By Jill Dolan, The Huffington Post
The Tony Awards season confirms what anyone concerned about the status of women in theater has long come to expect: plays by women are excluded from the nominations once again. When will power brokers and critics realize that until work by women is produced and recognized, Americans will continue to hear only one side of the stories of our lives?
Women’s unheard stories represent a gold-mine of narrative intrigue and revelation. But of the four plays nominated as the best of Broadway this year, none are written by women and three are almost exclusively about men: Nick Stafford’s War Horse (a gloriously theatrical British import that tells a basic boy-meets-horse, boy-loses-horse, boy-finds-horse tale); Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (another British import about a character the Variety review calls a “wild man,” a “once noble animal gone to seed”); and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker with the Hat (directed by the talented Anna Shapiro), whose macho title can’t even be fully printed in most newspapers.
Only Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People is even about a woman, the salty, working-class Margie from South Boston, played with sharp dignity and empathy by Frances McDormand. With a disabled daughter and few skills besides impressive street-smarts, Margie can’t make economic ends meet, while her old boyfriend, Mike, has escaped his poor background with a scholarship and a medical school education… (read the rest of the article here)