Thank you all for the spring-like Boston Saturday morning, I appreciate it, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. I'm Julie Henrikus, I'm the Executive Director of State Shores, which is, as all of you know, the service organization for the New England and Greater Boston Theater community. And I'm really glad that we're having this conversation and I'm really grateful for HowlRound for live streaming it so that people who can't be here on this Saturday morning can still participate in the conversation. For those of you who are inclined to tweet, Heritage Boss is our Twitter hashtag for the day, we're looking forward to multitasking and checking in online as well. I want to give you a sense of what today looks like and what some of our goals are for the day, but first I have some thoughts that I want to share about why we're doing this. And forgive me, I'm reading them, but I want to make sure we're clear and I'm staying under my two minutes. At State Shores we've been having conversations about diversity and inclusion for years, most recently releasing a report last winter. As the Executive Director of State Shores, I've had conversations, been on panels, been interviewed and done a lot of thinking about this topic. Just this last week I was in Chicago and participated in a workshop on diversity and inclusion. All of this leads me to the reasons having this town hall on this day in Boston is so critical. First, equity issues abound in the theater, which is ironic given the power of the medium, the rise of the nonprofit sector over the past 50 years, and the flourishing theater community here in Boston. Second, equity matters in theater. Seeing your story told on stage changes perception, deepens involvement, and it makes the art form matter more. But it doesn't exist. Well on a ground scene it's going to share some numbers that bear that out. That gender parity does not exist in our theater community is not up for debate. That's not what we're here for today. Let's start the conversation there. Third, gender parity should be, or not third, gender parity should be an easy inequity to adjust. We don't lack for women in theater. There's just a lack of opportunity. 50-50, the math isn't even hard, but our numbers don't add up. Third, we tackle equity issues in fits and starts. Some seasons are better than others. Some companies have burst of gender parity that slip that season. I'm not suggesting we have quotas. I'm not suggesting we have quotas. But I am suggesting we have accountability. One idea that I took from the workshop this last week that is if we don't change the system, any changes we make don't stick. We all go back to the norm. We slide back to the status quo. We can do better than that. We have to. So let's redefine the status quo starting today. Fourth, the work, the actions. They need to be community-based. An individual, all of you, can be part of the change. You have to. Part of today is figuring that out, starting to measure, to benchmark, to count, deciding our roles, and stepping in to take it on. And lastly, we cannot let up. Today, this day, we are committed to creating change. This isn't a women-only issue. This is an issue for all of us in the theater community. Redefining the norm needs to happen so we look more like the real world. So, onto some housekeeping. Here's what today looks like. Alana Brownstein is going to introduce herself and give us some statistics we can use to move the conversation forward. Next up, we've had a sign-up sheet outside, and we've asked people who are willing to or interested in testifying to give us two minutes of testimony on the issue of gender parity in theater. Some of you signed up. Others might be brought in or be inspired. Keep it to two minutes, and we're going to hold it to 15 people just so that we have room for the rest of the day. And then we're going to have a conversation and reaction to that testimony. We need to give conversations room to breathe. We won't have enough time today, and I know that already, but part of today we'll be figuring out how to let the conversations continue. And the last part of the day we'll be deciding on action steps and getting a team in place to move them forward. I'm hoping that all of you will be part of that team. Thank you so much for being here today for this really important conversation and for helping us change the world. So, we're putting the stake on the ground. This is where we are right now, and it's forward from here on. I would love to introduce Ilana Brownstein. Thank you. This works. Maybe go. I know we've got to turn you up. Slide that all the way over. Perfect. Now I have a mic. Hi, everybody. My name is Ilana Brownstein. I'm the director of new work at Company One Theater here in Boston, as well as the founding dramaturg of Playwrights Commons, and I teach on the faculty of the School of Theater at Boston University. We're going to talk a little bit about some statistics momentarily, but I want to, before we begin to go into that, I want to give a shout out to the work that's already been done that allows us to get to this point. There are actually probably more people than I could possibly name who are turning their attention to this across the country. But a couple of high points that I think it's worth sort of acknowledging as the forebears of this conversation. In the late, let's see, I think about 2009, I'm sorry if I have this year wrong, Susan Jonas at the New York State Council for the Arts managed to get some state funding to do a study of gender representation in New York theaters. That is the last time to my knowledge that we have had some kind of official governmental funding that asks these questions that we're going to be talking about today. So Susan Jonas, that study is one that we go back to again and again and again because it had sound statistical methods. And we're going to talk about the problems of statistical methods momentarily. I also want to acknowledge the study that Emily Glasberg Sands did a couple of years ago, which certainly was complicated. It had its own methodological critiques from people in the field, but it definitely launched the conversation about gender parity into a more national conversation. There were several town hall meetings in New York at that time around that conversation. Starting in about 2010, we see different individuals in different cities around the country turning their own attention to what their local theater ecologies look like and trying as best as they could to create some documentation about the counts that were represented at various theaters. We've had it in Boston, certainly DC, LA, and many other cities around the country. So this is not a conversation in a vacuum by any means. And I think more to the point, quite recently, Peter Marks, the lead drama critic at the Washington Post, convened with the assistance of Arena Stage a summit on gender parity just maybe two months ago. And that event lit up the Twitter sphere because they were not live streaming it, but there were people at the event, including Alyssa Gochis, who is the artistic director of the Strand Theater in Baltimore. She was live tweeting the conversation as best she could. And because of the conversation from the artistic directors at that event, which did reveal some pretty, in some cases, retrograde thinking about the value of pursuing gender parity, Julie and I and some other people, lots of other people in Boston have been thinking about how to carry that conversation forward. So that's why we're here today. And we should say that the summit in DC actually wasn't about gender parity. Right. It turned into a conversation about gender parity, which I love. So the power of social media, right? Exactly. So I'm going to, speaking of social media, I would like to ask you, if you are on Twitter, please hashtag Parity Boss as your tag for anything you tweet from this event. And I do encourage you to do that. Okay. So there you go, Parity Boss. In case you were wondering. Right? So we want to know where we stand, particularly in Boston. But that's a question that's really hard to answer currently. And I'm going to talk about why it is we can't really get a hold on all of this information as much as we would like at the moment. So season counts. What's the problem with season counts? Well, so there's a couple of things we have to pay attention to. One, there are no nationally funded studies, either from a governmental organization or from foundations. So we have no sort of unified, formal driving force that's coming from any of these sort of overarching structures that would help us organize around this idea. Most counts as they exist and as they are reported are mostly local and or regional. Now what does local or regional mean? These are terms that are defined only by the people who are doing those counts. So I've done Boston counts. Pat Gavrich has done Boston counts. Jen Lewis has done Boston counts. But what we count as Boston changes depending on who you're asking. The counts are made by individuals, largely people without any formal training or statistical analysis. So it is literally like going through season announcements like one, two, three, four. Which has its problems. There is no commonly agreed upon metrics, sources for our data, methodologies or reporting tactics that are agreed upon for all of these counts that are happening either within a locality from year to year or across localities and across the country. Furthermore, I think we get pretty caught up in the snapshot idea. What does a season look like? But that season exists in a long path that a company is treading. So instead of snapshots, do we want to think about trends? How do we think about where a theater is making their mark with regards to gender parity? Do we want to hold them to account season to season? Or should we look at multiple seasons in a row? Finally, we have the issue of corrections and revisions because none of these systems that we are currently using are without error. I don't think any system is without error. But the issue is once we've put that information out in the world and we publish it, we put it on blogs, we tweet about it, what if there's a correction? What if we've gotten it wrong? How do we go back and sort of care for that information over time? So, here are some questions that I don't have answers to. What do we mean when we say playwright? So playwrights have written X-many plays and these playwrights are women and these playwrights are men. I don't know what playwright means in this situation. Does it mean literally just straight plays? Does it mean musicals, librettists, composers? How do we account for that? What does a play mean? Are we counting musicals? And sometimes we don't count musicals. And what do we mean by play if we're counting devised works? How do you count that? Who's in charge of getting the ownership or the writing credit on a devised piece? It really depends on the company and how do you ferret that out from a season announcement? Are the percentages that get reported within the Boston Counts and it counts around the country? There's always this like, oh, 29% of this is women and some other percent is some other thing. What