On Gender Parity in Theatre and What Might Be Broken, Part II:

Fighting for a Female Sentence, by Rita Anderson

Recently, I ran a theatre salon in Cincinnati where one of the participants—an academic and an aspiring playwright—told me a disturbing experience she had had in a writing class. “One of the gentlemen, mind you, wrote about women who had been left behind by their fishermen husbands and brothers. The instructor told him (and the class), ‘You’ve missed the boat. The story’s out there,’” pointing, I assume, to where the men-of-action lived offstage.

This story now comes to mind when I hear women who select plays for theater seasons and competitions criticize female playwrights for “not writing like their male counterparts” or for “failing” to create female characters that are “active,” only “reactionary.” It’s not that these female artistic directors are trying to pick all male writers—but they are trying to pick a “solid” season that comes together in a thematic or unified way. This approach will, yes, identify and reward women writers who are good mimics, amongst other things, writers who have perfected the male sound, the male play, the male sentence.

In the first part of this discussion on why achieving gender parity in theatre continues to be so problematic, I argued that women have been conditioned to adopt male patterns of thinking, reading (i.e. the world as well as texts), and writing. Assuming a male writer’s primary crisis is a tendency to emulate his favorites and that women writers search for such heroes in her own likeness but don’t find them and so suffer an “anxiety of authorship,” with so little women’s writing preserved or cherished as literary legacies who could her heroes be and where might they be found?

If a woman traditionally “surrenders” her natural forms to comply with institutional male models (and by this, I mean the metaphors, language, and structure women might have used instinctively to shape her stories), then how does “she” recover that, after assimilation? Can she? Having learned how to codify: to decode her female nature and encode male logic, language, and strategies, can she return to an informed innocence—in order to re-shape her experience? [As girls, we had to code through the universal “he” to share in much of the written word.]

“Herstory,” then, is really about trying to un-imagine the damage of that impact and, as stories are made of smaller units called “sentences,” this re-imagining must include a valuing of a female sentence. Not only must the culture deem “her” stories important, but also it has to recognize her way of telling a story--the words she chooses and how rhythmically or circuitously she strings them together to form meaning. What if her style isn’t linear?

What, then, might her sentence look like—had it lived freely to spawn female libraries and literary canons to influence us? This is what I’m asking. This is the sentence I am after, hers. What is her sentence and how is it different from the standard stock and trade? Will you recognize it, if and when you hear it? Is it a welcome addition to what should be a growing lexicon, syntax, and pallet of voices, voices and words, words and ways of speaking and storytelling? Or will the Otherness irritate because it goes against all that training, consciously or unwillingly, you’ve internalized?

If we’ve debunked the myth that female playwrights are rare and if women comprise 52% of the world’s population, then why aren’t women’s plays, naturally, selected at least half of the time, even now? Are her stories consistently subpar—or could it be her sentence or storytelling blueprint that is different? Will her content and the structure she comes up with to carry her message alienate you, if she deviates from the “norm”? They may—but couldn’t you learn to “hear” it her way, adjusting to her storytelling methods? Her style may not be simple or clearly straightforward but comprised of sentences that curl into a story that circles. Curling sentences and circling stories that repeat to redefine and reinforce through repetition.

We love to discuss diversity (over uniformity) and a multiverse (instead of a universe) but, seriously, what if her sentence isn’t his economy of words? Or if her style “fails” to replicate his focus on action—making her stance a “reactive” posture, which thereby “reduces her characters to inert followers”? And if her concerns for community aren’t things the standard models value?

Who hasn’t memorized--into the fiber of our consciousness--what that aesthetic is in literature? Perhaps not the novices, emerging playwrights who aren’t yet expert impersonators. This notion is confirmed when “Bitter Gertrude,” whose posts I enjoy, blogs that 75% of the playwrights her theatre produces are men and how hard it is to find new, female playwrights who don’t make the same “beginner’s mistake. Their characters suffer a lethal passivity and don’t have active desires. This is only a problem [with] emerging female playwrights. [V]eteran, more established women writers write active main characters, just like their male counterparts.” There is no incentive then for women to try and think outside this box so how will “she” find more organic ways to produce meaning? Will we ever achieve accepted and esteemed “alternative discourses”?

