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This talk was very emotional and, yes, I admit it, choked me up.  Jordan came at the talk from a very emotional place and it was affecting.  I have given two eulogies in my life for grandparents (Ruth Hayes and Frank Warden) and I wrote from a very personal and emotional place and Jordan’s talk hit me right in the same place, so I was quite affected by it.

The story that Jordan tells is of her incredibly strong-willed, strong-spirited grandmother (Mary) whose strength clearly resonates in Jordan.  Jordan’s tale is unfortunately not that unique, as she admits.  My grandmother, Ruth Warden–not Ruth Hayes–grew up on a farm in the great depression and had 10 siblings.  She worked tirelessly herself on farms, in canning factories, and scrubbing floors, and finally as a nurse.  She was a strong woman whose work ethic and practicality make me blush like the girl I am compared with her.  My wife, Kirsten, can tell similar stories of her grandmother.  The early part of the 20th century produced strong women, and men, the likes of which we don’t find too often anymore in our age of entitlement.  I don’t think I ever heard Ruth Warden, my “Meme,” once say the word “owe” as in, “he…she…they… owe me.”  Or “I deserve.”  Whether she thought it or not, I do not know.  But by all signs I would say that she did not.  She simply did what needed to be done.  This, too, is the tale told by Jordan of her grandmother.

The point, and focus, therefore, being as it is on strong women, is that there is an imbalance in the number of women playwrights being produced, especially given the number of women playwrights working, and Jordan sought answers to the “why” of this.  As well, she worked with several other playwrights, including Martha Norman, to establish the Lilly Awards, named after Lillian Hellman, to recognized women in theater.  And yet, as Jordan points out, after all her grandmother went through in her life, the idea that she is complaining that her theater career is not as it should be seems somewhat frivolous.

Jordan notes that was in looking with a friend at the list of plays that were being produced in the upcoming year, and noting that there were less women on that list than the usual “one in five slots to which we were accustomed” that she finally decided to do something.  Jordan says that she firmly believes that if the “production rate had stayed above the 17-20% mark that she would have kept her mouth shut.”

Jordan then listed the common arguments to which she was exposed and to which she often listened:

• That established writers are overwhelmingly male;
• That male artistic directors were just more drawn to male works;
• That male writers write more dramatically, while females write more poetically;
• That drama is more commercial that flowery and poetic script;
• That things will get better in the future when there are more women artistic directors;

The problem for Jordan was that she had been hearing those arguments for years: since she was a student, and now, no longer a student but a teacher at Columbia, and things still had not changed.  Jordan then looked at her 2001 NYSCA report which noted that 17% of productions were by women playwrights and then Jordan examined the TCG list of top ten plays (she refers to it as “most often produced plays”) and noted numbers here, where are unclear to me–17% of first productions and then double that the next year? 34%?  For clarification as to the significance of this discovery, Jordan called her date to her senior year high-school valentine dance, which was Freakonomics author Steven Levitt.  While Levitt told her that she really hadn’t discovered definitive proof of bias in the American theater, as Jordan suggested, he encouraged her to find someone who had a statistical bent to look at the issue more closely.  In the mean time, as she googled about on the subject of bias in the arts, she discovered the study Orchestrating Impartiality by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse; which found that when orchestra performers auditioned behind screens (blind auditions) the representation of women and minorities in orchestras vastly improved.  So, Jordan found Cecilia and met with her: Emily Sans was guided toward the project as her thesis.  She did three studies:

• Supply (are women present in the same numbers as men?)
• 30% of submissions are women (artistic directors reporting)
• Doolee/TCG — 30% representation
• Tough, because it doesn’t match up with women’s experience.
• Hard also because of the reality, which is making a living as a playwright is hard. Jordan notes that as hard as it is for men to juggle responsibilities and playwriting, it’s harder for women and the attrition rate is higher–less supply.
• Audit study
• 4 scripts read by various artistic directors
• Reported, variously, as authored by men or women
• No bias on subject of excellence with regard to the sex of the individual playwright
• However, Sans did find that women respondents regarding the plays believed there would be:
• Fewer tickets sold
• More negative reviews
• Top talent would be harder to attract
• Artistic directors would not want to produce
• Would not fit with the theater’s mission
• That is, if the script was “penned” by a male, it was not viewed as having these challenges.
• Sans found bias — “A really interesting kind” — “self-fulfilling prophesy” or “women in theater are just reporting honestly what they see and know to be true”.
• Broadway Study
• 10 years of Broadway plays
• Throughout outliers
• Judged plays against plays, musicals against musicals, and one-person shows against one-person shows.
• Shows by women made on average 18% more money, but were subject to shorter runs than shows by men.  This was the strongest evidence of bias in economic terms, because, of course, why would investors willingly cut short runs of plays that are making more money?
• The only way that there is a problem with the study’s judgment is if each show by a woman cost 18% more to mount than did a show by a man.  But, as Jordan pointed out, on average plays produced by women are produced in smaller spaces and have smaller cast sizes than plays by men.

Jordan then goes on to note that women dominate theater in high school and college.  In writing departments their numbers are similar to those of men at the graduate level. Agents rep around 50/50. Theaters state that 30% of scripts are submitted by women, and in turn that theater produce 20% of those scripts.  “That’s what happens to female writers: attrition.”  Jordan then casts the argument and findings in terms of race to highlight the discrepancy and “merit” considerations.