are those percentages of? Are we talking about the number of productions or are we talking about the number of writers represented? Because there are lots of pieces that have more than one writer. So how are those percentages being rooted? What do you do about Shakespeare theaters? Do you ignore them? Do you just take them out of account? Some cities do. What do you do about a company like Actor Shakespeare Project here in town which largely does Shakespeare works but not completely? They do also contemporary work which is really important. So how do we allow that to have space within the accounting of a season? And then are we bound by the binarisms of gender normativity? What do we say? What do we mean when we say a female playwright? And if what we mean is people who self-identify as female versus male, do we leave out folks who identify somewhere else on that gender spectrum? How do they get counted? Are they simply remaining invisible as they largely are now? These are questions I do not know the answers to. So when we talk about gender parity, what do we mean? Most of the time we're talking about playwrights because that's an easy thing to count in a season selection. We can also sometimes count directors if directors are named but not all season announcements come with named directors and you've got to go back and do post-season things after the fact. Do we want to talk about designers, dramaturgs, choreographers, other artistic staff? What about the actors on stage? What about the stories that are being told? When we say we're aiming for gender parity, what do we mean when we say that? Here's a case study. American Theater Magazine every year publishes their season preview. So there was a very fabulous and intrepid person in LA who wishes to remain anonymous who decided to do a count from the 2013-14 season preview that was published in the October 2013 American Theater Magazine issue. This person went through and just counted by hand all the things that were in that season preview. So inevitably also there's potential error in that. Shakespeare was not included. Included 500 TCG member companies across 47 states. Here's what was reported from that count, which, by the way, I'm sure took a ton of work. 35% of the plays were by women. 65% of the plays were by men. But what do we mean when we say that? Given all the questions we were just talking about, who are these women and men? What do we mean by a play? What's a play, right? I don't know. So we can say, like, oh, 35% of the plays at TCG member theaters across these 40-plus states, but who knows? Okay, so here's some statistics. These are the Boston counts from 2012 to the coming season. They are incomplete. So I need to say that first. This is not complete. This is a count that I did for the 2012-2013 season. And you're going to see as I go through these slides that the way that the numbers get spelled out is different for each of these because all of the people counting used different techniques. So I, for example, was interested in the number of total people who call themselves writers. And I did include musicals, librettists, composers, et cetera. So 14 theaters, 74 plays, 86 playwrights plus composers, et cetera. Of those, 19 identified as women, as far as I could discern, and 67 identified as men. 69 directors for those 74 plays, which means that that director count is incomplete. 29 female directors and 40 male directors. So you can see already the disparity. This is not parity. Here's the 2013-2014 season. This is a collection of a couple of complicated slides because this is Pat Gaybridge's count, and he sadly is not here, although he is with us in spirit today. And he broke down the Boston season by size of theater. So the first one is fringe. Now, if we were doing these counts from five years ago, a lot of these companies, I mean, we wouldn't have had necessarily as big a fringe scene to count. So that's another thing that changes parity numbers when we're looking across cities. Okay, so 2013-14 on the fringe scene, 36 theaters, 88 plays, 29% of plays produced were written by women, 39% directed by women. I don't have the other numbers because I don't know what Pat counted in terms of where these multi-authored works. All these are, this is the number of plays, not the number of writers necessarily. I don't know if he counted musicals, and I'm not sure about multi-authored works. So that's just a disclaimer. For the large and mid-sized companies, 36% of plays were written by women, 39% directed by women. So that's 12 theaters with 66 plays represented. The total, so all that together. 48 theaters. Pat's numbers give us 151 plays, but that's not actually a reflective number of the other two slides. So I'm just reporting Pat's numbers, but I think there might be a counting error there. I'm sure I have counting errors in my slides as well. So plays written by women, 60, and plays directed by women, 60. Not necessarily the same plays, by the way, even though it's the same amount of numbers. So 40% if you total that across the small, mid-size, large, and fringe. But what about New England? So he looked at New England and here's the numbers, not including Boston, but including the rest of Massachusetts. 34 theaters, 183 plays, 20% written by women, 29% directed by women. And you'll see, the next slide I'm going to show you adds the Boston numbers into this and you'll see how much it changes when you put Boston in the mix. So now up to 29% written by women and 34% directed by women. So what do we do about now? We have a totally incomplete and valorous count from Jen Lewis who did this last night, and this is based on breakdowns that were sent out over the AEA calls and various other things. So this is largely reflective of theaters that are at sort of, that are equity houses, use equity actors. So eight theaters represented, this is sort of basically the largest and mid-size theaters in town. 40 plays on the list, seven female writers, and 33 male writers. Currently the directors announced, now remember this is for next season so a lot of directors are not announced yet, 11 female directors and 19 male directors. So this is interesting because I think we begin to see even in just these very basic numbers some of the reflection of what it means for women to be produced at different levels in the theater scene. So if you want to see what that all looks like altogether there's a quick hit. Remembering of course that the current coming season is not fully reported. But here's something I think we want to think about. What percentage of total plays by women are produced at the fringe level? At the small, mid-sized and large? Do we count presenting houses? What do we mean when we say gender parity? And does it matter that different stages have different numbers of audience members, different kinds of production budgets? Is that what we mean when we talk about gender parity? So that is my statistical presentation in all of its problems and errors. So now we are going to hear from some people, reflections and testimony for lack of a better word but I actually think it's a fabulous word for this about gender parity. And we are going to ask that the people who are willing to stand up and give us two minutes and we're going to hold you to that just so that we can keep moving on up, stand, take the microphone, own your moment and introduce yourself and give us your thoughts. We're going to all be digesting them and then after 15 people or up to 15 people have had this conversation let's open this up to the town hall. How's that sound? Great. I'm so glad to see so many of you here and people want to take a moment to be move over to another party theater you welcome to do that as well. Becca Lewis, who is our fabulous volunteer today. Becca, who's on the list? First is Jen Lewis, no relation. So we're going to ask people to come down and stand right here next to the stair. Here's your mic. All right, give it one second so that I don't know if any of you want to move over. We're all chickens. I signed up as number five and nobody signed up before me. Yeah, I did a little count last night because it was 11 o'clock at night and I went, I really keep, I keep being complaining about this and I want to know what the numbers are for not only playwrights and directors but for cast as well because as an equity actor in Boston I don't know that I need to complete that sentence. And so in an hour, literally I compiled just those numbers and it was literally from the equity hotlines that go out so I know it's not complete but it was some interesting numbers anyway. The numbers that did not get on a lot of slides are the actor numbers which were 56 percent, I'm sorry, role numbers, 56 percent male and 44 percent female which was actually surprisingly close. I was really impressed by that. What that doesn't show is the size of those roles. I did pull out kids separately because I didn't count them at all. As many of you know, I'm an actor, director starting to be playwright and I've gotten into this because I want to be more of an actor. I want more opportunities to work. I feel like I started out in my 20s believing that this wasn't an issue and it was raised by hippies and that's not the case. It's taken me a long time to stop gaslighting myself and that's one of the things that I really want all of us to think about and to tell our students that this is an issue and it's all of our issue and it's something we all need to focus on. I worked with Ganymede Theater Project for three years and ran our, I was director of our career labs, that was my baby and started our, continued our networking nights. It's something that I think really has to happen so for those of you who didn't, I see some familiar faces who came to those but for those of you who didn't know about it we ran just a networking night once a month where people would drop in and chat about whatever focused on women in the theater and then we would run an event quarterly co-sponsored by StageSource, Thank You Julie where we would have panel discussions, etc. During one of these discussions or afterwards I remember one person coming up to me obviously having been crying and saying to me this is church, Thank You which made it worthwhile. It kind of died off because there were three of us doing it and actually we want to be acting and doing other things so Ganymede still exists but I'm not involved currently and that focus in Boston does not exist. To my mind there are two different ways we need to tackle this issue partly is from within, from within this group from all of the women and the supporters of women out there who need to create our own work, have these discussions as frustrating as it can be saying we have these discussions all the time and nothing happens we need to continue having the discussion so that we know it's not just us and so that we can brainstorm with each other and work communally to find things that work better but then also within the establishment within the companies that get grants and have money instead of just producing everything bootstrap, if I'm producing all the time I'm not acting all the time and that's actually what I want to do studying the problem is the other side of it so