More Than a Room, We Need a Sentence of Our Own

Virginia Woolf wrote, “However much we may go to the work of male artists for pleasure, it is difficult to go to them for finding a voice,” and I’m not sure how much has truly changed on this front in the century since. I’ll need to write my dissertation, however, to develop this argument into its truest potential, but I will finish here with these thoughts. My frame of reference changed 20 years ago when I read Luce Irigaray (“This Sex Which is Not One”), Ann Rosalind Jones (“Writing the Body”), Helene Cixous (“Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body”) and others. Ideas about “renversement” as a process and as a worthwhile, final product. That it’s important to keep blowing up an idea with questions, not always aiming to answer them—and I don’t mean that dismissively or to suggest that art can just be a hot mess with no craft involved.

My argument for learning to identify what a woman’s sentence might look like isn’t one in support of an anything-goes approach devoid of merit, artistic method, or a stylized talent. It is about multiplicity, building up, including. How? I don’t have those answers. Why? Because we can’t just release young women back into the wild and tell them that, after years of acculturated evisceration, “It’s okay to throw like a girl now. Take it back. Reclaim those words and what they mean.” We have to show her the ways she can #FightLikeAGirl and #WriteLikeAGirl. But first? First, we must help her find her sentence. Why? Because to cure rot you must diagnose it from its point of origin. Culturally, we can slap down new linoleum but the floorboards will groan until we rip them up and replace them—maybe even go so far as to reconfigure the floor plan. In a less-linear fashion.

On Gender Parity in Theater and What May Be Broken, by Rita Anderson

This year I bought an anthology of Contemporary Plays by Women: Outstanding Winners and Runners up (1978-1990) for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (prize deadline was September 15th). In its preface, Editor Emilie S. Gilgore wrote what is now a damning statistic: “We got in touch with Lillian Hellman and asked her to join us as a director. . . At that time, in 1978, only 7% of the plays presented across the United States were written by women. A similar situation existed in the UK. Today, 12 years later, that figure has approximately tripled.” In 2014, women playwrights only experience 17% representation, but in 1990 women’s plays were produced almost 21%. How have we lost ground in 24 years, in this, the fourth wave of feminism?

With a needed push from the theatre world for changes, “50/50 by 2020” (only 5 ½ years away), it is refreshing, finally, to discuss the obvious: women’s right to be equally represented in contemporary American theatre and her odd absence from it. --For female playwrights the present is critical because historically she’s barely mentioned in the ranks of “classic” theatre, a sacred albeit-male canon. Today, I hope to begin a discussion on why I think parity hasn’t happened and why the issue remains problematic. Through events like Arena Stage’s The Summit, and The Kilroys, we now know women playwrights exist [*wink*] and that there is a waiting “pipeline” of talented women interested—so why aren’t women playwrights playing in theatres near you?

We inherited the culture we inhabit and clues to a deep-seated gender inequality are everywhere. Take, for example, the recent ad which pointed out the perceptual differences between strong men (“BOSS”) and strong women (“BOSSY”). While many of us fight for change, more are invested in maintaining status quo, but these are complex issues for another time. To focus on the topic at hand, suffice to say that, psychologically and socially speaking, men and women may act, speak, and even write differently, but women are not, as Freud suggests, “imperfect men without penises.” [This is not to say that all women are the same, either.]

One tenet of my argument, however, is that, in terms of decision-making styles, men statistically think in “absolutes,” while women are “situational” thinkers (decisions are made on a case by case basis). From here it is no stretch to see how, for self-preservation, a patriarchal system needs uniformity: There is one correct way to run businesses, make laws, love, and to art. This longstanding mindset and patriarchal power structure is our brick wall and it won’t be undone with polite discussion, a wish, or a prayer.

