Playwright’s activism appeals to audiences
‘She has faith in women to carry a play, to be complex, flawed, funny and heroic.’ Lara Toner Haddock Austin Playhouse artistic director
Playwright Lauren Gunderson has had quite a good few years in Austin. From Capital T Theatre’s “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” in 2012 and Austin Playhouse’s “Silent Sky” in 2016 through to three productions of her shows in 2017 alone (Paradox Players’ “The Taming,” Shrewd Productions’ “The Revolutionists” and Austin Playhouse’s current staging of “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” co-written by Margot Melcon), Gunderson has been all over Austin stages.
She’s just as popular nationwide. According to American Theatre Magazine, Gunderson, who lives in San Francisco, is the most-produced playwright of the 2017-18 theater season, with 27 productions of her work throughout the country.
What’s particularly interesting about Gunderson’s work is that, rather than having an overarching style that dominates her writing, such as what’s seen with writers like Harold Pinter or David Mamet, each play has its own voice. What unites Gunderson’s plays, instead, is a dedication to strong female protagonists with distinct points of view.
According to Lara Toner Haddock, artistic director of Austin Playhouse and director of “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” this feminist thread is crucial to Gunderson’s work: “She has faith in women to carry a play, to be complex, flawed, funny and heroic. She’s an accessible playwright, and you invest in all of the characters, you root for them. So whether it’s the French Revolution, or scientific exploration, or reimagining Jane Austen, you always get to meet these amazing characters, these amazing women, and you’re delighted to spend two hours learning their story.”
In large part, this is what makes Gunderson’s work so popular for Austin producers and directors. There is no dearth of extremely talented actresses in town, yet theater has long favored strong male leads, with fewer juicy roles for women. Not so with Gunderson, whose work provides nuanced characterizations of independent women in situations both ordinary and extraordinary.
Gunderson says her plays “encourage strong feminism and diversity. There are a lot of female actors that don’t get the amount of roles that men do. They, like myself, are sick of it and have had to prove how a woman’s story can be a universal story.”
Indeed, she hopes that her popularity isn’t so much a symbol of her own success but more a sign of a larger political movement in American theater, “one that is more ready to focus on strange and strong stories of proud women, ready to embrace nonwhite stories and actors, and one that is unafraid of rebelliously funny and political plays.”
Shannon Grounds, Shrewd Productions’ artistic director, directly relates the political aspects of Gunderson’s work to the playwright’s popularity. In regards to Shrewd’s production of “The Revolutionists,” which told the stories of four women in revolutionary-era France, Grounds says, “Coming when it did, especially after the 2016 election, I think it really struck a chord for women in Austin — women who were hungry to see a story that mirrored their resistance, their