I'd love to have a study that includes the seasons for companies and not only the producers and I'm sorry the directors and playwrights but also the roles, who gets equity roles where do those go? I'd also encourage us all to go see plays by female playwrights by companies that are focused on women's work and also for all of us fake it till you make it and fake it till you become it there's an interesting study out there on confidence that just came out a couple of weeks ago that is in danger of blaming the victims and saying that we all just need to bootstrap up and do it but it also has some important lessons for us all I think in that there's a lot more that we can do if we believe we can do it and we try and just looking around and saying my voice isn't out there so it's really hard to get my voice out there is self-defeating thank you I think I'm going to go over here and I'll give you some time information okay my name is Charlotte and I'm an actor, writer, puppeteer I build puppets I pretty much do everything for conceiving an idea to putting it on stage but I don't have to rent a theatre I usually get hired by libraries and stuff like that so that makes it so much easier but what I think is very interesting these statistics do not show and do not represent how many women are actually in the field they say who is getting the jobs but if you go to stage source and I'm sure a lot of us were either as producers or actually going you see, I don't know the statistics but I'm sure you can figure it out you see close to 60 or 70% women auditioning and I also see in other fields in the producing, directing, set, design, everything I see larger quantities of women applying for stuff so in a sense these figures which actually seem oh 40% isn't too bad it's only a little bit off for 50-50 but it's really bad if you actually compare it with the quantity of women who are out there compared to the quantity of guys I pulled from the non-union acting day, not even the singing day I was looking for some guys so we need a Prince Charming for Saturday yeah they didn't need a Cinderella no, they didn't need a Cinderella no, they needed a Prince Charming 6-hawk tool guy I was able to pull less than 10 people from that stack the number of guys, literally yeah, there were some guys who were too old or weren't quite right you got about 30 seconds so I think that's one thing these figures don't show to our audiences sometimes you've got to have bums on seats and sometimes if the audience is only women especially younger women they want to see handsome guys on the stage eye candy for bums on seats for certain things like I do murder mysteries and I've had to do shows where oh we need two guys in it and they have to be eye candy in order that our bachelorettes are going to come see the show so that is another issue thank you into this conversation the age factor we have no statistics here about how old are these women whether they're the 60% that you might have seen at stage source or the auditions or who's on the stage or who's writing when I was texting somebody about going to gender parity my iphone auto corrected to tender party it made me reflect that's the sorry state of those words aren't even in the computer but I don't have statistics either I only have anecdotal experiences and that's repetitive but my experience is going to audition and getting really great feedback but we've got enough women your age we're looking for young women or I don't have anything in the demographics for this season that fit you so those are my experiences so I write my own plays so I get to work but I also write, produce, direct, act and I want to be in companies I want to be with other actors so that doesn't always work for me I'm very excited about the opportunity to work with a great Boston playwright Melinda Lopez and I have to write plays workshop that's coming up thank you stage source thank you and I'm probably friends with your parents the hippies that gave you all that support but as the baby boomers are responsible for a lot of great things I think we can tackle this too and a great quote is motto that I live by is if you can't fix it feature it so this is the new 60 well I'm not an actor so I'll do my best some of you have already heard this I'm up here speaking for radical lesbian feminist visibility or lesbian visibility period I would say thank you I would say Ninth Women's Playwrights International Conference in Stockholm in 2012 there were 300 playwrights there we put out a call for because there were no lesbian plays out of like a hundred that they did and we had 14 people come for lunch of which three or four of them were allies so it's just a pollock and I think there was one play out of the hundred that even had a lesbian character so when we talk about gender parity that part doesn't get in very much I notice and there's no fault of the statisticians there's no breakdown by race which I think is a huge problem I mean they are mostly right here so and the other thing that I wanted to talk about well two things one is while we can't do radical political, social justice kind of work because people won't come to see it and my experience is every time somebody does a good play with that there's not enough room in the theater so that's another myth that we need to get rid of and let's see there was an open call for short plays earlier in maybe 2013 a new company they said we're really looking for unusual work we want gender diversity and race and blah blah blah and all that they chose ten plays eight or nine of them were by men and I'm not sure any of them were people of color so I wrote to the person because I'd been in dialogue about it and they said well we chose the best plays and they said but your call was that you were going to have et cetera et cetera et cetera and the response was the same like I was four years old and couldn't understand it the first time so I think it's not just them up there or them out there it's in our own community hail to all the teachers thank you Jen for what you said and I think that's all I have to say thank you that was everyone who signed up who moved to speak I'm G.L. Horton when writing and Geraldine when acting or to my friends I belong to an organization called the International Center for Women Playwrights which broke off from the playwrights international puts on the conference every year and it's been going on for a long time but my interest in this goes back to my beginning interest when I started writing plays when I was just a kid didn't know women didn't do it and when I got further along in school it was explained to me that it was absolutely impossible and I said it's too late I'm going to do it anyway and I'm going to try to change that impossible part so I've been fighting for this from the women's committee at the dramatist guild I used to take the train down and go to the things and then we founded the International Center for Women Playwrights after they shut down the women's committee at the dramatist guild so here I am and I'm telling you about the latest project of the International Center for Women Playwrights which could use some help by the way if you're interested in this this might be a good outlet but we are giving a 50-50 applause award for playwriting gender parity and this will be the third annual one and we are accepting nominations for that award from the May 1st on and anyone may nominate and the members of the who volunteer to help who belong to the International Center are going to send out a fact sheet to the theater where they answer the questions about exactly how do they explain their gender parity and then we give them an award and we send out press releases to help the people who belong to the International Center will organize some kind of a little party in their own community to make this a special occasion for the people who get the award so I have brought copies of this and I'm distributing it online and we would love to have your help those of you who favor this cause thank you for organizing this if you want to come right down here just so you can get on the camera I'm Sherry Galper I have recently thrown my hat back in the ring as an actor I have been writing and directing and producing for a number of years the last time I was really on the market as an actor was in the 80s in Seattle where we had women in equity meetings about how most of the equity contracts would go to the men and oh my goodness so much has not changed yeah you used to call the equity curse so it was really bad if you were a female actor to go equity because you'd stop getting cast I've been making a few notes about some things I do a lot of diversity and inclusion work that's one of the roles that I do in the real world and there's a phrase that I like a lot which is people in power decide what is right and beautiful I find that a really profound statement so when you have people saying oh we chose the best plays according to what criteria and whose criteria that's one thing to think about and how can we make inroads ourselves well I sat through three days of stage source auditions and I realized that a lot of the roles that go to women are as sexual objects and sex objects and so on I would encourage women of all ages to choose pieces that are not about that to choose pieces that are by women and not about being sex objects then for those of us who teach theater or run workshops or do scene study classes that we choose scenes by women and choose scenes that are not about necessarily objectifying the female or the female needing the male that there are other roles and other functions that we have on the planet that as a subscriber a couple of years ago I wrote to one of the theaters in the area and said I just looked at your season you have no women playwrights no women directors and I'm not subscribing this year and I got an email from the artistic director who said oh gosh gee I hope that won't keep you away it did and the following year I broke take credit for it but the following year their season had different representation so we do have voices and we can use them in a number of ways thank you for this my name is Kitty Drexel I am the queen of the gigs at the New England excuse me New England theater gig I see a lot of theater I see a lot of theater my lovely wife and I usually see maybe two to three shows a week and it is very apparent immediately when you see that much theater how few roles there are for women either on the stage or as leaders in the theater community and I do my dardest with my blog to say this is a problem not always easy what that motivates me to say now is that we are a lot of women hi guys thank you so much for coming but it is absolutely important that we get men involved in this conversation women make up 52% of the population on the planet men are fewer than us that is fine but it seems like feminism and parody is largely an issue covered by women if it affects the population that much if we are that large of population then it affects all of us so in order to create parody to make it a non-issue we must get men involved women are largely a lot of the directors they do a lot of producing them the head of companies they run the businesses