Whos afraid of the female playwright?
Why do so few plays written by female playwrights get produced? Is this the result of discrimination, or, as many artistic directors claim, lack of material? These were the questions explored by Princeton undergraduate Emily Glassberg Sands in her thesis, “Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender,” which confirmed that female playwrights experience bias at every level, from script selection to play production — but not always from the usual suspects. (A PowerPoint presentation that summarizes Sands’ thesis can be found here.) In the theater world, it has long been an open secret that plays written by women are not produced as frequently as those written by men, that the former are not produced in the most prestigious venues, that they are not often awarded the most prestigious prizes — the Pulitzer, for instance — nor do their authors get the most prestigious jobs. In 2002, a much-discussed report on the status of women in the theater (“We passed it around like a joint,” the playwri
