Women Count at at off the WALL
WOMEN COUNT In case you missed the theatre industry’s gender parity movement, here’s a recap: women have been writing plays for millennia and landing productions for centuries. Over time, they’ve also come to play key roles onstage and backstage. But female theatre artists of all kinds still find themselves bonking their heads on a glass ceiling known as the “glass curtain.” Even today, female playwrights, directors, and designers are atypical. Shakespearian gender-swapping has been mooted as a partial solution; however, such theatrical “novelty” only serves to distract from the main issue – the absence of contemporary dramas reflecting the complexity of women’s lives. Cross-gender casting fails to question the over-representation of dead and living male playwrights. It does not address the fact that half our contemporary creative world is missing. In an essay in howlround.com, Jenny Lyn Bader writes: “We live in a world dominated by male imagination. (Men) writ