the CEOs etc etc if we want things to change we must get them involved in the discussion because we as women if we are not going to the head we can't do much change without them we are 52% of the population to get the 48% involved or to get them to care but it is a women's issue why should I care because you know women because it affects people you love because it affects people you know because you see them on the T because you go to rehearsals with them you go to rehearsals with them they are writing shows they are auditioning for you you should give a damn because women are people yep yep you are good hi everyone I am Lea Mikeska Gardner I am the New Artistic Director at the North Theater and I have a few different statistics to share with you this is from our season I am going to assume that it is in some of these because it was published for our EPA's so I don't know for those of you who know the NORA and the NURT share space at Central Square Theater so I only get to program 3 or 4 shows a year but if the 4 shows that I am working on this year that I have programmed 3 of my women out of the or 12 roles only 2 are men possibly 4 which means a majority of women and out of the 3 shows directly involved are directed by women so take hope there are practical things one can do I also am from DC and I did not look at that summit I looked at it in retrospect and it made me so angry that I couldn't look at it and because I know those people who are involved in that and I know Peter and the artistic directors so one of the frankly one of the reasons why I fled DC because the tenor of the town is changing oh by the way the first show is a lesbian show it is not radical it is a love story but still radical love story and and it became really clear in looking at the sort of the culture of DC that a lot of lip service was going on it is not necessarily a lot of deep action and one of the reasons I came to this area was because of the north the north found me we found each other it drew me here so I am actually delighted to be at the start of this conversation in this community because I wanted to be reflective of a different culture not what I am seeing in DC right now I want to ask do we have any board members or leadership here a couple of board people because honestly going back to what you were saying a lot of it started who is at the top who is at the leadership who is looking for people who look like them and how do we change that and also right now my board is all women and I am looking to diversify I need a couple of men for the very reason that one voice is still one voice we are looking for many voices to make the conversation complete you can sit at your seat and you don't have to use a mic although I think we do want a mic we can make sure we have a video capture but I will run around with the mic there you go who wants to who wants to who wants to say something to have a comment how are you what are you thinking how are you feeling this is change this is a movement that isn't hard 50-50 is not difficult I know I have been working for 30 years this is part of the reason I have this thought so much is it hasn't changed in my working life I want to answer one issue that was brought up in some of the testimony which is indeed these statistics do not reflect any sort of racial breakdowns or sexual or gender identity breakdowns in ways other than just male-female however that's not to say that those things aren't being counted if you go to the stage source page that is the announcement for this event you will see links to some blog posts that cover what I have done and those do indeed address some racial breakdowns for the purposes of today's meeting Julie and I decided to stick to the gender parody question but that question about racial representation is incredibly important and definitely not off the table simply a different conversation than the one we are having right this moment although super connected so thank you for saying that and we will know that over here okay Hi my name is Kelly Galvin I'm from the Berkshires in western Mass and I have been working for the past five years as an artist in residence at Shakespeare & Company and for the past year and a half as the artistic associate at a newer theater called Wamp Theater and I just wanted to relate something that I heard a lot at Shakespeare & Company when I would sort of say to my bosses by women and what I so often heard and then have reflected by Molly Smith in that panel was well a regional theater is a place where plays that have been done and have been successful get remounted or whatever for your community and I really believe that these people aren't making the time and don't even have the awareness to know about fantastic plays being written by women so then I got an idea that I got from Angela Merkel who said she got so sick or was this her or was this someone else there's a powerful woman a powerful woman who is so sick of hearing men say we'd love to hire a woman for this position but we just didn't know of anyone qualified so she started carrying a list of ten fantastic well-qualified women and handing it to people so that's my new thing have a list of your ten favorite plays and that's what I started doing handing them to my bosses I want to say too that there is a new group in LA called the Kilroy's which is a collection of playwrights and producers and they are in this moment collecting from professionals around the country lists of people's top five favorite plays by women either unproduced as of yet or have only had one production and they're going to be publishing that list very shortly with the idea of exactly what you're talking about which is how do you we can make a list of lots and lots of plays by women but of those plays sometimes a regional theater artistic director wants a vetted list and so this is an idea of like but also who gets to vet that list this is why many lists probably need to exist other conversation that wants to happen Lucy Graham on Twitter is curious about ideas for how we can support mentor early career female theater artists so we want to speak to that great if you put it out there, anyone in me just start talking to them chair and I've been doing like having coffee with a playwright or with a young person who wants to get gone or any of your information if you have the time just do it, it's easy enough so we have a couple of our young early professional people here today and I would encourage everybody to utilize services like how either of you through a fund called the Boston youth fund which is now called something entirely different department of youth employment and something, an engagement so basically these are high school students that go to Boston public schools who are ready to work in our theater and we work with them a lot on all kinds of different things and it's been pretty incredible from our end, hopefully from their end we'll see but we've been doing that for a couple of years now and I really encourage everybody this is something that's been in Boston forever and I don't think enough arts organizations you use this at all and this is something that can only be good for all of us yeah, it's called D-Y-E-E department of youth department, here you say it the department of youth employment and engagement used to be called the Boston youth fund, right? other ideas for mentorship of young, emerging artists yes, and I say young but what I really mean is not age ones new artists so for me how I think oh hi, I'm Caitlin I'm the associate artistic director at Stonem so one of those mid-sized theaters but not everyone's count because we're in the summers so I think the way that I've been trying to help is shifting how I think about myself that I think I've been so busy thinking of myself as an early career person that it really took until about a month ago for me to say oh wait I hire six people to direct shows every summer and their shows with students with young kids but I can commit to making sure that there is gender representation in my summer directing program and it's a great place for people who are younger and earlier in their careers than am I and I think especially I've been thinking about this a lot lately the question of gender parity and I'm sort of not worried as a female director for like 20 years from now because the associate artistic directors in this town are women or many of them so I'm kind of not worried about what power in the theater looks like 20 years from now, 15 years from now but I'm thinking about how I can help people I don't want to be worried about 20 years from now but I'm not convinced that all these women are going to rise to those levels of management or of decision makers again having been at this for so long in many different fields there is a glass ceiling and a lot of women's faces mushed up against it and a lot of people in color's faces mushed up against it so this but again we're changing the world today so you know I look forward to that I'm also going to offer something I taught I also teach arts management classes at Emerson College and I talk to my students a lot about informational interviews we have an incredibly generous community and I don't know anyone who wouldn't be willing to talk to somebody if they have a question and all of us, everyone in this room has an expertise that can help somebody else you know how did you start where did you go, what would you suggest who do you know, all that sort of thing so asking and you know an offering to buy the coffee might help but they take advantage of the community itself and who is where you aspire to be invite that person out for coffee I want to remind those of us who are watching online hi online, how are you doing that if you tweeted us with parity boss we are monitoring that feed as well as the new play feed so if you guys have any questions there are definitely some people in the audience who are tracking them so your question will get into the room we can keep talking about mentorship or we can change the question or the conversation I actually just wanted to address mentorship one more time when Ganymede had a discussion about the class procedure as we call it all the time Kate Warner in town for that year mentioned that she tries to have salons with women, young women that she knows who are somehow affiliated with Ganymede now and then and just get people together for an evening with a couple bottles of wine and chat and talk about how she what the issues they're facing building a big sense of sister-ship as well as sharing her experience with them I'd encourage any of us who have some experience whatever level it is I'm with you where I've gone oh crap I'm actually the one who should be mentoring now I guess to share it about proactively and find people who you want to help you nurture Hi everyone I'm Peter Meacham theater manager at the Boston Center for the Arts and a member of this community Mentorship makes me think of one of the root causes that I often question when having this discussion which is where academia comes into this I don't know any artists of my generation didn't pass through a liberal arts school or a state school or some higher ed institution to get some sort of formal