imbalance

The more (of us) you know…

When you really start looking for something you start see it everywhere.

This is how I’ve been feeling the past few days as I draw my attention fully focused onto the topic of gender parity in the arts.

When you really start looking for something you start seeing it everywhere.

I’ve had more substantive conversations and been struck by more observations about this in the last 48 hours than I probably have in the last 48 days. And that’s really saying something, because I think about this a lot. But what’s most interesting and exciting? I’ve also felt freer and more invested in really trying to articulate the difficult honest version of my thoughts. I haven’t dumbed it down. I haven’t tempered my real feelings for the sake of the easier chit-chat. I’ve really tried to say what I believe and then listen back in a way that is open, non-presumptive and curious.

I want to try and capture some of those observations and conversations. I feel like talking in generalities gets us only so far. I really want to share and discuss real world examples here in Philly and figure out how we as a community feel about particular choices. I think this is the best way to really get into the meat of the matter. But I am also cognizant that part of creating safe space is making sure people don’t feel like they might say something to me and then see it online without having been consulted or that I’m putting really specific thoughts about their company in the public eye without being invited to the table.

So I’m gonna work a bit on those writings and I’m going to send them to the people they are in reference to, and my hope is that those folks will not only consent for me to share my thoughts, but possibly get in on the action.

So for today, instead, I’m going to start with what I know: female directors.

One of the things I catalogued last year was the number of women directing for companies in Philly. Female actresses and playwrights didn’t have it easy, but female directors (most especially at larger sized companies) had a rough go of it, especially if you factor out directors who occupy multiple directing slots in a season.

Part of the problem, I think, is a chicken and egg syndrome. More guys are directing which reinforces the idea of the pool of directors being more guy heavy generally and so when AD’s think about bringing in outside directors their first instinct is likely one of the people already visibly working.

Elissa Goethschius started an awesome thing on her website in which she literally just catalogs names of female directors. There is no plug or assessment of each particular person, just a list that shows the sheer size of the population that a person in a position of choice might choose from.

So in that vein I’d like to put out into the Philly arts ether a list, as comprehensive as I can muster of female directors/lead artist types (cause sometimes that distinction is fuzzy) who are working in theater (though again that line gets blurry) that I know of who you might consider to direct the next time you’re considering…

Abigail Adams

Krista Apple

Gedney Barclay

Samantha Bellomo

Suzana Berger

Deb Block

Cara Blouin

Carly Bodnar

Tina Brock

Karen DiLossi

Anne Marie Cammarato

Liz Carlson

Jen Childs

Candace Cihocki

Jess Conda

Ginger Dayle

Emmanuel Delpech

Amber Emory

Lisa Jo Epstein

Lee Etzold

Rebecca May Flowers

Charlotte Ford

Kate Galvin

Allison Garrett

Tamanya Garza

Arianna Gass

Brenna Geffers

Anisa George

Karen Getz

Amanda Grove

Jill Harrison

Allison Heishman

Jenna Horton

Candra Kennedy

Maura Krause

Kathyrn MacMillan

Manon Manavit

Deb Marcucci

Sarah Mitteldorf

Maria Möller

Sebastienne Mundheim

Gigi Naglak

Charlotte Northeast

Megan O’Brien

Erlina Ortiz

Malika Oyetimein

Michelle Pauls

Lizzy Pecora

Martina Plag

Harriet Power

Nora Quinn

Erin Reilly

Gwen Rooker

Jen Rose

Sarah Sanford

Chelsea Sanz

Rebecca Schaffer

Jessica Schwartz

Joanna Settle

Micki Sharpe

Catharine Slusar

Amy Smith

Eva Steinmetz

Elizabeth Stevens

Sam Tower

Meg Trelease

Mary Tuomanen

Daniella Vinitski

Meghann Willians

Becky Wright

Blanka Zizka

And of course me, Adrienne Mackey.

That’s it for today.

PS – I know there are more. Let me know and I’ll update. Also, I’ve only included in town folks for now, though I know there are many who work in Philly but may not permanently reside here.

Talking about talking

So I’ve been thinking a lot in the hours since my last post about how to have this conversation.

I’ve been thinking about how we can best begin to discuss issues of unequal representation in a way that both is honest and straightforward and is also productive and provokes dialogue instead of defensiveness?

In other words, I want to start by talking about how we talk about this.

I find it easy to provoke and push when the target seems large and imposing. I find strength in feeling myself becoming a David in the face of a Goliath. My guess, without having been there, is that this was the awesome power of what happened at #thesummit. It was a moment where the folks on the stage, the ones with some degree of sway and power and perhaps a degree of unknowing complacency, had to take in the might of opinion and feeling of the voices sitting on the other side.

But in a business as tiny as this, in a community where community is key, when networking and positive relationships determine your ability to get a job or a grant next week, month or year, it is easy in the micro-moments of inequity to excuse the tiny things. Too often any one moment or choice or thought seems isolated or small enough to swallow. And as the distance between we and the “giants” gets smaller, the harder it is to see them as the Goliaths they once were. Little things amass because it’s sometimes hard to know what is and isn’t a battleground.

And let’s also point out that these are really hard conversations to have.

Because so often I see an cry to battle dissolve when it has to translate into the daily implementation of such ideas on the nitty gritty detail level. Based on the conversation in our few meetings of the Awesome Lady Squad I hear female artists find the balance of when and how and where to try and bring these issues up the biggest barrier to change. “Do I really want to make this tiny line or scene or interaction a soapbox?” “Do I want to be that actress today, tomorrow, through this whole process.” “Am I really seeing this or am I being overly sensitive?”

It’s exhausting constantly trying to parsing it out in the moment.

