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Hi Friends,
My past few newsletters have given you a glimpse into my writing process for my next novel – in which I pose the question of whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays, and more importantly, suggest as an alternate candidate a very real woman named Emilia Bassano who had the skills, contacts, education, and desire to borrow Shakespeare’s name, because women were not allowed to write for the public stage at the time.
Why bother?
Today’s newsletter will introduce you to the other half of the novel – the modern-day story of a descendant of Emilia Bassano who is a female playwright struggling to get her work noticed in the NYC theater community…and who is failing, because of the crushing gender discrimination in the field. In other words – it’s been 400 years, folks, and very little has changed.
Let’s look at some numbers. American Theatre Magazine crunches the numbers of plays produced all across the country. The first year they did it (2015-16) just 21 percent of plays were written by female playwrights. The next year, 26 percent of plays were written by women (It’s worth noting that genderqueer authors don’t even make up an entire percent point). In 2018–19 season, the number of plays written by women reached 30 percent.
Yay, ladies! But also: NOPE… particularly when you limit the sample to Broadway, as done by a site called Broadway By The Numbers. Consider that women buy 80% of Broadway tickets; and that fifty percent of the population is female. Despite the gains in gender equality in 2019, there were 21 plays and 13 musicals on Broadway. Seven of those shows had ZERO female directors, choreographers, writers, set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, sound designers, hair designers or makeup designers. On Broadway that year, only 13% of the writers of shows were women. Non-binary and trans writers are so underrepresented that it was statistically insignificant.
The Count, which similarly tallies numbers to hold the theater community accountable – is trying to see the long-range outcome of all of this. In the 2016-17 season, they also found that although 35% of new plays were written by women, only 16% of the revivals produced onstage were written by women. That suggests that even the women who ARE getting their plays noticed are not quite making it into the “canon” of theater, which remains very male, and very white.
There’s a lot more I could go into – including the wild findings of Emily Sands’ study that suggest there’s a gender-based implicit bias in theater, where even WOMEN think plays written by women aren’t as producible as those by men…when in reality shows written by women sell more tickets on Broadway than those written by men (if you’re interested).
But the biggest question here is: why does it matter?
Because when half the population is living an experience that isn’t often represented on stage, we start to get skewed impressions of what is a valid story to tell, and what isn’t. When we are told for literal centuries that tales about women’s struggles, or young girls coming of age, are too “soft” or “small” for a public stage…eventually we start to believe it. This also holds true of course for plays written by BIPOC folks and LGBTQ writers – and there has been a sort of reckoning since 2020 for more representation in those communities (although it’s minimal and that’s a whole DIFFERENT newsletter, LOL). But the dirty little secret in theater is that it is still harder for female writers to get their plays across the finish line…and no one really seems to care. In the meantime, male writers outstrip their female counterparts in success, because the bar is set considerably higher for a young female playwright. A young male writer who seems talented will be offered a full production, and then a few more, and eventually writes a hit. A young female writer who seems talented, on the other hand, rarely gets a full production until she writes that hit. Artistic directors who are willing to take a risk tend to roll the dice on male writers – and part of the reason why is because, since the time of Shakespeare, we have been subtly trained to believe that male playwrights are the marketable ones, the real ones, the ones who deserve credit.
I hope my novel makes you think twice about the way women have been elided from history, and about whose stories matter – and who gets to make that decision for others.
But now, I have to go finish writing it.
XO,
Jodi
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