training within writing or acting or directing and theater departments have their own season they have their own producing wings their own directors and I know that this isn't complete but it seems that's a whole other question to ask about who are the professors that are being asked to direct who are the playwrights that are being chosen to be produced in those departments and that's just to relate it to mentorship I think again is is a question to ask because I think that's where a lot of the mentorship happens before it gets to the professional level and it gets to where a lot of the future artists come from and I think all of us have experience with that higher ed context in that so I think that's where my questions often go to is that as a root cause as well Hi, my name is Ann Denning I'm a consultant working in nonprofit arts with an art museum called Art Section Research and we work in several cities Boston being one of them I'd be interested in this idea of mentorship but I think we need to do more than mentor the next generation I think we need to champion the next generation and I've been studying women in leadership both in our sector and in other sectors as part of my work one of the sectors recently that's had a lot of attention around women in leadership is the high tech sector the innovation sector as it were and some women who have really taken over leadership positions Sheryl Sandberg etc a lot of what's happened there and a lot of what they talk about is the importance of having people champion them with the people in leadership and that is something that both women and men need to be doing which is looking at who are these emerging women in the sector and how can we champion them to the people in decision making positions so that they really can take all of that knowledge all of those ideas that are being shared with them and actually put it into a place where they have opportunity to use that My name is Walt McGuff, I'm a local playwright an administrative and artistic associate and I think that there is mentorship on an individual basis that is incredibly helpful for younger artists who are starting out but I think there's also a large opportunity for mentorship on an institutional basis there are a large number of theaters in Boston that are very established and codified as far as their administrative structures and that does result in a big glass ceiling it can be very hard to adjust and turn on a dime but there's also a really robust and active fringe community of companies that are much more flexible in how they farm and the work that they do and I think that there is a really big opportunity for companies that have become established to teach the younger companies how to follow their path and by doing that take all the artists they work with as they grow I think that for fringe companies it's immensely helpful to just know how to become more professional and how to become a larger company more and grow your donor base and I think having as much interplay in that ecosystem as possible between larger theaters and smaller theaters can only help the scene because it gives that much more opportunity for the professionals and artists in the world I just want to say in response to what you said that I might not be younger but I definitely will into the champion so and I think the manager and Cheryl Sandberg we've a lot to be desired so let's move that paradigm a little bit I want to say something about that too because I think we tend to use the term all the terms are horrible emerging is a terrible word young doesn't actually convey what we're talking about early career as I guess okay but how long have you been working and how long do you remain early career so I think your point is really well taken we look at the large variety of women young just out of school people who've been working for decades and decades and figure out how to find pathways for people at all of those levels to progress in their own artistry and professionalism as they desire it's a great question and I wish I had an answer can everyone stand up when you speak sorry Lila Rose hi everyone I'm Lila Rose I'm a local playwright and I'm standing so theater is always dying right regardless of what gender you are or what level you're on and I think that's something that we need to think about that these people in power are really worried about their theaters and I think if we approach this compassionately rather than combatively we're more likely to make progress and I think the words we use are really important here what you're talking about I'm an emerging playwright I'm an emerging female playwright I'm an early career playwright but I'm too emerged to apply for a lot of the emerging things for emerging playwrights it gets really tricky it's kind of like your statistics everybody's using the same words to mean different things something I've been sitting here thinking is a lot of diffusion that's happening because we're talking about gender parity which to me automatically links also to race parity but we can't talk about that today because that's two different conversations but it's the same conversation there's a way that it's hard for me to know how to talk about this because it isn't just one kind of parity but once you start talking about more than one kind of parity you're not having a focused conversation then how could you take action so I don't have any answers but I have been doing a lot of thinking and working about mindfulness and compassion and I feel like if we remember we're all on the same team and to most of the world we're like the crazy theater people I think that'll help us move forward everyone should be held accountable for what they're doing and what they're producing but I think demonizing the very people you're trying to befriend isn't going to help us here I'm John Landcourt I'm the board chair at Underground Railway Theater and I think the word that you mentioned that resonates for me was about power and I think you don't change things unless we do collective action of some sort and so I think about an experience I had on a totally different issue in a neighborhood where there was a problem that had existed for about 50 years like the 30 years that you talked about and it was we ended up organizing about 500 people at the Boston Public Library for a teach-in and when the powers that be comparable to the directors of the theaters saw 500 people packing the hall where they were turning people away because the capacity was 500 people all of a sudden the problem started to get solved and we participated in creating an infrastructure that to this day this was about 10 years ago this infrastructure is still in place and they are monitoring the problem and anytime something looks problematic the appropriate people are called in to fix it and so I would suggest that we have to think about some kind of collective action where we go and talk to all the directors and you know executive directors and board chairs and whatever and say we're not going away and it has to change we want to help change it but it is not possible to stay the way we are I'm going to come over here in just a minute Good afternoon, my name is Leigh Ann Ossie and I've been trying to sit here and just listen and not say anything I've been away from theater for a number of years and I came home with my third child and I'm returning and the same problems exist I'm sort of responding to Lila Rose's comments about choosing the right words and in trying to re-emerge so to speak into the theater community those words that people say to you are very important and what I want to say to everyone is before you speak to another artist female or otherwise stop and think and find them stop trying to tell them who and what they're supposed to be and on the flip side you as a person you start as a playwright you say I can, I will, I should I am and define yourself and put those words into other people's mouths and as a person of color as a round brown, nappy headed black woman which for me are just adjectives but for other people they're often negative in some way I'm always trying to redefine myself in other people's eyes yes I get am I married, you know if I say I have a house full of kids I think of other things so I'm purposely correct and heartfully correct when I ask you for a song don't tell me to do color purple actually I'm thinking about carrying in a louder note if I'm auditioned for a play don't automatically assume that I want to do Queen Margaret so and then remember our hearts so Sherry it's all camera stuff it's all about the look so I like the word champion as I said I do diversity and inclusion training and consulting and it's a funny thing that the people who have the power don't know there's a problem so that issue of going again that whole thing about the glass ceiling if you're under the glass ceiling it's a two-way mirror but if you're above it it's just a mirror they don't see they don't see anybody below it they don't see any problems they don't see the problems so we do need to let them know there is the issue we need to approach them as partners and that whole idea of champion or advocate which is a term I like to use we have to go in and say will you be our advocate will you champion because we don't want to confront it will just alienate I don't know that's my own belief on it but to do what we can to get them to partner with us and to make them aware is critical so we're going to be moving on to action steps and to talk about how to I'm going to read a tweet what is the action here I'm ready to talk solutions time to pick up tools and start accurately fracturing the glass and till it's gone yay thank you Summer Williams for what you said about compassion and about everything else but I will also say that one of the gifts of turning 50 is your stop being so nice and so start demanding change otherwise what's going to happen is the status quo we're going to move and then we're going to snap back to the status quo what I'm thinking what I'm saying what I'm suggesting what the tools we're going to be developing in this next half hour are is about cutting those elastic cords that keeps napping us back and reframing them somewhere else so that's what we need to do we can all talk here in Boston we're good at talking we're smart we're compassionate we're thoughtful we're all those good things everyone has the right heart for this but what we need to do is create change and create change that's systemic and that's permanent so how do we do that and it's we it's not state chores needs to cause just to bring that up again state chores is a service organization I'm so thrilled to be part of it it is two full time staff people it is two full time staff people right so we are state chores we are the Boston slash New England theater community and I always put that slash in because our artists are everywhere because greater Boston is stoner it is Cambridge summer village it is fluid it is it's Batson now it's different parts of the community and we go to the Cape and we go to the Berkshires and we go up north and we go down south so we what we're you know this is big this is a fluid conversation so let's start putting some stakes to