And even if you are sure and you do know it’s an issue, it is so so so so so so so much more difficult to say things that are tricky and sticky to people we know and care about. It sucks to be a watchdog. To be a nag. To feel like you’re stopping everyone’s fun. To put people on their guard. It can feel like the opposite of the artistic impulse, where we want to feel open and accepting of each other. And I think it’s so hard because to have that conversation is also to acknowledge that the ills of our culture, the biases and darknesses that float around us all the time, also make their way into our brains. That we are sometimes making choices with little pushes from beliefs or stereotypes we’d never support if we said them out loud.

I wrote a while back about a study that showed how academic scientists displayed preferential treatment of men when filling a position for a lab manager.

In that post I explained how candidates in the study were never seen in person and scored based on identical applications save for the gendered first name of the potential employee. I underscored that this bias was shown in both men and women assessing the candidate. And I made a particular point of noting that none of the decision makers felt their choice had been affected by the applicant’s gender in any way. They all felt they were being totally gender objective in their assessments.

In other words, you can display bias and stigma and stereotype even when you don’t subscribe to them, EVEN when YOU are the negative recipient of them.

It is scary to think that stuff is in us. Even scarier to come to terms with the fact that it can affect our actions despite the best of our intentions. And when confronted with it, defense is natural. From the outside it seems ignorant and bigoted. But my guess is that the real cause is that no one wants to find in themselves dark things they didn’t ask to be in there. So sometimes it’s easier to believe they aren’t.

And it is here I want to point out the latent superpower we are missing: Yes, this is hard. Yes, It is tricky to talk David to David rather than David to Goliath. But. The closer we are, the more potential impact we are likely to have. The closer we are to them, the more likely we can get people to let that guard down. The closer we are to the offending source, the more likely we are to find a safe space to excise these demons with their hosts intact. And if we can win them to our side we grow our army of soldiers. The less it looks like a war and the more it looks like a conversion, I think the faster the battle will be over. If we have to kill them all, we may still do it, but I bet we lose much more time and resource and energy.

So I think we should begin with two assumptions, even if it may seem idealistic or naïve:

1) No one intentionally wants to make harmful choices to women artists.

2) Everyone imbibes some level cultural crap that will predispose him or her to doing so.

So when we look at the choices of a company, or another artist (or in our own work for that matter) and we see something that makes us feel squicky, our goal should be to remind them of #1 and help them see where they might be displaying the crap of #2 (pun by the way, totally intended).

To do that I think we start by asking these questions:

Is it conscious? – i.e. Does the person or company know and realize what they’re doing? Do they identify their behavior as a problem or are they truly unaware of it and its effect?

And

Is it conscionably contextualized? – i.e. Have they passively presented potential problematic material/decisions or have they taken steps (even if imperfectly) to justify them through dialogue or contextualization? In other words, do they balance a guy heavy Glengarry Glen Ross with another play with mostly female cast? Do they perform a problematic cannon text in context of a conversation series about historical representation of women in history to point out the potential in conflict with the morals we have today?

How we assess the answers to these questions will help set the stage for the modes through which we express our concerns and I think also help start to identify the solutions. And in tailoring it in this way, I think we get closer to coming to real understanding of what’s at play in each specific case. Because the devils really are in these details. And if we don’t treat all offenses alike, I think we’re likelier to find specific tailored solutions, likelier to find and commit the people who are ready and wanting to change but may not yet be brave enough or know how on their own to do so.

Dispatches from the Awesome Lady Squad #4: On the topic what we’d like to see instead

Yesterday I reviewed the last meeting of the most Awesome-est of Lady Squads and I ended with a section called:

What we’d like to see instead

This section for me is key.

I believe in the power of talking and sharing and creating a sense of community in perspective. But I value even more the ability to take the power of that sense of community and perspective and identify problems and find awesome ways to solve them. Tackling the issues we identify, this is for me what elevates support into a sense of empowerment. It’s the thing that brings me back to my super lofty goal for us Awesome Ladies: To make Philadelphia a model city for how women work in the arts. Some part of that will be discussion of the problems we face. But I hope a much bigger part is piece by piece finding concrete projects to start tackling them.

And I find that the easiest way to get to that new place is to have a vision of what it might be. So in identifying how to best channel the building energy of the Awesome Lady Squad I started with a line from the “What we’d like to see instead” category and coupled it with a concrete projects to help start to accomplish it.

This is the list I came up with:

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– A re-framing of how we look at each other as female artists. Replacing the model of scarcity and competition to a model of abundance.

A project that could help us get there:

– Create a concise and clear code of ethics for how the Awesome Lady Squad. Inspired by the Core Principles of Artist U this document should contain clear and simple guidelines that underpin the way Awesome Lady Squad members promise to work with each other and the world around them. It is an agreement that details the ways we can model the behavior we want to see around us.

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– More models of women in roles of leadership and success in the arts. Seeing female artists successful in their practices. A commitment by established artists to identify and foster talent in emerging female art makers.

Two projects that could help us get there:

– Foster an Awesome Lady Squad Recruit! This could include: creating an survey for young artists to talk about interest areas that is then used to pair them with artists and administrators already working in the field, “Take an Emerging Lady to work day” in which young creators get to shadow women doing their awesome professional thing in action, and/or an “Ask the Lady Squad Anything” advice column in which new Squad members send their questions to the email list in search of advice.

– An Awesome Lady Arts Administrators caucus. Bring together women who already get to make choices about the work they make and produce (as self producers or as a member of a larger company) and talk about how they can use that leverage for positive gain.

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– Skills to handle tough conversations about gender parity. A way to talk about this that doesn’t become apologetic or defensive. Something to say when I sense people starting to roll their eyes.

– The ability to say no to a project that doesn’t conform to my moral code.

Three projects that could help us get there:

– A “manifesto” of the AwLaSq that details in a fuller form the believes and aims of its members. Defining your core principles specifically will help when you have to articulate them to others

– A workbook or simple writing project that helps codify and set bars for situations you will and won’t tolerate artistically that you can come back to when trying to decide if you want to take part in a new project.

