The XX Factor: What women really think.

Girl-on-Girl Theatrical Action

Ann, I think you're right that the Times article on gender bias in the theater may have leaned a bit hard on the women-keeping-their-sisters-down aspect of the original study. (I also think you're right that the best thing we can do, as audience members, is actually get out there and support quality work by buying tickets.)

But I also think there are elements of this study that should give us pause. When Sands sent those scripts out to producers, directors, and literary managers, she found that both female and male respondents were likely to rate a play with a female writer's name attached to be of lower quality—not just less economically viable, but actually of lower artistic merit—than the same script with a man's name attached ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

Is There Gender Bias on Broadway?

It’s a catchy, catty angle, that’s for sure: An article in today’s New York Times about a recent study of potential gender bias in Broadway theater opens by suggesting that women playwrights do indeed have more trouble getting their work produced than men do—and that female artistic directors, producers, and literary managers “are the ones to blame.” That’s the conclusion purportedly arrived at by a precocious female Princeton undergrad, who undertook the study for her senior thesis in economics, and who recently gave a presentation to a mostly-female audience of playwrights and producers.

If you read further, and check out the thesis itself, it’s clear Emily Glassberg Sands says no such thing ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

David Edelstein on Hedda Gabler

Last year, Broadway got Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull and Katie Holmes in All My Sons. In this month's lady-from-Hollywood-takes-on-an-English-class-classic, we have Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, Boys on the Side) as Henrik Ibsen's notoriously difficult (in every way that phrase can possible be meant) Hedda Gabler. Hedda is one of the most iconic female roles in Western theater--Cate Blanchett came to New York with her own version just two years ago. Former Slate movie critic David Edelstein has a great essay in New York this week that asks, "Why, in spite of everything, is Hedda still the most popular girl in her class—and can anyone manage to get her right?"

"They all want to play Hedda, the female stars of stage and screen unjustly deprived of characters in the canon with real stature—despite the fact that she is a borderline psycho who resists our sympathy, and that Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is an obstacle course over a minefield: creaky, exposition-laden, rife with the potential for unintentional laughs, bound by conventions of drawing-room realism. Beside Hedda, Hamlet is a walk in the park: At least he can talk to the audience, establish a rapport—help us to, you know, relate to his predicament. Chill Hedda is forever out of reach."

Edelstein is rather kinder to Parker than Ben Brantley was in the New York Times ("her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who's given up cheerleading to be a goth because it's way cooler and it matches the place her mind's at now"). His ideal Hollywood Hedda, though, might surprise you:

"The only living English-speaking star who seems a perfect match is—laugh all you like—Angelina Jolie. I have no idea if she has the theatrical chops (movie stars who rule in close-up—like Julia Roberts—have a way of shrinking onstage), but Jolie has the size, the unyielding self-containment, the take-no-prisoners craziness, the will of a temperamental Greek goddess .... She could demonstrate, definitively, just as Ibsen did, why Hedda is the most alive anti-heroine in modern drama: It's what happens when you put a very large spirit in a very small box."