the ground to work around and start getting a gravitational pull for some action so that summer Williams can tweet about action stuff next right and so I know you're right so what do we think so Bobby Steinberg that was very serendipitous I'm with summer because that's what I was just going to jump into so I'm 71 and I haven't been nice for a really long time and I find the need to reinvent and be mentored a lot as well as mentoring other people and the other thing I want to say before I give an action idea or two is that I love women so you know in a couple people have mentioned this it's so great to have people like Lee and Caitlin and Walt anybody else who is an artistic director associate artistic director in the room but there's a paucity of that today obviously and I'm wondering if there can be some kind of invited strong invitation to are behind the back invitation to some kind of a round table of I wonder how often in this town I think it's rare ever the heads of theaters be the executive producers artistic directors presidents of boards like Joan come together ever and what would that do in terms of being able to present our action plans our desires our demands if you will in language that doesn't make them leave the room and how can we engage right from the top those people who do not I love that metaphor of just seeing one way through the mirror seeing themselves and not seeing two ways so is that I mean we can talk and talk and talk but we have to get to those people fortunately we have some people in the room who are either those people and are doing the right thing I know that I'm a member of actors Shakespeare project and the women in that company have fought hard to not only be actors in that company because we're doing Shakespeare and most of the roles are men so we play a lot of men and we fought hard for that but we also very much fought hard with our artistic leadership to bring in for instance this year we have three women directors and yes finally yes yes and I I just I think it's we need to sit down with these people and let them know how we feel because they don't know so that's where it's at for me I mean how can we do that I guess is the next step other action steps oh great we've got here and then sure so last year's stage conference in the summer at the ART there was a section devoted to equality and I was in that section we talked about how to create equality in the theater and there were members of boards and different people from various companies most of them professional a company one led the discussion I believe I'm not remembering exactly so I remember sitting there and there were people saying but how do we do it and my response was you do it but what if it's transparent and my response was it should be transparent let your people know that you are looking for people of color that you are looking for women that you are looking for things that are not straight cisgendered white men and they will come to you and if they don't come to you you keep looking and they can make a point you start by actually doing it and making a point of doing it and it's that easy to start but what if the subscribers don't come you convince them to come you convince them that it is in their best interest to see this theater so what if the lead isn't a man so what women have stories too you make a point of doing it and it will get done Hi I'm Kristen Baker and I think that I love data and I think that one of our action steps needs to be more data because I think that one of the challenges I think it's a bit it's a bit of a fool's errand to try to convince those people who have power and privilege that they should give up that power and privilege because it's the right thing to do because it's not going to work because that's the thing about privileges you don't know you have it you just walk around having it and that's just what the Laurel does like to collect enough data and enough demonstrable proof that including people of color including women striving for parity is good for your business because most of these people who are in power that we're talking about are in fact struggling they're struggling to keep their theaters alive they're struggling to get butts in the seats they're struggling to get grants and donations and they don't think they have time to do good work and they might not be wrong but we need to tell them that the right thing to do is also the fiscally smart thing to do and we know that that's true we all want to see plays by women about women that have a different tell us a different story than that cisgendered white guy but we need to show them that we do it and I don't know if anybody else is a Nate Silver fan of data but on 538 a couple of weeks ago there was a delightful post totally debunking the idea in Hollywood that films that feature women make less money they don't they make more money but there's that pervasive thing like oh if we do a female lead unless it's one of these two women no one will come and it's not true so we need to not just say you should do it because it's right we need to say you should do it because it's smart and we know it because of this and I don't know whose job it is to collect back data I hope Alana does it I'm not exactly sure who's going to do that but I don't know if it means that we need to organize to get a grant or just crowdsource this data collection but we need to prove that this is smart not just right because it's both can I grab this I'm going to give this to you in a second so okay about an action step I agree with you I think the biggest thing we need is data but we need responsible data collection and I am not a statistician although I like to play one in my dreams but there are people in town who are because there are a million folks around here going to universities who work with them who are skilled in these areas but what I do think this means is that it can't be one person or one organization here's my proposal for an action step I would love to see a committee of people who are committed to data collection and establishing best practices meet together under the aegis of stage source be responsible for helping to get some of the best information perhaps in collaboration with HowlRound which I know is a great place for us to kind of locate some of this stuff so I'm my action item is I'm looking for more people in this room or online hi online how's it going who want to be part of this because I can't run it and no single person can run it I'm Ginger Lazarus I'm a playwright I'm available both to be mentored and to mentor them and and I'd like to go I'd like to thank Gerlin for telling us about the IC 5050 award yes the 5050 award which I think is a great idea and something you mentioned about you know confronting theaters whose seasons are traditional all dead white males or whatever and from what and other things just adding in all other things people are saying is so what is there and I don't have a good action step but maybe I can start the ball rolling on mobilizing audiences either to say you know when a theater is not representing diversity in their offerings going to them and saying hey why aren't you showing shows that I want to see and also championing the theaters that are offering the shows we want to see and bring more publicity to set you know look at this season that is you know Nora's season that is majority women playwrights there is this great show going on by Lyle Rose Kaplan Frasier with majority women cast that you should go see you should actually Frasier theater and and again I'm not sure how to do that but I wonder if there is some action to be done on that front go over here I'll be back to you guys in a minute Hi, my name is Tracy I happen to work for Mass Creative where the statewide arts advocacy organization so in both my free time and non-free time I spend a lot of time thinking about power and how to convince people to do the right thing so folks may know we worked with State Shorston a lot of the Boston arts and cultural community to run a campaign around the Boston mayor election to really change the conversation and make sure that arts and culture was part of all the candidates' vision for the city and we're translating that now to what we're doing statewide around the governor's election so I like to do this little thing where I power back decision makers and I figure out what is it that actually influences them and it's always the public it's always money, it's always media it's always VIPs and I want to encourage everyone to kind of think about this model here too I think what you talked about using audiences and using boards is really smart and talking about subscribers that's who I'm sure folks who are artistic directors can talk about this you really care about your boards you really care about your audiences you really care about your donors and so those are the folks who should also be part of this conversation and they should be asking for gender parity so they should be saying I'm a subscriber because I care about this but I will continue to be a subscriber if I see this or going it would be really interesting to look at some of the organizations that aren't really representing the community on stage and the people who put on productions and saying who are their major donors and who are their board members and are they also a board member of my organization and can I have this conversation with them and then can they take it higher and then it's you can convince people either on the merits so with that data or you can convince people with power and we've got a lot of power in the community there's lots of breath and there's a lot of depth and I think we should continue to use that Hi everybody my name is Daniel Jones I work in marketing at Arts Emerson and I dabble in some French work as well in town and I am for better or worse a white man and I really care about stories of people of color and women so that's going to be fun I've noticed this kind of scary trend as I've been working on shows related to women or told by women or people of color that there's not an audience coming to them and that's alarming and disheartening to me especially in this town and so I just wanted to echo some of the points made over on this side of the room about put your money where those stories are being told don't sit around and wait for the free tickets to show up when the show is not selling because it hurts me if you don't have any money you don't have any money but those of you who have money but then go and show up and see these shows because they need it we're hurting folks this industry is hurting in this town so we need to show your point about we need to make it look like this is something that's actually economically viable something that's going to make your company prosper and the people in this room are going to be the ones to do it and we have to start tweeting about it we have to start talking about it we have to start dragging our friends by their ankles to see the show and then what we have to do but we have to show up and be there and be accounted for I have one action item I'm going to throw in which is that in New York once a month or once every other month a whole bunch of people