– Conversation toolkits and practice. Just like a business negotiation, knowing that you’ve done this thing before is half the battle. This task force will identify such potentially sticky moments and help craft language and talking points that are clear and concise. It will also identify the potential counter arguments and possible responses. These “toolkits” could be downloadable online. We could also organize a session where people simulate these conversations with others coaching from the outside so that there is a low stakes situation to practice so they are more confident and comfortable in the moment.

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– Female directors, designers, administrators and actors represented in equal numbers.

A project that could help us get there:

– Create a symbol of Awesome Lady Approval for arts organizations that meet a certain minimum set of Awesome Lady requirements. Before minimum wage was mandated if you were an employer willing to pay a certain wage you could display a certain color flag. What if Philly had a stamp that you could put in your program, on your door, in your marketing material that indicated that your company had a commitment to women in the artistic community? Using this positive reinforcement, we could also find ways to make sure our audience bases understood what this symbol means and to help promote the theaters that make this commitment.

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– More awareness of the size and scope of the problem.

Two projects that could help us get there:

– Create an Awesome Lady Squad shirt. Make it something awesome that you will definitely want to share with the world. Then make a promise that any time you wear it and someone sees it and asks about it you stop and take a second to share a bit about the vision of the squad. Possible offshoots:

Use any proceeds to fund childcare at future Awesome Lady Squad events
Organize a city-wide Awesome Lady Squad “shirt-in” day to show the size and reach of all the awesome ladies that live and work here

– A marketing effort in conjunction with our other projects (like the gender report card or Awesome Lady approval symbol) to help reach not only fellow creative sector workers but audiences as a whole. Use the model of the DC based female playwright initiative to create powerful marketing leverage that makes it Awesome and sexy to be a part of the movement.

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– A genuine curiosity in discussions we have with people about these issues. Figuring out what’s really motivating the choices that undercut female artists and getting at them. Not assuming the worst of our peers even if they display behavior we don’t approve of.

A project that could help us get there:

– Create a “Gender Parity Report Card”:

Develop a set of standards as a Squad for what poor, mediocre and outstanding work at creating equal opportunity for Awesome Ladies looks like.
Gather measurable, concrete, data to evaluate artistic producers in Philly and then create an awesome and well-articulated assessment of that data we share with these companies along with an invitation for dialogue about the results.
The key here is to find out 1) if theaters know their own stats in this regard 2) if there are trends that might indicate a lack of opportunity for women if they are willing to dialogue about how and why such trends occur 3) if they are willing to make a commitment to change

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– A way to share these issues with my male colleagues. A means by which they can help support these issues when they see them.

A project that could help us get there:

– Bring together an Awesome Lady Squad support team: Set up a meeting that includes a discussion forum specifically for guys who think the Awesome Lady Squad is awesome. Talk about ways that they can become Awesome Lady Allies and strategize about means through which they can help. Give them some of the tools we offer the core members so that they can go and spread the Awesome word.

And finally:

The “What we’d like to see instead”

– Funding targeted for women that doesn’t carry a social change element.

– Non-traditional funding opportunities and alternate way to fund and produce work

– Subversion of some of the power systems that currently undercut the issues we’ve discussed. Starting a conversation on “this is the way that funding has worked” and “here’s how it might work in the future”

A project that could help us get there:

– An Awesome Lady Grants and Funding Task Force that:

Meets and discusses what might be problematic about certain kinds of funding structures
Strategizes about ways to approach funders about these concerns
Envisions and articulates the kinds of funding we would wish in Philadelphia for the future and shares this vision with the funding community
Works together to try and brainstorm and create alternatives to the current structures

These are what I envision as the first tangible steps towards seeing the “What we’d like to see instead.” And over the next year, they’ll be the ways the Lady Squad starts gathering energy and focus around all those things we discussed.

The next step is to figure out which of these takes our energy and focus first.

If you have thoughts about what should happen first, let me know.

If you have expertise in one of these areas and want to help out, let me know.

If you have a lot of passion about one of the items and want to get in on the ground floor, let me know.

If you don’t really care where we get started but are interested in helping to organize or send emails or type minutes or whatever just let me at it, let me know too.

And soon, let’s say in the next couple weeks, we’ll roll out the first phase of one or more of these…

Until then…

Dispatches from the Awesome Lady Squad, #2: In which the ladies plan to meet for a second time

I’ve been feeling lighter lately.

I’ve been walking around with just a bit more bounce in my step.

I’ve been feeling, well there’s just no other word for it, rather awesome indeed.

I believe I’ve been feeling that way because for the first time in a long time it seems like change is imminent. Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about finding my place as an artist in the world. I’ve worried about whether I was doing the right thing. I’ve worried about whether a choice I made would get me on the right path. I’ve worried if I’d ever land in the place where I was supposed to be. But you know what? I think I’m finally, finally, finally, realizing that the whole idea that there is a right place, that there is one just path, that there’s even a standard of measurement that is anything close to absolute is a load of crap. And that realization is part of what I think is making me feel so awesome in particular about the Awesome Lady Squad.

After the last squadron meeting I felt the positive power of defining a new perspective. About refuting the idea that there is an absolute when it comes to what’s “normal or that there is a fixed set of disadvantages and that there are givens that stay given about the way that things work.

I thought about the way I run my theater company: as a hybrid artist somewhere between non-profit and individual who is able to make the kind of creative work that doesn’t fit easily into categories and still manage to pay my collaborators the same level as many mid-sized theaters in town. I’m pretty sure that if I’d asked my mentors first coming out of school if such a set up would be possible, they’d have all said no. My guess is that at that time they would have told me there wasn’t funding or structure or opportunity for such a different way of doing things.