Per my comment above with regard to my Meme, Jordan’s grandmother never complained or bemoaned what had happen to her.  And she won’t complain about her own position.  But all things being equal in any conditions and circumstances, men will do better than women in terms of making a living in the theater, or Jordan suggests, any art: except the orchestra: which holds its auditions behind screens to ensure that the race and gender of the applicant is hidden.
While Jordan notes that the fact that only 1 in 5 women playwrights get produced is a small problem in a small context that many people don’t care about.  But she notes, as given the story and history of her grandmother, that the problem isn’t just in theater: it’s bigger than that and reflects the whole of our society.  Further, Jordan encourages that if it’s our small problem in our small area than it is ours to fix.  And that by fixing it, and putting the stories of more women on the stages “we will help in the best way we can to re-define in the audience’s mind: who, and what women have always been, are, and can be.”

[Re-post from Playwrights Local]

Millwood Outpost by Tom Hayes opens on Friday, March 18 and runs through April 2. Directed by Rachel Zake, this new drama features Joe Milan, August Scarpelli, Zach Palumbo, Sean Seibert, Quin Johnson, Tom Hayes, and Juliette Regnier. Thanks to Tom for this preview! 

What kind of play is Millwood Outpost, and how did you get the idea for it?

I originally started writing this play many years ago, probably fifteen or so. I was going through a David Mamet phase and I’d just read Lakeboat, a play about a bunch of men out on a cargo boat on Lake Superior. I was fascinated by the window that the college kid provided on the lives of the working men and the stories that they told.

When I was just out of high school, and during my first summer out of college, I worked summers for the Ohio Department of Transportation. I was one of those people you see with “Stop/Slow” signs. I also cleaned-up dead animals and weed-whacked endless miles of guardrail. The environment was both similar and dissimilar to that in Lakeboat: similar, in that there was a hypermasculine atmosphere, dissimilar in that ODOT had several women working there, and they were greatly resented.

That early play, like Lakeboat, was more monologues and two character interactions. Events were episodic and seemed to focus more on the joy of what people said rather than any plot or story. I knew that this approach wouldn’t work, at least, not the way I wanted it to, so I set about moving it toward a more dramatic structure. At first, I was interested in the two college kids (the characters Zak and Nick). They offered that “fresh” insight into the world, and were also not jaded by it. I also was interested in the initiation aspect, that is, men bringing a boy through a ritual ceremony into manhood. But even more than this, I was interested in the notion of a perverse idea of manhood, which made a sort of negative ritual or negative initiation. It occurred to me that another focus for the play was the resentment that these men feel about having to change — or being told to, at least.

The best way, it seemed to me, to get at the problem of forced change was to create an external environment that is threatening everyone inside the outpost. At first, it’s innocuous, normal even. But, as things move along, the character of the threat changes. No one inside can define it. They’re forced to tell each other stories of past experiences that touch on what is undefined, but they still can’t put their finger on it, and it scares the hell out of them. All of these elements combine to create a dramatic play that also has elements of magical realism, I guess. A sort of strangeness that I believe will come through in the production.

As a playwright, were there any other models for Millwood Outpost, or did you see yourself as working in any other particular genre or tradition?

I don’t know that there are any [other] models that I was thinking of for this play. I know I enjoy plays where there are strange, unexpected things going on that point to a bigger universe or dimension. I can think of plays by Mac Wellman, Conor McPherson, Sam Shepard, Will Eno, Erin Courtney, Carson Kreitzer, Anne Washburn, and others. I like plays in which there are not only elements of the theatrical experience in terms of light and sound and strange story elements, but also in the language itself, like Harold Pinter and the patter, unanswered questions, and bizarre situations people find themselves in, as well as the equally bizarre or understated reactions to the predicament.

What has the process been like so far of working with director Rachel Zake and the rest of the cast and staff?

I’ve had a wonderful experience working on the play. Rachel is smart, professional, and demanding. Her process of getting to dramatic moments in the play has been exciting to watch and has drawn my attention to aspects of the play that I either hadn’t noticed or that I hadn’t focused on. She can really see what’s in the script and figure out how to get it out of the actors for everyone to see and experience, which I think is great. Rachel has an eagle-eye for detail and makes actors stay focused when things get a bit…unfocused during rehearsals, which can happen. Rachel’s the first director of this play, which takes a special type of creativity and imagination. 

The actors have been great, too. Sean has brought a stern, ferocity to the character of Rollo. Joe has dredged up a truly mean-spirited Digger which he, literally, spits out. August brings out the no-nonsense dignity of a man who just wants to get his work done and go home. Zach brings an energy and truthfulness to the character of Nick, which is a critically necessary foil to the men at ODOT. Mugs is doing fantastic as an earnest and naive high school grad who is being initiated into something he may want to avoid. 

[I’m playing] the role of Dad and I won’t speak about the process of working with myself because it’s rotten. (Laughs.) I’ll let others answer that question. We also have Juliette Regnier as The Voice, and she does a wonderful job as the ominous expression of doom coming through the radio, striking fear in the hearts of the men.

In addition to being the playwright, you’re also the Managing Director of the company, Playwrights Local. What do you think is the value of this type of new work to the community?

When a group of us founded Playwrights Local in 2015, we wanted to be a theater committed to staging the work of local playwrights. At the time, there were virtually no theaters producing the work of local playwrights on their main stage. There are plenty of theaters around that will run some staged readings or some other small things, but they don’t put local plays on their main stage. The consequence of this is that the plays that come into town are written by people from other cities and other states whose interests and concerns don’t reflect those here in Cleveland. Another consequence is the lack of production of local playwrights creates a huge hole in the theater scene. The people of Northeast Ohio, believe it or not, actually do have something to say, and often have a pretty interesting manner of saying it. That should be represented on the stages in town.