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In late June, as the old theater season was winding down and announcements for the new season were pouring in, New York City was in the spotlight. Playwrights Horizons, known for such productions as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George and Annie Baker’s Flick, unveiled its 2025–26 program. In some ways, it was a conventional slate, featuring work by returning Playwrights writers (John J. Caswell, Milo Kramer, Sheyok Misha Chowdhury) and several new playwrights (Jacob Perkins, Nazareth Hassan, the writing team of Jen Tulloch and Frank Winters). A six-show season feels like a packed schedule these days; many theaters of its size, beset by chronic financial difficulties, have scaled back their offerings. What was also striking, however, was that among the fairly diverse cast (most of the leads are queer, and two are non-binary), there was only one female playwright, and she took up half the slot.
Playwrights Horizons is not alone. Other major theaters have announced programs, some of which have returned to the familiar patterns of a decade ago. The Roundabout Theatre will give one of four slots to a woman whose work will be presented on its nonprofit Off Broadway venue. The Manhattan Theatre Club, which like the Roundabout uses both Broadway and Off Broadway venues, will present two plays by women among its four announced shows; however, as has become the trend, both will be staged on its smaller, and therefore less profitable, Off Broadway stage. Classic Stage Company, under artistic director Jill Rafson, has confirmed a season of three shows, all written and directed by white men. And the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which is in its first summer under new director Jeremy O. Harris — the playwright who asked Center Theater Group to pull his “Slave Play” in 2021 when it presented a season with only one woman — will not have a single play written by women in 2025.
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In 2015, the Lillys group, which celebrates women in American theater, published The Score, a national study assessing the demographics of playwrights working on the country’s stages. As one of the group’s founders, Julia Jordan, put it, “Statistics are our superpower.” For years, advocates of this position had railed against the underrepresentation of women playwrights, especially women of color, to little acclaim. Some theaters cited canon and shrugged helplessly: Was it their fault that Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Shakespeare were all male? Notably, when a theater included a woman in its program, her play was relegated to what they called a “second space,” or a series of readings. The Score gave theaters a chance to see their place in a larger context. Individual programming decisions—reflecting the tastes of one theater, or even one person—looked very different when placed in a national context.
Attention-grabbing efforts like The Count and, more recently, accountability projects like We See You White American Theater, which has published a lengthy statement calling on the American theater industry to address racial imbalances and posts hiring statistics on Instagram, have pushed the industry to change. In 2023, at its annual awards ceremony, the Lillis Theatre announced that, for the first time in its history, New York theaters had achieved what the Lillis Theatres themselves called “parity,” with the city’s playwrights roughly in line with the gender and racial distribution of the country as a whole. Was it a victory? The Lillis Theatre began to consider disbanding itself; perhaps its work was already done.
So when news of a new Playwrights season hit her inbox, Jordan called the company’s artistic director, Adam Greenfield, to find out what had happened. (Greenfield is a longtime friend of the Lillys; the group was essentially founded at the Playwrights in 2010, when Greenfield was still associate artistic director, and the group hosts an annual awards ceremony on the Playwrights’ main stage.) The Lillys told him they wanted to call a public meeting about what they considered a serious departure from their principles, and Greenfield responded immediately.
At the subsequent City Council meeting, Tony Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron noted, “Adam recognized it as a ‘gaffe,’” adding that he immediately suggested the Playwrights Theatre for the occasion. Six days after the Playwrights announcement was made, the full house gathered to discuss representation and curatorship, and to try to imagine how to reclaim the progress that had been fought for and, however temporarily, made. “We’re here to point out that something doesn’t feel right,” Kron said.
Sourse: newyorker.com
