Harvard detractors call on actress Kunis to turn down award

BOSTON — A Harvard University theater group with an all-male cast is under fire from critics who say it should allow women on stage and they’re asking actress Mila Kunis to take up their cause.

Detractors are calling on the Hasty Pudding troupe to start casting women and to update sexist portrayals of women.

The That ’70s Show star was honored on Thursday as Woman of the Year by Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The group calls Kunis one of Hollywood’s “most sought after, vivacious, and engaging actresses”.

The Ukraine-born actress earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role in 2010’s Black Swan. She also starred in Bad Moms and is the voice of Meg Griffin on Family Guy.

But Liz Kantor, a senior studying molecular and cellular biology, who auditioned for this year’s show, said earlier: “It would be a wonderful thing for her to not accept this award, to say this is gender inequality.

“There are women on campus who are more than willing to take advantage of these opportunities, yet they’re still being excluded.”

Hasty Pudding is known for bawdy comedic revues that feature men in drag playing female characters, a longstanding tradition in the group, which says it was formed in 1795.

But more recently, women have sought acting roles in the student-written parodies, which are shown in Massachusetts, New York and Bermuda and have helped launch careers for former students ranging from Jack Lemmon to Broadway composer Larry O’Keefe.

Kantor is among about 20 women who auditioned for this year’s show as a form of protest, an idea started by two women in 2015. Each year, the women have promptly been cut.

Women can instead take behind-the-scenes jobs, including writing the shows or working on the technical crew, the group says on its website.

Students on Hasty Pudding’s executive board, which is led by a woman and includes several female members, declined to comment. Overall, about half the 50 students involved with the group are women.

The troupe has been criticized for its all-male cast before, including in a 2016 petition from dozens of former members.

Its shows take cues from the Shakespearean era, when men played all roles. Harvard itself admitted only male undergraduates until a partial merger with Radcliffe College in 1977.

The Man and Woman of the Year awards precede the kickoff of the annual revue, which includes more than 30 performances in February and March.