Does having a woman Run the Show mean that women writers will be better represented on stage? You be the judge. Here’s a snippet from a live interview with the male Artistic Director of one of the most prestigious theatres in New York City.
The interviewer asked the Artistic Director why his upcoming season had no women playwrights represented. And the Artistic Director replied, “it’s my job to give my audience the best plays I can find — those plays are mostly written by men.” Luckily for him nobody in the audience had a rotten tomato to throw!
Cut to Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles, cited by Time Out LA, Conde Nast and LA Stage Times as one of the best theaters in the city. At Bootleg two women run things and in the last year they have produced more plays generated by women writers than some theaters will produce in a decade.
Alicia Hoge Adams is the Artistic Director, and Co-Founder. I asked her the following questions:
SUSAN: What is your goal as a woman artist?
ALICIA: My goal as a woman artist is selfish in a way — it’s to try to find the courage and be brave enough to fulfill my own potential. If you know you have something inside of you that needs to be expressed – I want to be able to express those things for my own happiness and for my own sanity — I know I will not like myself if I don’t find the bravery to do this.
SUSAN: An Artistic Director has to deal with so much more than art. And I know you are a wonderful actress — why not just do that?
ALICIA: I have watched men feel proud enough of themselves to be creators. I am not really just an actress. I also want to express my own ideas to people. So I recently created (with my colleagues at Bootleg) “A Fried Octopus”, my first effort at authorship and collaboration to create a new work. It was difficult, scary and the most worthwhile thing I have done since my last child was born.
SUSAN: Do you think women telling stories in their own voice is important?
ALICIA: Yes. I think that women have just begun to find a voice – there have always been women artists, but there is still a huge reservoir of untapped women’s voices around the world. We are half the population, if our voices are not heard, we miss out on half the perspectives of the human race.
After speaking with Alicia, I spoke to Bootleg Co-Founder and Producing and Managing Director, Jessica Hanna.
SUSAN: What is your goal as a woman theater artist?
JESSICA: I am a theater artist because I love to tell stories in a live setting.
SUSAN: Why do you work at BOOTLEG instead of being freelance?
JESSICA: I do work freelance but my primary goal at Bootleg is to have a space that significantly increases the number of LA artists who get to tell the stories they want to tell.
SUSAN: Do you think women telling stories in their own voice is important?
JESSICA: Absolutely. Because women have a different POV and I think having women characters from a male POV is interesting but I also think it has to be balanced – more now than ever before because women are being heard more. So it’s up to us to start talking.
***
It is not always true that a woman in charge will be sensitive to giving other women a chance. It is not always true that a man in charge will be misogynistic.
But it is true that we have the right to be in charge of things at least 54% of the time. That’s our percentage of the human population. We all know women who hate other women, who are jealous of their “sister’s” successes. But there are also women (and yes, men too) who see the need for new kinds of stories told on stage, and on screens, large and small.
I am so grateful to Bootleg Theater for being stalwart supporters of my playwriting, and for putting my work on the same stage as the other women writers they give a voice to. They believed there were plays by women that were every bit as good as the plays written by the Tony’s, Donald’s, and David’s. For me, and for a lot of talented women in Los Angeles theater, it does matter who runs the show!