Last night, students shuffled in and out of the audition room for a production I’m working on, frantically asking about pronunciation and deciding whether to use or ignore the chairs we’d provided them. Between one audition and the next, after we’d seen about 15 people, my male professor turned to me and whispered “there are so many good girls.” Less than 20 minutes and 10 more auditions into the night, another man working on the show turned to me and said the same thing.
In the audition rooms I’ve been in over the last four years, the number of women auditioners is almost always double the number of men, and women are competing for far fewer roles. More often than not, the shows done on my college’s mainstage feature predominantly male casts and are written by men. Given the statistics, the odds are stacked heavily against the women and men have noticeably less to prove. A less-talented man may find himself on stage six times before an astonishingly talented woman ever sees her name on a cast list.
When people say, “there are so many good girls,” it’s usually followed by “and what a shame that we can’t cast them all.” Directors and professors select male-driven plays and then seem shocked when they can’t possibly cast all the talented women, like there’s some unavoidable, universal rule about the number of girls you can have on stage at one time. What a shame, indeed.
That there are so many good girls is not a new phenomenon, and that we “just can’t seem to cast them all” is indicative of the enormous gender gap we have yet to eradicate.
Plays by women and about women are produced far less than plays by and about men. The numbers show this isn’t a good idea — more women go to the theater than men, more women audition for plays than men, women make up more than half of the population — but we’re still conditioned to believe less in their stories and voices. Female writers aren’t inherently less prolific than their male counterparts, and yet it’s harder for them to have their work produced. Women are finding success in the workforce more than ever before, and still they are more likely to play girlfriends than lawyers on stage.
Men, it seems, tend to lean towards writing plays mostly for men. Just today, a classmate from my Playwriting class confessed to freezing and chickening out each time he sets out to try and write a woman. “Our society,” he told me “has conditioned me to believe I’m writing down.” He’s not the only male playwright caught in a tricky trap — he’s afraid of the backlash if he “gets it wrong” and afraid it challenges his masculinity if he “gets it right.” Theater, of all things, teaches us to empathize, so why is it so hard for so many playwrights to step outside of themselves and portray an experience other than their own?
Women too, we know, can get in the way of their own success. We are less likely to advocate for ourselves than our male counterparts. Even those of us who are driven and talented directors, designers and dramaturgs are more likely to pass up an opportunity than fight for an interview or meeting. We are more worried about failure (because it’s more difficult for female directors, for instance, to bounce back after a flop) and are afraid we are not qualified. Women are discouraged by stereotype threat; men seize the opportunity and figure they’ll learn on the job. Female artistic directors and literary managers are actually far less likely to produce works by women for fear of being perceived as “too feminist” or loyalists to their gender.
We still, even after decades of “knowing better” and the innumerable women who have devoted their lives to making progress, believe that plays about men are plays for everyone and plays about women are plays just for women. We uphold the notion that women’s stories are inherently uninteresting to men, while their stories are considered automatically compelling to all audiences. When we imagine plays about women, we anticipate romantic comedies and Real Housewives, women complaining about sex and men and how to raise their children. “The expectation of soft work from women writers comes from something way more awful in the society — the commercial romantic idea that all female stuff is soft…playful and decorative and insignificant, not worthy of our time,” wrote playwright Marsha Norman.
The truth of the matter is, that we can’t cast the women is, in fact, our fault. We must do better. For the girls and women who want to make a life in the theater, for the women in the audience who deserve to see themselves on stage and the men who must.
The good news? There is no shortage of well-written, beautiful, poignant plays by and about women. The even better news? A remarkable, LA-based group of female playwrights called The Kilroys launched The List of 46 of the best recent plays by contemporary female playwrights. They started #parityraid and made their list available to professional theaters around the country, demanding that their leadership begins to do more and do better.
We must find strong, resonant female voices and support them. We must believe in and commission and support good plays by women. We must create complex, fully-realized, multi-dimensional characters for women. We must find mentors and be mentors as we embark on or settle in to our careers. We must refuse to be silenced and demand to be heard. We must write and play and dream up women who yell and bleed and care deeply, who are in love and who sweat and who laugh out loud. We must do these things because there are hundreds of reasons why we should and none why we shouldn’t.
It’s time we get a little bolder, a little messier, a little grittier, a little braver.
It’s time for women to take the stage.