At the time, there probably wasn’t an obvious route towards what I wanted.

Now, there is. But that’s only because I found it.

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2013 fretting about whether it’s possible to change how women are treated in the arts. And as one of the attendees from the last meeting said, it’s a feeling that has taken up a lot of space in my life. I’ve felt mad that things aren’t the way they should be. But at this moment, I’m a lot more interested in putting that energy towards actually getting them so they are.

Right now, the route to doing that isn’t obvious.

But after we do it, other cities can look to Philly and see that it was there all along.

The resolution I want you to join me on in 2014 is this: you have to know – not desire, not wish, not hope – but deep down truly know that there is a future world where the Awesome Lady Squad doesn’t need exist because we’ve solved all the problems we’ve identified. And we need to know that it’s going to become reality, and soon. Gathering people and realizing that you are not alone, that your perspective is one that is shared by many, that your view of the world need not be rage-inducing or isolating, that you can indeed find a space where every person around you also starts from the same set of ethical givens, this is the first step. It’s an important one. Because it’s the one where we all have to stop and say, hey, the things that I disagree with are actually NOT truth. They are NOT givens. Not in this room. Not right now.

And once we carve out a little bit of space to stake our the Awesome Lady Nation, we’ll be able to invite the rest of the world in as citizens. One by one, we’ll make them all denizens of our Awesome new world.

Charting that course is already underway and you can check out our first scouting mission here. On Sunday January 26^th from 7 – 9pm at the Arts Parlor (1170 S Broad) we walk just a little further down that road.

We’ll use the same format from last time, me asking some big questions, and you guys sharing your big answers. For a few hours in a few square feet of space we’ll create a world where people believe in equity and fairness and respect for female creators. And if we can make it true in a room at the Parlor for a few hours at a time, there MUST be a way to expand that perspective, that new sense of reality past that room and out into the world.

Hope to see you there.

An as always, thanks for being awesome.

– A

Resolution for 2014: Form the Awesome Lady Squad

Happiest in the new year Swim Pony friends.

Can I share some stuff I realized in 2013?

I spent a ton of time this fall teaching. In so doing I realized I’ve been rather taken with many of the young women that I’ve worked with.

I also met a bunch of young female artists who are trying to get their feet wet in the Philly scene. In doing so I realized that I wanted them to get their artistic voices out there and that it’s possible I could make that easier.

And as you likely know if you’ve landed here, I’ve been writing over the past year about women in theater and what I see happening and how it’s been making me feel and think.

And the previous two combined with this last thing has brought me to reflect in this, a newly formed 2014, back on my own early career. It occurred to me that all of my mentors were men. That one of the things that it took me a really long time to find was other female art makers a bit further along in their career. That it wasn’t until I made a show that was an explicitly all female undertaking that I really felt like I’d found a cadre of female voices to share the female art-making experience with. It made me think about the fact that while I appreciate the necessity of talking and discussing and highlighting inequity, I’m really most interesting in figuring out how to actually do something about it.

Many of you who read this blog have had smart insightful things to say. And in writing so much lately about women in the arts I’ve wanted a way to pool thinking about this topic, especially with those just coming into the field.

I don’t know what form yet this will take – drop in sessions where young female creators can meet and ask questions, round tables on topics that I’ve been discussing, a small talk from a female artist each month or all of the above – but it feels like something on the once a month scale would be a project I’d be interested in and have the life space for.

So as a resolution for the new year, I’m starting by collecting some female folks on Tuesday Jan 7th at 10am at the Arts Parlor (1170 S Broad) from a variety of career stages, to ask what they wish they’d had then or what they wish they could have now as a female artist, things they’d like to see different and what might be useful to explore in an open source format. So feel free to pass this along to folks of any variety of career stage, I’m interested in getting a variety of perspective. I’d especially love to get any students, young creators, newer female artists, to hear their perspectives on entering the artistic workforce now.

Y’all know I slant towards the generative side of the arts but I’m interested in a solving a variety of problems, so come with whatever you want to talk about.

If you’re interested and want in, come, and if you can hit me up first so I have a sense for numbers: swimponypa@gmail.com

If you can’t come, but want to throw a few cents in, post your thoughts below on topics for this or future discussions…

I’ll be in touch about this again soon.

Thanks,
A

The Ballad of John and Jen

When I started writing on this blog, it felt like I was pouring out a lot of the things that I had been feeling for a long time. The first posts were thoughts and arguments I’d been having a lot – internally with myself and externally with others – and were pretty well formed in terms of their reasoning and logic by the time they went onto (virtual) paper.

In the last few months, however, things have slowed. That’s partly (perhaps largely) due to my busier schedule of work. But I think it’s also because I’ve started to dig deeper into some of these things, I’ve begun to get at the stuff under that stuff. I’ve started to get at the things way down that one may not really realize. When you really start to pull apart your choices you start to see the unnammables that work on you, the things that you didn’t totally even realize were there. When you get down into the real muck of it, this stuff is less formed and harder to parse out. You start to pull apart shit that is often much much trickier to unravel and reason through.

I think this might be where some of the real scary stuff is.

I think this is where the less polite stuff is.

I think this might be where people could get a little upset.

But I think this might be where some of the real work is. And I think this might be the place where you start to tackle the issues that really might make a difference. All of which is to say that this post is coming back around to some of the women in theater/gender parity stuff. This is a first step at trying to dig into the muck.

Let’s begin with the truth: we have some major work to do. Even those of us with the best intentions aren’t really fixing this problem. Those of us with cursory intention are likely perpetuating it. We can blame the theaters that continue to produce plays with way imbalanced seasons. We can bemoan the writers that continue to create the plays. We can lament the market for having a glut of women. We can do all these things. But it isn’t going to get us anywhere. And if we actually want to get somewhere we have some “money where our mouths are” choices to make.

