Bias against women playwrights

[BakerWilliams]

Posted: 6/27/17 at 10:17pm

The Vogel drama has been continuing for a while now, despite the Indecent discussion dropping off this board, and I thought it was relevant enough to warrant its own thread.

To catch some people up, when Indecent posted a closing notice, Paula Vogel tweeted basically that male critics had attacked her play unfairly because she was a female playwright and that the patriarchal notion of arts criticism was why her play flopped on Broadway. Lynn Nottage, whose Sweat also flopped, replied to the tweet in agreement.

Since then, think-pieces galore have popped up about how male critics seem systematically biased against female playwrights, and I think it brings an interesting issue up: is this valid? 

My own perspective is conflicted. On the one hand, I think that to say that Brantley and Green were biased against Vogel and Nottage specifically is logically nonsensical, and Vogel and Nottage's responses were more personal than all-seeing, if only because not everyone likes Indecent and Sweat and both Brantley and Green have been exceptionally positive in their praise of works of Nottage like The Baltimore Waltz or Ruined (which just about every critic agreed was exceptional, and rightly so), but I was interested to know if people had thoughts about whether this bias exists in general.

The most recent example in favor of feminine marginalization in theatre has to be the reversal of the situation with the Times review of Encores! Big River, which was a total disaster for the theatre company, in my opinion, but I really don't see the bias in general, and I am really (really really) open to seeing some sort of anecdotal or statistical evidence of critical bias against women and specifically women of color in the plays that they write, because, at the moment I remain unconvinced. 

I'd like to add that, in general, I think women have a slightly higher batting average in terms of new plays from the past ten years.

Updated On: 6/27/17 at 10:17 PM

[froote]

Posted: 6/27/17 at 10:26pm

I think the bias isn't always conscious. I keep a ranked list of the movies I've seen every year and I notice that consistently as a woman, I rate movies about women higher. I find them more interesting and my ability to relate to them causes a bigger reaction. Now that isn't always true. Moonlight was far and away my favorite movie of 2016 and I'm not black, gay or male. But overall there tends to be a lot of female-focused stuff at the top and male-focused stuff at the bottom. It's hard to say if it's the same for movies written or directed by women because so few are that there's not enough for a pattern.

Now I'm sure critics try harder to be objective than I do in my ranked lists. But the bias does still appear now and again, as you mention in the Big River review, in the Anastasia review etc. I think a lot of the time the bias is perfectly natural but that's why women need better representation in theatre criticism, so that biases - intentional or unintentional - can be counteracted. 

[BakerWilliams]

Posted: 6/27/17 at 10:38pm

You make a good point about unconscious bias. I think a lot of discussion nowadays is so heated that we forget that a lot of people do things really without malicious intent. I do think that there is a lack of female critics that, while I don't necessarily consider concerning (criticism is ultimately irrelevant—art matters), I do think that reading differing perspectives of artwork to be insightful. I would much rather read Laura Collins-Hughes' criticism than Ben Brantley's endless, pointless droning, and Linda Winer's loss was sad not only because of who she was, but of the quality of her writing.

[A Director]

Posted: 6/27/17 at 11:28pm

Here's some food for thought.

http://howlround.com/a-collective-call-against-critical-bias