all agree to go see a play that's being produced by a woman all on the same night it's an organized effort and it shows an economic investment in that play because it is by a woman in fact in New York there's a lot of plays to choose from so that committee who ever decides that makes a choice about which play they're going to all go to and then this is now that also becomes a group of people who go to the theater together all the time and then become advocates for those plays so that's one action item that we might be able to borrow another thing is that I find myself doing this and so I presume I'm not the only one but maybe I'm a weirdo I think sometimes that I have not I don't put enough faith in my non theater going friends and I make assumptions maybe about what I think they might like and I invite them to things that I sort of pre-select like oh I think that person will like this play and I wonder how often I am subverting my own industry by not advocating for things that might not traditionally immediately align with who I think that person is because I've been surprised more often than not and so I just want to say somebody who I think is pretty attuned to these issues I still find myself making those errors in judgment and so as an action item for myself I think I'm going to be working on that or if that can be translatable into a larger action item for more people we're some more hands over here hi again everybody so I have a statistician I haven't been married to and I've been texting with him and he says does anyone need some analysis done I'm more than happy or to have anyone audit my class next fall I said can I offer you up officially he said ha sure we have someone to analyze our data and now we need data and I think a good action item someone said it but I don't know if it is is to crowdsource a study because people get invested in things that help crowdsource and there are a lot of people more than in this room who are sort of frustrated lukewarm frustrated about this right so an easy thing to do is to give like 10-15 dollars to your friend's crowdsourcing thing and then you feel a little better and then you follow it right so I think that that's actually not only a good way to get some money that might not take as long as a grant but also is a way to get a whole bunch of people am I doing it? get people excited in following it Jared my statistician also runs this great thing called SciFund which is like helping scientists promote their work online to non-scientists and I feel like as theater people there are women in the world and people in the world who would want to know about this and really subscribe and aren't theater people so I think the more things we can be doing using social media to get this out there the better there's a guy in DC who is a member of the dominant skill his first name is Gwydian I would just since we're online Gwydian if you're listening contact these people because he has a date ring absolutely right and very functional when you're talking with Gwydian so the other thing and this I would like somebody to come up with an action set I know somebody and I'm going to do this all anonymously for obvious reasons who is involved in a new play and we've had a long conversation about you know they put out a call and they decide like okay we're going to focus on women and people of color and the scripts are not just enough quote unquote and I am really at a loss in terms of how did A do anything about that B had to talk to this person and say you know it's either in sourcing or it's in who's evaluating or the topics or something but I went into this repeatedly and I feel like you know I have a bloody for it now and I know other people can give me some good language about how do you talk to people about changing that item perception or the reality so maybe the action item is finding a place on the stage source website around this gender parody stuff where we can crowdsource some language that other people have found successful and have a talking points page maybe that's helpful other things so this is from twitter so we've got a question from the LAFPI Hi guys so the question is since women buy most theater tickets already producers already count on our economic vote how can we use that's for parody change there we go I didn't use to give it before by the way I wasn't worried the question was the question is since women already are the primary ticket buyers how do we leverage this how do we already have great I didn't need to say before that I wasn't worried Julie I meant to say that I'm not as terrified as I am that's an excellent clarification but I think that there's this weird idea on behalf of people who select shows it's not good we know where it comes from that plays about white men are universal stories and plays about people other than white men are universal stories which has lots of different things in it but the techniques that are interesting to me are the idea that okay these are universal stories sure great so that means that anyone should be free to interpret that story and present it to people so if I'm programming Arthur Miller because Arthur Miller speaks to the human condition then a female director then female designers then different populations of folks conversation like a month ago different populations of folks should be able to interpret that story as it speaks to them and then there's also this idea so we have the universal story and then it speaks to the specific human beings in the audience and I also think that we're we're not having the conversation about how specific stories speak to specific people sure but they also speak to everyone that's why we do good plays because they supposedly speak to everyone and this conversation about artistic directors a potential non-scary place to get them engaged building off of what Lila Rose said and also this question is inviting them to talk about why they chose I mean this is a touchy feeling non-systemic way but inviting them to talk about why they chose the plays that they chose and building on their language and what inspired them to reflect it back to them and also if we do do this idea of having people report what they're doing in their season rather than having it be outsiders reporting if we've got the theaters themselves preferably the very higher ups they're sitting there and they're typing these numbers into their Excel spreadsheets and then as they're doing it hopefully they're going crazy idea action step good housekeeping approval for seasons that represent women I don't know who would choose those criteria I don't know how we would make that happen but I think it would be fabulous if we could have a list that we publish at some point of these theater companies are representing women proportionally in their next season and hopefully then theaters could be putting it on their little brochure and people could be looking forward looking for it at some point building audience awareness in that way and the other idea is still going nevermind Hi, I'm Leah jumping off Daniel's point I'm not even going to be subtle about this the show this weekend at Art Somerson is called The Whole Hearted it's about a lesbian boxer it's amazing and it's not sold out and that is a crime the second point jumping off of all of the data collection I'm curious about what people think about asking for quotas because there's a lot of the response that I always hear to that is like well we're artists and we don't want to do things that are artistic and fill these artistic requirements but they're out there that you can still do that and have 50-50 so I'd love to hear opinions on that something with the 50-50 I feel like I like the idea of me putting in my work anonymously being chosen completely on the merit regardless of if I'm male or female black, white, Asian heterosexual, homosexual bi, whatever I want to be based on the merit and I think part of that base merit is who's reading it, if all the people reading it are white men they might not see my story as being good so you want a diverse panel of readers on scripts that totally blank with no names a lot of authors use to write pseudonyms especially in the Victorian era we actually now know that people had pseudonyms so that these women, writers could actually write and have their books published unfortunately with plays and this is what I think we had problems with the seasons, if you want to do a classic play because of the structure of society and politics and women's reproductive rights you know because when you're stuck in the home looking after kids it's very hard to sit and write and do things but things have changed in the last 30-40 years that have allowed women to come more into the workforce in a non-family related fashion that has changed the side in the past, in the old days that wasn't as much and also so all the past plays up to so many of the past plays I couldn't name a play or even a film script even though I know more films and certainly libredos were done with co-like husband and wife teams writing but asked me to name a female playwright from pre 1950 and it would be very hard for me to know a famous playwright from that time but I know there's got to be lots of them who write good plays but we haven't been educated enough they're not in the routine and some of them were hidden by history I actually found a book of female Elizabethan plays because in Elizabethan time women weren't even allowed to be on stage and that's very hard as a producer you're trying to find both modern plays which you have more choice of female playwrights but if you're going old you don't necessarily have the knowledge or the access to female plays from the earlier era so I think action stuff that we can take from that is if we're building a gender parity section of the stage source website we can talk about having a resource list I know as a professor of dramatic literature I have a ton of those plays on my banner as well as contemporary plays by women and there are absolutely tons of lists that are being curated right this moment that are answering that question and one of the things we can do is make them easier to find so I think that's an easily addressable action item I haven't said anything yet I just want to make sure that some folks get a chance I just want to interject somebody is creating a list of like Christine Evans Christine Evans is doing that because anybody can great so if you go to the event page for this event on the stage source website you'll see a link to a blog post that I wrote trying to accumulate a bunch of links around gender parity one of the things that you can find there is a link to this to this list called We Exist and it is a massive list of plays by living women working playwrights right now and it's people either add to anybody can add to it, it's crowdsourced editable and so if you want to add female playwrights that you know or if you want to add your own self and you haven't done that yet that is something you can do to be in the world noticed so I'm the lip director for Fresh Inc and also a dramaturg with Company One and one of my action items that I would love to encourage other dramaturg's lip folks to do is to really encourage