Backing up a bit: I had an argument back in mid-April, right around the time I wrote this post slamming a few Philly reviewers for their presentation of women in Shakespearean roles. This argument, one that had seven months ago is still picking at me and has been ever since I had it. It would randomly surface in my head in the middle of rehearsal, while driving, watching TV, I just couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let it go because at the time I had it I was trying and failing to say something, something that I felt with incredible force and vigor and anger and fullness, something that felt like it implicated me and in the way I make choices about my work, and frustratingly was also something I felt totally unable to articulate.

The argument was a sweeping one, the kind that starts with a couple offhand comments and ends up gobbling up an entire afternoon. It was the kind of argument you can only have with someone that you really trust, because you actually start to uncover defenses. It was the kind of argument where you talk about the things you believe deep deep down inside about yourself and the world around you. And my sole caveat here is that it’s totally impossible to try and reconstruct all the things we said. But basically, it came down to this hypothetical:

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

In the moment of the argument, it felt like I had no choice but to argue for the latter. It felt like a mission from on high. Like my entire life depended on making the case for that female playwright. That there was something deeply stacked against her. That I was the only way she was going to get a chance and if I couldn’t find a way to make that choice seem reasonable and obvious to my argument partner that she and no female writer after her would ever get it.

Which of course I failed to do.

And of course there are (and were) many reasons one could counter the position I took. Rational, reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful positions that we went back and forth and back and forth about. I almost ended up in tears because sitting there I felt so torn between the opposite side’s reasonableness and some kind of irrational deep down feeling that said there was something very wrong about taking a side other than the one I was on.

Neither of us could be moved. We left it unfinished.

But as I said, this question and the debate that ensued has continued to stick, continued to hang out in the back of my mind, needing to come to completion. It’s been this nagging incomplete thing trying to resolve itself for seven months now.

Over time, small details begin to accrue:

An review for a work of my own in which women played “men’s” roles

Writings from the dear Katherine Fritz

A book on the virtues of affirmative action

And then finally this: a study in PNAS about gender in the sciences that both control for and show statistically validated evidence of bias from Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues at Yale. It was this last one cracked something open that I can hopefully finally start to put into words.

Here’s an intro from Sean Carroll’s blog for Discover:

Academic scientists are, on average, biased against women.

I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.

What the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

With me so far? I swear, this comes back to the arts.

So half of the applications were Johns and half of them Jennifers. What the findings showed were that the faculty members rated John significantly more “competent and hireable” than an identical female applicant named Jen. These participants also selected John to receive a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to this male applicant.

And the real kicker? It didn’t matter if the faculty member was male or female. Both were “equally likely to exhibit bias” against Jennifer and viewed her as “less competent.”

A depressing graph:

How about another?

In her great Scientific American blog post about this study, Ilana Yurkiewicz appropriately writes:

Whenever the subject of women in science comes up, there are people fiercely committed to the idea that sexism does not exist. They will point to everything and anything else to explain differences while becoming angry and condescending if you even suggest that discrimination could be a factor. But these people are wrong. This data shows they are wrong.

The thing that stuck with me about this study, maybe even more so than the disturbing results themselves, is that, as Yurkiewicz points out, the scientists didn’t view gender as a factor in their decision-making. They thought they were using objective data for their assessments – rationally reasoned, non-gendered arguments – to determine the strengths of this particular candidate for this particular job.

I’d bet my house that were I to get into argument with those interviewers of Timon of Athens that the points they would have countered with would been rationally reasoned, non-gendered arguments. And my point is that just because you don’t obviously act like a sexist or consciously espouse anti-female philosophy doesn’t mean it isn’t working on you. And even the benefit of experiencing that disadvantage is no shield from inflicting it on others.

Does anyone want to guess about whether I think this pattern might be found in other contexts?

If it can happen so sneakily in something as cut and dry as the representation of skills on a job application with the exact same credentials but a difference of –en versus -ohn at the end of a J…

If there are forces that bias us against thinking that a woman is as capable and intelligent as a man in doing a job in such a carefully crafted scenario of objectivity…

If that can happen in a field whose express purpose is to remove bias from its methodology…

How can we possibly imagine that we can create object assessments in all the incredible number of variances and nuances and details about what makes a better work of art?

So of course if you knew for one hundred percent sure that you were absolutely judging the work objectively then yes yes yes yes yes you should absolutely pick the “better” play. But I what I’ve come to finally articulate these seven months later is that I just don’t believe there is anyone in the working world that can honestly say that they can do that.

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

The problem isn’t your answer to this question. The problem is that this is how the question seems to always be framed. And I don’t buy this scenario is really the one that any of us is objectively encountering.

So when I hear “It just turned out that way,” I’m calling bullshit. When I hear, “The season line-up just ended up male heavy,” I’m calling foul. When I see foundations that just “happen” to be given to a majority of male-driven companies, I’m not going to say “Well that must have just been the applicant pool this year.”

We all know the odds are already stacked against women because we see it manifest all around us. And while the scientist in me wants to document and collect all the evidence I can to try and display this finding to the world, the maker in me says I need to find a way do something about it now. I don’t have time to wait for a fix. I don’t have time for more research. I’m making my work right now. And there’s no thinking theater artist I know who would truthfully declare gender wasn’t an issue on the general scale. Where we break down is whether we are willing to acknowledge that it’s happens in our own personal choices.

Intentionally or not, like it or not, we are all making a million tiny anti-women decisions and justifying them with million other reasons. The troubling implication from that PNAS study is that we not only judge women’s past work less fairly but that the bias impedes the potential for future opportunity. And without opportunity we are less likely to create new examples in which people can start to see anything different. Every performer or writer or director knows without a chance to make anything you can’t get better at making things. Even if you wanted to work way harder to achieve the same perception of success it’s going to be way harder to find the opportunity to do so.

