When Contest
Winners Are Mostly Men—or Mostly Women
ON WOMEN'S ISSUES - by G.L. Horton
SH wrote: "RE: 'Maybe we need a letter for no females...'
I suspect that's tongue in cheek. But, if serious, I noticed that
my hometown theatre, Spokane Civic Theatre, also picked 7 plays
by men out of only 35 entries. What's odd is that it's totally
blind judging--I know it for a fact. How do you suppose this happens?
Probably because most of the submitters were men. Thoughts?"
It isn't tongue in cheek at all.
I think some women as well as most men are convinced that male
characters and themes and "issues" are more dramatic,
important, better. It only takes one person who dislikes plays
about or by women on each round of readers to screen out all
but a few females by the final round. The report on Women In
Theatre from NYC a year ago demonstrated the math. And once
a contest posts a list of all-male winners, a prudent woman
who has done her homework will not waste her money sending scripts
to that contest-- every year the proportion of male-written
scripts will grow, and the chances that the winners will be
male will rise.
The opposite can happen too, of course. The Humana has been
female-dominated for a number of years now: I bet every female
writer in America sends a script to it. The critics who disliked
this year's batch of plays came very near to saying that the
selection process must be deeply flawed to result in so many
women and such weak plays. (4/21/05)
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