Women in Theater (WIT)

There are a few examples of male and female versions of the same play, most notably "The Odd Couple". They're easy to switch because the change of gender does not really affect the dynamics of the characters or the relationships among them. "Whose Life is It Anyway?" is another example. Because those plays are about bonds and relationships that aren't romantic.

In your example of Death of a Salesman, would an actress play Willy Loman – like Glenda Jackson played King Lear and not Queen Lear – or it would be a play about a saleswoman named Wilhelmina Loman? If the latter, does she have a stay-at-home husband raising her kids? A lesbian partner? Then whose children are those? Are the children two young women too? Is the American Dream based on the premise of a suburban life with a lesbian couple and a bread-winning matriarch who fails to comply with her role in society?

You could have an all-female Death of a Salesman in which a cast of women play the roles as they were written to highlight specific themes (eg: the crisis of masculinity, for instance, or gender expectations), just like a few years ago they revived Laura Wade's Posh with an all-female cast (not very successfully, if I may add). But a Death of a. Saleswoman would simply not work. Those 40s and 50s plays are particularly difficult to adapt because Fences, like Death of a Salesman, is about family, and if you turn them into same-sex families in their historical context you end up with either a parallel universe or different concerns altogether. You can't just change pronouns, you'd need MASSIVE rewrites that would make those plays unrecognizable. There are for sure plays that could receive the "Odd Couple" treatment, but most would require extensive rewrites.

Two-handers would be much easier to adapt because the world of the play tends to be smaller and with fewer ramifications. Nick Payne's Constellations, written for a straight couple, has recently been revived with two gay men and there is no reason it wouldn't work with a lesbian couple.

As for great plays with at least two big roles for female characters, you could fill a syllabus without ever venturing into "obscure" territory. Medea, Streetcar Named Desire, Top Girls, The Children's Hour, Mary Stuart, As You Like It, The Glass Menagerie, John Gabriel Borkman, Three Sisters, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Crucible and The Seagull are a dozen classics (much-revived and widely read) that surely any drama student has read, seen or performed at some point.

Updated On: 3/3/24 at 10:41 AM