Girls with guns
Good going, TCG. Marsha Norman's fantastic essay on the underrepresentation of female playwrights spoke to me in light of my recent musings on male vs. female plays. A (somewhat long, but too good to cut) sound byte:This brings us to the final group that has been blamed for the underrepresentation of women in the theatre—the playwrights themselves. Women's plays are boring, people say. They have too much talk and there's no event. They choose "soft" subjects and aren't aggressive enough about promoting themselves a

What's up with those atheists?
So I was a little miffed, and not totally comfortable, when I briefly glanced a news story in my neighbor's newspaper about the subway ad campaign by the Big Apple Coalition of Reason.  And, upon reading further, I'm only more miffed, and less comfortable.Yes, yes, freedom of speech; yes, y

Middlemen
I had one of those really lovely theater experiences last night, where everything just kind of works. That experience was the inaugural Human Animals production, Middlemen at Walkerspace. In it, two middle-level employees come in early for what they think will be an ordinary day of work, and instead end up getting drunk and possibly bankrupting Bolivia. Despite this silly description (and it is silly for sure), it's also an oddly tender,

11-1, men
American Theatre Magazine just posted a list of the most produced playwrights in the 2009-10 season. And, surprise surprise, the men far outnumber the women in this list. 11-1, to be exact. That's about 92% men, 8% women.So I thought, hm, maybe if I look at the list of most-produced plays, it won't be quite so lopsided. Maybe there are more female playwrights that are just getting one play produced a number of times in the season. But, sadly, that list is only slightly better. It's a Top 14 list instead of a Top 12

No homo.
Somehow I'd missed out on the phenomenon that is "no homo" until now. This is exactly what my life has been missing!