And here’s where I’m going to get honest with you all.

I think a lot about this. I try very very VERY hard to root this shit out at the source. But I know I do it too. I wish I didn’t. But it’s just… in there. And were I able to somehow analyze my seemingly objective rational non-gendered artistic decisions I bet I’d find that I too have subtly undercut women in my process or in the field as a whole. Though I might not see exactly how those predisposed biases slip in, I know am not immune. And neither are you.

And in knowing that, I have felt myself at a cross roads where it seemed like I was asking this question:

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

And increasingly, over the last decade of my career I’ve forced myself to do the thing that felt, in some vague and hard to define way, the slightly less artistically “right” choice because I believed it was the better moral one to make.

Just so that I’m totally clear about this:

I’m saying that I have steered projects in artistic directions that I might not have otherwise had I not cared about making a less imbalanced world through my theater. I have often picked the slightly “worse” artists because I believed it was the morally right thing to do.

And I do it constantly. I do it on projects ALL the time. Not just on the ones where it seems obvious. I make myself go against my gut in lots of choices because I think it’s better for theater as a whole.

I don’t often don’t say that out loud.

In fact, I don’t know that I’ve said it to almost anyone before now.

And part of the reason for my artistic public persona – my warrior-queen-who-get-all-the-grants-and-deserves-them-because-I’m-a-badass-take-no-holds-creator stance – is to show that despite doing this you cannot impeach my creative process. I want to demand that people acknowledge my artistic worth. And I do that because I secretly fear that people will see what I’m doing and think less of the work. Because deep down in the muck I fear that most people think women are not as artistically capable or that their stories are not as interesting.

In the past I’d get really hung up about it. I’d worry that I was losing my sense of artistry in order to make a point. And though I still believed it was worth it, I fretted about the cost.

I used to think that I was trading quality for principle when I did that.

Now I’m just going to think, “Jennifer.”

Perusing the outcomes of those choices here’s what I find: way way way more often than not, the person I picked was able to bring something to the table that was tangibly better. For obvious reasons, I am not pointing out specifics here but suffice to say, when I went with that slightly non-gut choice, I was often rewarded back in spades. And even when I wasn’t, if I could remember to view the failure in context of the qualities of the artist’s work and not simply their gender, I almost always saw that the real issue had little to do with them as women.

I’m not saying you have to pick terrible performers. I’m not saying you can never work with who you want. But I am saying that creative worth is totally squishy. I’m saying that we make artistic assessments for all kinds of totally ridiculous reasons. I’m saying that the way it’s usually is done is a massive amount of momentum pushing you towards a choice. I’m saying that we’re probably wrong as often as we are right about how a collaboration or an artistic impulse is going to work out. That failure is built into our creative growth. I’m saying we might as well start being “wrong” for the right reasons.

I’m saying that if you do this for a living, you have to know that so much of the time the difference between two options in the scope of a whole process doesn’t mean that much in the long run. I’m saying the difference between “really good” and “just a little bit better” is likely negligible. And perhaps not actually there. And even if it might be, at a certain point, the artistic benefit no longer justifies the outcome.

I’m saying if you’re at all considering a chance to give the opportunity to a female voice or person or story you should do it.

I’m saying if you actually care about doing anything about it, you have to do it. Even if something is pulling you away from it. Maybe especially then. Because that thing that’s pulling is ugly and dark and mean. And it hides in reasonable arguments’ clothing, it hides in gut reactions we don’t quite unpack. The only way to exorcise it is push in the opposite direction. Even when it seems strangely hard to do so. Even when it makes you feel a little funny. Activist-y. Moral high-ground-y. Like you’re doing the wrong thing-y.

Trust that you’re an amazing artist. Trust that this small push in the other direction will not harm your work. Know that it is a better thing for the world to have done. And see that your work is no worse off for it.

And then perhaps we can start actually getting this shit fixed.

– A

Art crush

Hello my friends. It’s, again, been a few days. And this rhythm, perhaps once or twice a week, is likely where I’ll be living for the next few months.

I don’t say that because I think you’re upset about it, I just like to keep folks informed. Because the truth is I’m back in rehearsals, and that changes the tempo, the rhythmic pace, of one’s existence. It gives me such a different perspective on all these things I write about.

It’s a kind of amnesia, getting one’s feet back onto the floor. It’s as if all of the sudden I’m remembering a feeling that I’ve forgotten. There is a kind of: “Oh! This! I remember this. I love this. Why have I been doing anything else but this all this time?!”

This is always how it starts.

All those things we later don’t understand ourselves putting up with. All those indignities that in stark recollection we are surprised at our ability to tolerate. The long hours, the strange spaces, the running from place to place, all of it.

Last night I had people rolling on the ground outside covered in wet and dirty spandex while it rained.

And when it’s good (and right now, it’s very good) it all seems totally worth it.

A new work, for me, is a little like falling in love. And like falling in love, the moment when we surrender to an emotion that has the capacity to make us feel bigger, fuller, than we had been just the moment before, it is easy to allow ourselves to do anything to stay in that place. It is easy for the feeling, which can be so ecstatic and full, to feel like greater compensation than any amount of money ever could.

It is a constant surprise to me that this can continue to stay true even now, ten years into the doing of it.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about this: how the process of making something can feel like someone opens a door and on the other side is something amazing and incredible. And when you have to close it for some length of time it’s hard not to just yell at people who don’t care about the door, hard not spend all your time just waiting to open it again, hard to recapture the image of what’s on the other side.

An artistic love, like any affection, is a process of revealing oneself to an another, an unknown, and finding how you fit into it, into something larger than yourself. It is an amplifying mirror – reflecting one’s image back to themselves in bigger and sometimes stranger ways than we usually see ourselves.

