Yeah, I said feminist,’ and posted it and went off about my day. When I came back, I had gotten about 50 responses in an hour, coming from women I admire saying ‘When are we meeting?’ and ‘When do we start?’”

That was the beginning of the theater salon, Yeah, I Said Feminist. More than 30 women came to the first meeting, Butterfield said. They discussed ideas and actions and what kinds of projects they’d most like to work on. She got some of the best roles of her life through connections made in the group, Butterfield says, and she as well as other members got more confident about speaking out.

Marisela Treviño Orta, whose play Heart-Shaped Nebula will be produced at Shotgun this season, was at the first meeting of the Yeah, I Said Feminist salon. She thinks being a member of the group has gotten her in touch with the larger theater world and made a huge difference in her career.

“It’s helped me understand the employment challenges for women,” she said. “It’s a great way to share information and to keep conversation going—there’s this sort of hive mind you can check in with on information about gender parity.”

Orta first heard at a salon about Shotgun’s season. Her work is a good fit with the theater company, she thinks.

“Patrick says they look for plays that transport their audiences into another world,” she said. “It’s more than just naturalism—there’s a lot of imagination happening on that stage. There’s elevated or heightened realism, and this play walks that line of reality and something more magical.”

Madeleine George has some history with Shotgun—her play Precious Little was produced there in 2012, and this season the company will do a reading of her play The (Curious Case of The) Watson Intelligence. George says she and Dooley were talking about doing the play, before she was aware the theater had a slate of all women. She was delighted by their choice to take this step, she says.

“There’s as much radical diversity with these plays as in any theater in America,” she said. “It puts the lie to the assumption artistic directors have about what would happen if half of their plays were by women.”

And what’s that assumption?

“That if they had 50 percent plays by women they would end up with 50 percent solo shows about breast cancer,” she said. “They’re afraid to be in this narrow bandwidth, but Shotgun’s season shows that’s totally wrong.”

Lisle said along with the response from agents and literary managers and theater people, those outside the theater world have gotten involved as well.

“We’re hearing from supporters of advocacy for women,” she said. “We’re having conversation about what does it mean to be telling stories by women and how does that change the frame of things and why these plays? There’s been a lot of input from the community, and those kind of intersection points are really exciting.”

The people involved hope that this can inspire other companies.

“We kind of hope to get another theater to pick up the torch, and for this not to be just a one-time thing,” said Orta, who mentioned that Chicago’s Halycon Theatre is also doing a season of all women playwrights this year.

The women of Yeah, I Said Feminist have been talking about other actions that people can take to see more stories by women. One is very simple, Orta says.

“You definitely have a voice if you go to a play,” she said. “Usually they give you a survey, and you can always say, ‘I would love to see more women playwrights.’ Let them know you notice, and you want more gender parity and more diversity.”

 


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