Where women hold centre stage
New Works by Diverse Women presents five readings within Fringe Festival
In a 2014 study, Equity In Theatre noted that Canada’s professional theatre industry has not yet surpassed the 35-per-cent employment marker for those who identify as women. The Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Annual Theatre Production Survey of the 2013/14 season revealed that of 812 productions across the country, 63 per cent were written by men, 22 per cent by women and 15 per cent by mixed gender partnerships. One can only imagine what the figures look like when these results are broken down to reflect involvement of marginalized or minority groups.
Yet women constitute 49 per cent of the theatregoing audience and constitute the majority across all demographic categories.
The one place where this statistical evidence gets turned on its head is in the Fringe Festival circuit. In 2016, 66.67 per cent of the applications to the festival came from women and nearly 50 per cent of artists who appeared in last year’s festival identified as women. It’s a profound difference and one that the Fringe Festival, Playwrights Guild of Canada and Vancouver’s Ruby Slippers Theatre have set out change with the Annual Advance Theatre: New Works By Diverse Women staged readings series, which is a five-play festival that takes place during the Vancouver Fringe Festival.
“In 2015, I had been sitting on yet another diversity panel and just came to the conclusion that I wasn’t interested in talking about it anymore and I wanted to do something,” said Ruby Slippers’ Diane Brown. “I talked to the Playwrights Guild, then I approached (previous) Fringe director David Brown about it and, within 24 hours of the initial idea, we had a five-play festival happening.”
Now firmly established, the event has become a major draw and given 15 different plays exposure that they may very well never have had the opportunity to receive otherwise. Ruby Slippers curates the selection, giving priority to “diversity of all kinds (age, cultural background, sexual orientation, physical ability).”
“We got over 100 submissions from all across Canada this year, so we are already expanding the festival because there is such a huge demand besides a huge need,” she said. “There are people lining up with standing room only for a staged reading series. It’s Ruby Slippers Theatre’s baby and the Fringe jumped on board because they have always shared our values about diversity.”
Since its founding 28 years ago, Ruby Slippers Theatre has pursued a mandate to present diverse female talent on stage. In 2017, Brown received the Bra d’Or Award from the Women’s Caucus of the Playwrights Guild of Canada for her work advancing Canadian woman playwrights. For the company’s coming season, all of the productions are from women playwrights. This is an incredibly rare undertaking for a professional theatre company.
“Mainstream professional theatre programmers, mainly a bunch of middle-aged white guys, don’t want to take box office risk and women and diversity are still considered box office risk,” said Brown. “So you find a much larger female presence at the Fringe where there is no box office risk because of how the event operates. But we believe in hitting the nail smack on the head in response to this massive void and proving that there is talent so deep and so important that it should be produced beyond the Fringe milieu.”
In association with Touchstone Theatre and Diwali in B.C., playwright Pamela Mala Sinha’s Happy Place is being produced in October (Oct. 20 to 29 at the Firehall Arts Centre). Sinha’s play is in the 2017 Advance Theatre reading series.
“We’re putting our money where our mouth is and we are hoping that others will see that there is no box office risk here,” she said. “This isn’t the future, it’s the present. Just do it.”
This year’s Advance Theatre: New Works By Diverse Women includes the following five selections. Jumping Ship by Marcia Johnson; Go, No, Go by Natalie Frijia; Hidden Memories by Lillian Nakamura Maguire; Sex, Drugs and Age: The Last Taboo and Happy Place by Pamela Mala Sinha. If the festival’s vision is true, expect to see these coming to a theatre near you.