Like love, it causes me to panic, simultaneously scared and excited to meet this new thing I’ve temporarily committed myself to. And the newer that love is, the less known, the more it throws me into paroxysms of emotion. Ups and downs between wanting to commit the rest of my life to this thing and feeling so silly and small and unsuited to this task, waves that come and go over days, hours, sometimes minutes.

I, for one, still struggle to be in it.

Even when I know the agitation, the terror, the butterflies, the inability to sleep as the mind races through images at night, even though I know all these things are part and parcel with the joy, I sometimes don’t know how to just release and let them in. And for me this manifests in extremes of doing and not doing. I spend hours creating detailed, printed, minute by minute plans for the day, which are often tossed aside within the first hour. And then later, exhausted, I sit and stare out windows or listen to the same song over and over again trying to get it to reveal artistic secrets to me.

This cycling between manic outward production and preoccupied inward energy gathering, like love, binds us to the thing we cycle around in a way that, like love, can feel so specific and special that it’s hard to believe that other people can share this passion. It’s sometimes frightening to think that even the others involved might not care for it as deeply as I do. And like love, the feeling can make one feel enmeshed and alone all at the same time.

I have these dreams about rehearsals. Both waking and asleep. Nothing in them is ever sexual or explicit in any literal way. But they feel like romance dreams. And in recalling them, they pull on the same strings deep in the center of my chest. It is a love ache that these thoughts elicit. I think about a rehearsal’s scene or sound like a person’s offhand joke or their dimple. And like a giddy teenager I can replay the moments again and again trying to recapture the rapture they engender.

Let’s call it what it is.

It’s an art-crush, this.

And like a new love, I worry about letting the feeling take over me. I worry talking about it too much. About putting too much faith in its newness. About giving away all of myself to it before I know it will catch me.

But really, there’s nothing to be done but to just be in it.

To try take it in so we do not deny ourselves the pleasure, with an eye or two on the rest of the world so we don’t too totally lose touch with reality.

To endeavor to be honest with our new love, so that we do not lose our sense of selves in an effort to fit inside it, but stay supple enough to let it change and open us in ways we might not have known possible.

To keep our sense of fairness and standard and integrity, so that even if we could give everything of ourselves so thoroughly away, we don’t, because later, when our love tempers and perhaps even fades, we’ll need it.

– A

Digging Deeper

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay about a few reviews for local company The PAC’s production of Timon of Athens that I thought were heinously misogynist. Right after I finished, still vibrating from the anger that I felt from writing it, I went into a brainstorming session with a collaborator of mine that I really respect. And because the essay and the larger issues that it alluded to were so present on my mind we ended up getting into a two hour discussion about opportunity and success and how that works in regards to dealing with making theater more equal for “othered” communities. And I’ve been trying in the days since that conversation to put into words something that I’m wondering about.

Let me diverge for just a moment and share something: I have my mother’s last name.

And I’d like to be clear that I knew my dad all through growing up and he was part of my life from the start of it. My sister and I received my mother’s last name not because my dad was not in the picture. No, my parents were married during both my and my sister’s birth.

And yet, I have my mother’s last name.

It was a bet. The name thing. Or rather, a decision left to chance. As I’ve heard the story told my parents agreed that if the first born of my parent’s union was a boy, it would have my dad’s family name Gude. If a girl, we’d be Mackeys. And then, for consistency, all kids after that would get the same no matter what the gender.

I, as the eldest, came into this world a girl, and as such, the Mackey line continues.

It was a point of extreme confusion to many many people when I was growing up. People from school called my father Mr. Mackey all the time. My dad, for his part, seemed to take it in relative stride. (Though he did, I noticed, seem to find it a bit more annoying than the mother of my good friend whose name was different than her husband and daughter.) But on my part, it took me a long time to get why people were so incredibly surprised by this. I was in my teens before I understood how incredibly rare such a thing was.

I do now.

Something else: I’m in the midst of reading the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg that’s been getting so much press lately – so many people had mentioned it to me that I almost felt obligated. And there is a lot in there that feels like a larger parallel to some of the issues that I’ve discussed about gender parity in theater. Especially a 2003 study in the book (cited all over the internet if you want to read the full thing) from two Columbia Business School and NYU professors that showed students (both male and female) who rated impressions of a successful venture capitalist were less likely to view the person as likeable when that person was a woman. In both cases the person was respected but while success and likeability were positively correlated for men the opposite was true for women.

Instinctively, as women succeed we tend to like them less. As an emerging leader in the field, I feel this deeply in theater. The study indicates that there there’s an unspoken but present and persistent hurdle towards success for women. And while it’s not insurmountable but it’s likely always there. Which means that even if people are smart, open minded, even if they believe in equality. Even in a “liberal” art form we can have let biases infuse our choices. From within and without we have this extra bit in the way.

As my friend and I discussed my PAC review essay we both brought up Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and the study in it that showed professional hockey players in Canada are nearly all born in the first four months of the year. Researchers surmise this is because the cut off date for participation falls at the end of the year and so children born in early months are a small bit larger due to an extra few months of growth, a huge advantage at a young age, and receive attention and positive reinforcement for their successes. Their little bit of totally random age advantage is seen as a greater degree of talent even though it’s really just being born in the right month.

That study makes me depressed because it showed how small advantages seem to make concrete differences in the long run.

There’s another study we talked about, one about societal messages that influence us. This test, the IAT, measures instinctual associations between words. Here’s the site where you can take a number of such tests.

I took the “Gender – Career” test which “often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males.” In other words, how strongly we correlate a particular gender with working and another with staying home.

I understood the implications of the test and how I felt (that I didn’t want to associate male gender with work more highly than female gender). I knew what the test was testing, how it worked and tried to prove that I could outsmart it. Here’s the result I got:

Your data suggest a STRONG association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.

