Introduction The Context for Ruhl and Her Contemporaries, or Women’s Playwriting: Strictly Prohibited in the New Century?

Abstract

For more than a decade, activists, writers, and critics have been calling for a change to unfair working conditions faced by contemporary female playwrights. During the 1998–99 theater season, the Guerilla Girls put stickers in the stalls of women’s restrooms in New York City theaters that had not produced a play by a woman that season—this included some of the city’s most well-regarded companies. The stickers proclaimed, “In this theater the taking of photographs, the use of recording devices, and the production of plays by women are strictly prohibited.” The Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett study “Report on the Status of Women: A Limited Engagement?” was released three years later, in January 2002. In their study, funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, Jonas and Bennett reported on the number of female playwrights at work in the American regional theater and in Off-Broadway theaters at several moments: from 1969 to 1975, the number was 7 percent; in the 1994–94 season, 17 percent of plays were written by women; in the 2000–2001 season, 20 percent “had a woman on the writing team”; and in the then current season of 2001–2, 17 percent of plays were written by women.1 They observed that in 1998 in Off-Off Broadway theaters the percentage of plays written by women neared 30 percent, but if one looked uptown to Broadway houses that same year, only 8 percent of dramas and 1 percent of musicals had female authors. While women’s voices might not have been literally prohibited in the years covered by the study, the statistics Jonas and Bennett gathered demonstrated that on American stages, these voices were rare. It was at roughly this time that Sarah Ruhl began her professional playwriting career.