Donna Spencer, artistic director of Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre, does not program a season with the goal of promoting women’s voices or creating more roles for women. It just happens. Maybe because, as a woman, the way female playwrights approach stories speaks to her. She offers a theory on this – but predicts it will never make it into The Globe and Mail. (We prove her wrong later in this story.)
Last week, Firehall was named a recipient of an International Centre for Women Playwrights 50/50 Applause Award for its 2015-16 season. The awards – which went to 15 Canadian organizations this year – recognize theatres at which female playwrights represent at least 50 per cent of the work produced in a season.
And Firehall’s 2016-17 season, which kicks off next week with Cathy Jones’s one-woman show Stranger to Hard Work, is being dubbed a celebration of “women and their connections to community and family.”
The season includes Tracey Power’s Miss Shakespeare; Nicolle Nattrass’s Mamahood: Turn and Face the Strange; Theatre Passe Muraille’s ELLE, Severn Thompson’s adaptation of Douglas Glover’s novel about a French noblewoman abandoned off Newfoundland in 1542; Mary Vingoe’s Refuge, about an Eritrean child soldier who comes to Canada; and Andrew Cohen and Anna Kuman’s Circle Game, inspired by Joni Mitchell’s music. And Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker With the Hat has strong female roles – especially Veronica, an addict whose former drug-dealer boyfriend is released from prison.
“It’s all about women either taking a stand or trying to make a change or addressing some of their personal concerns. Or in the case of ELLE … it’s really about somebody going on an adventure,” Spencer says. “I felt somehow that the spirit of all these women was going okay, this is what we do, and reminding me how important the work of women is within the community.”
A recent Equity in Theatre study found that 55 per cent of Canadian theatre awards granted between 1992 and 2015 went to men, 39 per cent to women and 5 per cent to mixed partnerships. There are significant gender divisions based on categories: 72 per cent of directing awards went to men and 62 per cent of playwriting awards were given to men. Meanwhile, 62 per cent of awards for administration went to women.
EIT, run out of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, reports that women form the majority of theatre graduates and audiences, but hold fewer than 35 per cent of the key creative roles in Canadian theatre.
Then there’s the question of the availability of interesting roles for female actors, especially as they age.
“For women it’s difficult when you look at plays and the balance of roles – male versus female,” says Nattrass, an actor who wrote Mamahood about her experience with late-in-life motherhood and postpartum depression. “Also, as a woman I reached a certain age where I was too old to play the super, super young roles … and then you’re too young to play mom roles. So you have to keep yourself creatively alive, and for me, writing has been wonderful.”
Nattrass began writing her own work at 26. “I wanted to have more interesting characters [to play] and quite frankly … I just wanted to work more.”
Jones, with CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes for more than 20 years, knows that female performers, especially aging women, face challenges men don’t have to deal with. But when it comes to story, it’s the art that matters.
“It’s not about whether it’s about a man or a woman; it’s about the quality of the work. If people are doing shows that are stupid, it doesn’t matter if they’re male or female,” she says. “Good work is good work, and women’s stories are phenomenal.”
Power premiered Miss Shakespeare last year; the show imagines the Bard’s youngest daughter, Judith Shakespeare, as a woman with theatre ambitions at a time when women were not allowed onstage.
While the show was celebrated for the female-focused story and all-female cast (seven women, including Power), Power was frustrated that much of the focus around the production concerned gender diversity – and not the art itself.
“It shouldn’t be a big deal that it’s a woman’s story,” Power says. “This is a show with lots of women in it. Yes, you want to celebrate that; yes, great. But what I want to be greater is the story.”
The production was accused in a piece in Canadian Theatre Review of being “self-congratulatory” and “trumpeting” its all-female cast; and the story criticized the production for being all-white. (In fact, one of the actors was of Arabic origin and another diverse actor turned down the production because of a scheduling conflict, Power says.) Power says she’s adamant about the promotion of diversity, but wants to see the conversation remain civil and positive.
“As we’re working toward gender equality and diversity, I hope we can remember that we’re better off fighting as a community and not pointing fingers at each other, because every single artist matters,” she says. “The struggle for gender equality onstage can be fought alongside diversity. In both cases we have the opportunity to reverse historic trends of marginalization.”
Spencer (whose Motherfucker production last January was criticized for only having one non-white actor) believes she has a responsibility to program inclusive work. She doesn’t try to fill a quota or select anything because it’s written by a woman; it’s the story that speaks to her. She believes female playwrights tell stories in a different way from men. When I ask how, she offers that theory she predicts would not be published.
“The standard format is we go forward with the story and then we reach the climax and then there’s a denouement, and that seems like a very male experience to me,” she says. “When women tell stories we tend to build and then we might go back and then we build and we build. … I’m not saying it’s all tied into orgasmic climaxes, but it’s sort of a different way of telling a story. We kind of amble around the story a bit. Maybe that’s a huge generalization.”
Gender diversity (cultural diversity, too) remains a goal in theatre. We haven’t reached the tipping point yet, but maybe we’re heading there.
“It just needs to happen and let’s make it happen,” Power says. “Then we need to get on with the show and create amazing theatre.”