A Modest Proposal for a Local Theatre Company

Dear Local Theatre Company (and I know you know who you are),

If your audience demographic is anything like the national one, then women comprise 69 percent of your ticket buyers and 63 percent of your audience members. Hold that thought.

I see from your latest bulletin that your upcoming season has a lineup of all-male playwrights, with the exception of one play by a female novelist who has never written a play before in her life. (I daresay she has never formally studied playwriting or worked professionally in the theatre… but does that matter, really, since all women playwrights appear to be amateurs and novices anyway?)

So here’s a suggestion for you: Since you have never yet in your long history pulled together a season that even remotely reflects the gender demographics of your audience, why not tailor your audience to your season? That would mean 86% of next season’s audience would be males. And the 14% who are women would be folks who have never attended the theatre before in their lives… because surely the fact that they have chosen never to see a play can have no possible correlation to their ability to appreciate the experience.

Frankly, I make this proposition out of self-interest. I am a woman and a professional playwright.

The fact that you continue year-after-year apparently to satisfy a predominantly female audience with all-male-and-token-female playwriting says one of two things: A) Women don’t want female playwrights. Men, apparently, write as well as, or—as your lineup would suggest—better than women when it comes to telling women’s stories. Either that, or women experience stories by, for, about, and serving the interests of men from male perspectives as being so universal there’s no need for our own narrative. (It goes without saying, that men have never found stories by, for, about, and serving the interests of women from female perspectives universal. There’s a puzzler for another day.)

… Or B) Women deprived of exposure to the work of female playwrights do not have any idea what they are missing. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a lot riding on Theory B. I think that the work of women playwrights is as universal as the work of male playwrights. Men just need to have the same level of incentive for becoming as literate in women’s culture as we have had to become in theirs. I also believe that women tell our stories better than men tell them, because we actually live them. I believe that, this being a patriarchy (which means a cultural preponderance of male voices and male representation), many women have not had adequate (more than 14%) exposure to our own culture on the stage.

Theory A is a comfortable match for entities that produce all-male/token-female playwriting year after year. But this is Maine, and I think we can do better than that. I think we can take the road-less-traveled of Theory B, and I ask the local theatre company who knows who they are to lead the way. Be the change I want to see.

Take my suggestion for changing your audience demographic, and let’s see whether or not that majority of women who will be so deliberately excluded at your box office will begin to clamor for the kind of work that will spell full inclusion for them. And then let’s see whether or not equal exposure to the work of non-tokenized, professional female playwrights will result in the development of a discriminating palate and appetite for plays by women playwrights. Because, you know as well as I, it will.

Oddly enough, I leased a space from you (and you know who you are) more than ten years ago, when you were producing an all-male playwright season, and I hung this very poster in the lobby of the space I was renting. One of your employees ordered me, in the space I was renting, to take it down.