Theatre Bay Area Poster
Countless women artists have suffered through conferences where the gender discrimination that they face every day is never mentioned. On the rare occasion when gender issues are discussed, it is usually in a break-out session in a small back room where 99% of the people who show up are other women. Although it can be helpful to have these opportunities to vent with our peers, it never feels like we are seriously engaging with the powers that be.
In San Francisco, a group spearheaded by local members of Actor’s Equity with support from members of Works by Women SF and the Yeah, I Said Feminist Facebook group, decided to address this problem head-on by launching a letter-writing campaign to the leaders of Theatre Bay Area, an alliance 365 local theatre and dance companies. They asked for “a thorough and focused conversation about gender inequity” at TBA’s annual conference which will be held on Monday, April 29.
A Successful Letter-Writing Campaign
By using their social media networks, the women generated almost 100 letters in December and January (see their sample letter), and they definitely made an impression. You can read a blog by Brad Erickson, Theatre Bay Area’s Executive Director, in which he talks about what it was like to receive the flood of emails and his growing admiration for the campaign organizers.
There will be a plenary session at the Theatre Bay Area conference called “Where the Girls Are: A Pair of Genders Seeking Parity” moderated by Seattle Times theatre critic Misha Berson. Erickson says they were already planning to cover gender equity at the conference before the letters arrived, but the unfortunate reference to “Girls” in the plenary session’s title suggests that there is still some room for consciousness-raising. Still the plenary panelists are strong, and there are lots of excellent women speakers throughout the conference, so the organization is clearly moving in the right direction.
Also, Theatre Bay Area deserves credit for recognizing the connections between gender equity and other diversity issues. The break-out session called “Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall: Finding Unity in the Struggle for Diversity” moderated by playwright and novelist Jewelle Gomez is especially intriguing.
As he acknowledges in his blog, Erickson realized that the letters reflected a “deeply felt need” in the community, and so in addition to the plenary session at the conference, Theatre Bay Area decided to curate a series of articles about gender parity on Howlround, a website dedicated to stimulating dialogue in the non-profit theatre community. They also hosted an hour-long Twitter conversation on the topic this week.
Congratulations to all of the women involved in this letter-writing campaign. The San Francisco Bay Area is the third largest theatre center in the country, and the women have succeeded in making gender parity a hot topic at a conference where hundreds of theatre and dance companies will be represented.
More Work To Be Done
In one of the Howlround interviews, Carey Perloff, the Artistic Director of American Conservatory Theater, makes a shocking statement about what happened when she and the company’s Managing Director, Ellen Richard, wrote to the board of Theatre Communications Group, the national alliance of non-profit theatres. When Perloff and Richard asked the board to consider gender as part of their commitment to diversity and inclusion in their strategic plan, “The response from TCG basically said that they only wanted to address issues of racial diversity now and gender was not the priority. End of discussion.”
Let’s hope that others follow the example of the women in San Francisco and start putting pressure on all of our arts alliances to include plenary sessions on gender parity. We need to be talking about this issue at every local and national arts gathering – and we can’t stop talking until the problem is resolved!