Individual giftedness aside, gender differences aren’t imaginary. In April, The Atlantic Monthly ran an article about “The Confidence Gap,” showing how men and women promote their work and themselves--and asserting that “confidence” is as important as “competence.” Rather than deconstruct Nature vs. Nurture or “why” I think men excel in this area (which the article takes a stab at addressing), I will heap more facts on the fire to show why parity will be an Olympic-sized nut to crack.

Washington D.C. theaters did band together this year to produce 44 female playwrights but, despite industry claims for big changes coming, these heavy-hitting lists still posted showcases with 0 or 1 female playwright, often out of 9 or 10 selected: The Changing Scene Theatre Northwest’s Summerplay 2014 (1 out of 9), Manhattan Theater Club (2 women to 6 men 2013-2014 and 2012-2013), Pipeline PlayLab (last year 1 of 7), Steinberg Trust (“Emerging Playwright Award,” founded in 2009 and runs every two years, first year all males to include Bruce Norris), and Summer Shorts (59E59, NYC), last year 1 woman, this year 0.

The list above fell in my lap and it makes no pretense about being exhaustive. It’s just one of those tip-of-the-iceberg glimpses that makes you despair. I cannot wait for when America becomes a “post-racial” and a “post-gender” society, but that day is not today. Gender parity makes everyone uncomfortable but it’s more than because it’s “the elephant in the room” issue. The real question isn’t, Where are all the female elephants? but Why aren’t they in the room?

The 17% Solution

While the temptation of an “easy solution” for gender parity might entail (a) a mandate that theaters contract 50/50 female/male playwrights, and (b) boycotting or (c) cutting funds for theatres that don’t comply, these measures don’t extinguish the underlying conditions that helped create female invisibility in the arts. Until these “norms” (we’ve been bombarded with and have steeped in for so long they’re absorbed) are brought back to the surface and acknowledged, the cultural lens will remain skewed and inequality will persist. We must learn to look at or “read” plays differently and to see other ways in which to “see.” Otherwise, even with “blind” submissions and with female literary managers at the helm, scripts that fit this ordained writing-style tradition will continue to be selected.

As an undergraduate psychology major, we learned that women use different conversational styles than men: we apologize more, face each other, touch, and rely on eye contact to communicate. Men’s preferred style for communication is side to side—as in from the driver’s and passenger’s seats of a car, or sitting together on the couch. There’ve been controversial studies about differences between the sexes on everything from physical strength, sexual preferences and performance, and intelligence and brain size. What’s important is whose style is being favored. . . Foucault said, “Knowledge is power,” and it follows that whoever runs the board room or classroom (writes the text books, serves as artistic directors and literary managers) dictates what is “good” and sets the agenda for what that looks like.

When feminism began, the most successful women fit in by becoming female men, laughing at jokes which were aimed at their own sex’s expense to assimilate and to show that they were “good sports.” Once inside the golden doors, those women felt privileged to listen to (if not to memorize and to copy the styles of) the sermons and lectures of journalists, novelists, and poets who operated from a foreign set of metaphors and a male-centric way of thinking. “She” learned to read (i.e. decode and encode) the male pronoun “he” as the universal referent for “mankind,” while her models—all male—sponsored phrases like, “Cold as a witch’s tit,” “Take one for the team,” and “Grow a pair.”

Until recently, women were the sole object of the gaze—and everything fell in around that worldview. It is mindboggling how all-encompassing a worldview can be, and how nearly impossible it is to change the sights on that rifle, male habits “she” accommodated and forms “she” learned, after surrendering her own, more natural way of expressing herself to blend in and feel less foreign. If unfettered, what might “her” writing style look and sound like?

(Stay tuned for Part II: “Fighting for a Female Sentence”)