the male playwrights you know to write for women but if male playwrights are getting produced then there's no reason why those stories can't also be for women there's some really really great local writers who are writing awesome stories for female actresses and there should be more of them kind of link to that I would love to see some kind of workshop or kind of dramaturg playwright matching program where we can kind of invite playwrights who are maybe a little bit nervous to write stories either for women or people of color or any playwright in the background different from the story that they want to write who maybe feel like they can't speak for that person or don't have enough familiarity with the backgrounds to kind of get comfortable because if we were all writing stories we know like there wouldn't be Star Wars there wouldn't you know like there's so many amazing stories that have yet to be written we can't always we're comfortable with it My name is C.R. Shade Way and I'm an actor, dramaturg young playwright in the community and I also own my staff at company one and for me just when I look at the statistics when I look at all of the statistics and everything about well let's look at the the playwrights and the directors and everything like that I think what I'm kind of more interested in as an action mind and this is going to require a little bit more in-depth conversation but I'm really interested in the stories like it's hard for me like I feel like it's very much so in a vacuum like I wonder what these women are talking about are they talking about their jobs are they just talking about men all the time like I feel like that is such an essential point because I mean if a male playwright writes a play about complex women I'm all for this male playwright being produced you know so I think that that is an essential element and also to go back to the point about the mallots I forget made about the mallots that young female actors choose I think that is a great point and that's something I've actually never heard it close my mind so I also want people that encourage me to encourage young female actors to choose mallots they're not just about men they're about something else and to also as another action item about mentoring to ask these young playwrights of both genders to ask them to to be willing to explore the complexities of women I think that's such an important thing to do to just encourage them to really think about the story that they're telling not to tell them stories to write but to really really think about what's important and that way we start getting these young people already thinking about these complex issues and therefore over the years things will start to change more easily will have an even better selection a place to look at thank you well that's funny I thought Sherry was talking to me about choosing monologue so I think it's a good point for all women of all ages to be conscious of what we're choosing to speak about our stories I think maybe as an action we can look to not what might be non traditional for the theater community to get support like today in the Boston Commons there's a rally for jobs not jails and I think there's a lot of groups there that would like to go to the theater and would like to have their stories told and maybe becoming friendly with those groups and asking them to sponsor not economically but be a friend of the Friday night show and bring their folks and so they start coming and of course we can think about discounts or whatever we need to do to get them but creating new relationships with people that aren't traditionally coming to the theater is really important and I think the next link from that is inviting to the important conversations state reps we have on Cape Cod Sarah Peake is somebody super supportive Elizabeth Warren would like to hear from us and I know that there's a lot of times we get emails talk to your representatives do we call them do we say hey our theater has no money and we can't expect to run a theater on ticket sales and I'll add this as part of a connection to that action item earlier this week I was at a met put together by Mass Creative thanks Mass Creative speaking to the house representatives and state senators for the south end representative Byron Rushing was there and senator Sonia Chang Diaz was there and they both echoed exactly what you're talking about which is that it's a little connected to this which is the arts and the social justice organizations can do more work together than they can apart and if we're talking about gender parity that is a social justice issue and one of the things we haven't been traditionally very good at I think in our community is finding partners that are outside of the arts to carry our message with us as well as for us to advocate for their message that we're stronger together than apart the other thing that representative Rushing said which hit home for me was don't let the first time you reach out to your state representatives be an ask you know his point was get to know your representatives and your senators outside of an ask for money and they will remember you because nobody does that and if you can build a relationship with them outside of that and if you can maybe report some things that are going well for you as a sort of like this I'm in your district and this is awesome then when you have an issue they're more likely to listen so an action item I think this is really driven by Mass Creative and the ways in which Mass Creative has put the arts community in general in touch with our our state government and our city government so thanks to Mass Creative for that and I think that's something we can totally leverage as an action item I'm going to go here and then back here an action item is to apply the Bechdel test which is written by a graphic artist last name Bechdel the novel was called Dykes to Look Out for and the Bechdel test is a test commonly used in movies that it's two women talking to each other about something that is not a man applying this test to theater as well because it's shocking how many shows feature two women talking to each other and not just to a man about something that isn't a man that's sort of rare so using this test applied directly to theater would be a good action I don't know if anybody here remembers you probably do gentlemen the woman on top festival oh yeah let's bring it back you know I mean we have all these amazing people and let's bring the damn thing back we have the 10 minute play marathon we have the high school kids we have we can put this together and just yes yeah hold on one second so that's what I say and if anybody else wants to speak to that yes I was just going to say that the ICWP started women's festivals after the woman on top disappeared in 2003 and they've been continuing but they are very much below the radar they're basically attended by the family and friends of the people who have submitted work to the festival whose work is being done one of them is held right here every march in this space and there's another one that roams around Wellesley and Regis and various other places so that does come up but if you kind of look spread the word and look for it there's no reason it couldn't be a week or three weeks instead of one night or one afternoon always giving gifts so a good action thing would be to have your audiences or our audiences commit to giving only theater for the season so if you're a subscriber for every birthday anniversary on Facebook on that little thing when you say happy birthday give them Starbucks, Starbucks is rich enough give them tickets to the theater for whatever your local area Julie are you what's our timeline? It's five minutes of one so I would love to although we can keep talking and I'm so inspired I would love to wrap this up and get one last action step I'm going to do two things think about media we are the media because of social media this is a game changer and anyone who knows me or has taken a class with me knows that I'm going to preach it this has changed the world for the first decade of this century we have been playing with social media and in the last couple of years we understand the power if you don't understand Facebook, Twitter I'm still learning Instagram anyone is fine we will see I'm trying but let's talk about how to empower you to use it because it is a game changer you cannot ignore the conversation in social media we can storm the gates that way the summit in Washington DC it was the Twitter conversation that gave the subtext to the whole conversation you can't control a room anymore that's both terrifying and fabulous and that's what it should be I also do want to thank every single person in this room so many of you spoke a few of you didn't I really appreciate the men in this room being here and being allies and being part of this change although it is separated here discussions about equity or discussions about equity so there's a lot of conversation and this is the beginning and let's keep going 50-50 again should be the easy one which is why it blows my mind in 2014 that we need to have a town holiday Saturday morning but we did and we're changing the world and I went by show of hands because I'm going to remember you and then we're going to get you signed up who's well to be on the task force to make this happen alright this is good so you're going to come down, you're going to sign a piece of paper so I can note again or we're going to do something so I can send you an email I so appreciate that we're going to look back on today as the beginning of the new norm right thank you thank you one is that the video from today will be available on demand later this afternoon so if you have people who you wish would have been here, couldn't watch live they can catch it anytime secondly, are you going to send out notes to everyone who came, like what's the next big Joe Landcourt is taking notes we are going to disseminate those notes which will have action steps because this is a woman who is all about action and we are also will reframe the resource page on state source to be about the gender equity task force which has been created today and we will start making links available to all the information to this live stream, to other things and again crowd sourcing resources so that you can give them back to me so that we're missing things and this, we're going to disagree about some stuff that's cool, that's great, that's what theater should be right? and everybody gave their e-mails when they signed in they all signed in, but I'd love to know if you want to be part of the task force please, so Joan is making a sheet to sign and I've got some time this afternoon Lynn two quick things I have a whole series of monologue books, they're monologues for women monologues for women in color so maybe those can do the other thing is those social change organizations get them to have the keynotes at their conferences to be plays or dramatic readings instead of boring speeches and I'm happy to be a connect I'm also going to say one other thing always have a dramaturge on your team when you're trying to differentiate whoo! this was great so thank you so much putting the task force with