I’m the first to say I love women playwrights. Some of my favorite playwrights happen to be women- Yasmina Reza, Melissa James Gibson, Young Jean Lee, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, Caryl Churchill, Annie Baker… the list goes on. I’m also quick to acknowledge that there is a dearth of womens’ and minorities’ voices in theatre. That all said, it is easy, short-sighted and exclusive to respond to the gaps in theatre by creating submission and production opportunities that are for women only. You’re probably thinking that’s plenty easy for a white guy to say, but the theatre community can respect our underrepresented voices better than that.
A quick perusal on any playwriting opportunity resource will show lots of oddly specific restrictions on the types of plays that can be submitted. Must be a Canadian Jewish Lesbian, must be from one of these 5 Floridian counties, must take place in a cubicle and involve an act of kindness- Playwrights’ Perspective even did an April Fools Day prank about this. Nowadays, it’s trendy for theatre companies to pat themselves on the back for being forward-thinking and equitable for having contests or submission windows that are for women only. I understand that the conceit is to bring underrepresented voices onto the stage, but I think this is possible without shutting speakers out. After all, a great many fantastic plays speak on behalf of communities that the playwright doesn’t necessarily come from. Also, as The Dramatist or Outrageous Fortune will tell you, plays penned by women largely do better when they have male protagonists / male-heavy casts. Are we necessarily supporting underrepresented voices when we produce women playwrights? Perhaps yes, but by changing our criteria’s language a bit, theatres can guarantee it.
I, as a person, do not hail from a line of white male playwrights, and I don’t share in the privilege that they have long possessed. My parents are not Pinter and Mamet and my siblings are not Labute and Letts. In some respects, being a playwright is not unlike being gay- it happens spontaneously and not because of what I’ve been raised or grown up with, like being Irish or Jewish or racist. I haven’t inherited male playwrights’ point of views, their strengths, their faults, their politics. Which reminds me of another point- I don’t hail from a line of gay playwrights either. Gay playwrights don’t get together in weekly meetings and discuss our collective ‘agenda’, or maybe they do and I just haven’t been invited yet, but in any event I can’t really speak for them. If I come from a line of playwrights, they are my teachers and friends- Kate Snodgrass, Melinda Lopez, Ronan Noone, Rick Park, Jaclyn Villano, Michael Parsons, Liz Hagerty.
Allyson Condrath (left) and Rebecca Bradshaw in Lethologica at Emerson College in 2008.
My goal as a playwright has always also been to give a voice to underrepresented communities. Most of my plays have heavy LGBT themes, and I’ve also begun to explore racism and disability. And yet, by nature of a ‘Y’ chromosome, I am shut out of many conversations that I really would like to be a part of. I think I write for women better than I write for men, by virtue of the fact that I was bullied as a child and have always related better to girls than to boys, so I also listened better to girls. Just recently an actor came to me telling me that using the word ‘chicks’ felt awkward for him because it felt more like Grease than modern day. I don’t speak for men. The few straight men I write always need extra revision. The one play I’ve written about masculinity is about transgender identity, not a pissing contest.
So. I propose that theatres that wish to give a home to the silenced phrase their criteria more about content and less about playwright identity. Submission opportunities should be transparent- tell us you’re looking for plays that “speak for and to underrepresented voices” rather than “plays written by women and/or minorities”. This will help in two ways- it will prevent us from putting on more all fully-abled straight white man shows that happen to be written by women or minorities, and it will open a whole lot of doors when it comes to plays that have lots of women or racial minorities or differently-abled characters or (and this is one of my ultimate goals) those of us who don’t identify so easily with one gender or another. What we’re trying to do is reach the human spirit, not propagate exclusion.
Right?
5-page play to be presented by several small companies for their 