And on that same page with the result was this sentence:

“Evidence suggests that implicit associations form based on everyday experiences, so the daily exposure to differences in gender roles in one’s own family might be influential on how these associations form in memory – whether we consciously agree with them or not.”

That’s tough.

Consciously, clearly, I do not agree with that statement. A major part of my identity is wrapped up in the idea that I am no less capable as a theater professional, a professional of any kind, because I am a woman. I think that my success in the directing field, one that is stereotypically male, is in large part because of that belief. That success is due to the fact that I believe myself to every bit as creative, intelligent and capable as a male director.

And yet I, Adrienne – I have my mother’s last name – Mackey seem to have instincts to the contrary. Even I, Adrienne – I run my own company – Mackey seem to have that hurdle there to have to jump over. Even I, Adrienne – I’ve made a giant stink on the internet about the equality in this work field women deserve – Mackey seem to have a little voice in my head somewhere deep down that tells me otherwise.

So I stopped for a second and thought. I made myself picture in my head women in power suits sitting behind fancy wood desks typing on computers. I imagined the names Michelle and Julia and Anne on the marquees of theaters and in programs. I imagined women battling over budgets and running production meetings. And then I pictured a bunch of guys carrying babies and hugging at weddings. I imagined them sitting in houses and doing dishes. I did that for two minutes straight.

And then I thought about my name. I thought about what a small but potent message it provided me with as I grew up. And sitting here just a few days after mother’s day, I let myself be struck by what a powerful gift that last name was.

I made myself think about the fact that my name tells me that my mother’s lineage, work, identity and being was just as important to carry into the future as my father’s.

And I took the test again.

Your data suggest a SLIGHT association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.

Look, this is obviously an unscientific measure. But we’re finally getting to the point here. This is the thing I’ve been wondering about: Let’s roughly assume that most people don’t really want the huge gender inequity we see in the arts. But for whatever cultural reason it is instinctually in us to make certain biased choices that may make real tangible differences in opportunity for people. They may not want to, but they might still do it.

If this is true, what do we do about it?

I think we have to take time out to prime ourselves – give our brains a small kick towards a particular thought or idea – away from the negative directions that they’ll tend to go.

John Bargh is a researcher who has come up with a series of experiments in priming I read about in a different Gladwell book. One of his experiments sprinkled a disproportionate number of words that people associated with being old into a random word test and found people walked slower down a hall immediately afterwards. In another words that intimated demureness and quiet caused people to wait longer before interrupting someone.

In a different Dutch study (also pulled from Gladwell’s blink) people who thought of themselves as professors got 13% more questions right in a game of Trivial Pursuit than those who thought of themselves as rowdy sports fans. And students who are reminded of their minority race immediately before taking the GRE drop their scores by up to half.

So back to the conversation about the essay:

One question we debated was what you do to combat that that negative stereotype. We argued about how to deal with the difference in opportunities. Do you take an affirmative action type route? What do you do if you have an A+ play from a man and a B+ play from a woman? Which one do you put on? Is it fair to deny the “better” work? What if you hadn’t known the gender of the playwright at all?

And as I’ve thought more about it, I think that perhaps the question should just be framed differently. I think instead, we need to really ask ourselves if those grades are fair. If that kind of situation ever actually arises. Given the subjectivity of art making, can we really always trust those judgments about absolute “quality” in the first place? Perhaps, rather than assuming there will be B+ plays from women, we should take a step back and re-prime our expectations. I think we need to say that we’re not going to argue for or against the merits of doing lower quality work by women for the betterment of the theater medium because the choice isn’t that kind of either or. We need to believe we can do good work by men and and we can do good work by women. We need to start assuming that both are out there.

There’s a lot of negativity that flies around about this, on both sides. I’m not saying we never need a little angry shove sometimes to motivate – writing letters, demanding equal space, letting people know you see the gender parity – but perhaps we can also take concerted time and effort in our interactions to encourage another view.

What if every literary manager had to take a minute before reading a female playwright’s script to stop and read a short list of amazing plays by women authors?

What if every time artistic staff met to discuss a season they read a few short positive press quotes about the female driven shows that their company has produced?

What if every time a director had a role in which gender really didn’t matter and could be cross-cast they thought about three different women in the role?

What if every grant panel took a second to remind themselves that women’s work is equally important to represent?

Could that tiny thing make a huge difference?

Not because women’s work needs help. Because everyone (whether we want to or not) has a lifetime of subtle cultural pushes away from our ability to see women’s work as equal. And these little pushes back to the center might help make things fair again.

Artistic leaders, creators, and supporters are you daring enough to find out?

I hope so.

– A

Sell Out

I wrote a bit last week about the difference that can occur between the way an artist lives their life and the way almost everyone else does. I’ve been thinking a bit more about that difference and what’s been hitting me especially hard is the strange and terrible relationship most artists have to money. I think this issue in particular – how we think about money, what it means in relation to our work, and how we decide to navigate that relationship – has a lot to do with why so many of us feel like no one understands how we live.

While it’s obviously simplistic to reduce an entire nation into one value system, in my own experience I can say that I often find myself a little at odds with the American context in which I exist. Ours is, and of course I’m generalizing, a culture that places a high value on earning as a measure of success. And because of that, it’s one that makes justifying the life of an artist particularly tough, tougher perhaps than countries whose wealth it exceeds.

I would wager that on the whole, the impulse to make and share our work is anti-monetary. Artist are in a rush to give away their product, especially when they first start making it. I would also wager that the impulse to “own” ones work like a product or thing is a learned skill. It’s something we find ourselves having to do, not something that is inherent to the thing itself. Of course this is not always true, and not always true of everyone, but for the purposes of this article, I’m again going to generalize and say that on the whole the artistic process is one that is at its core financially altruistic, and therefore at odds often with commodification. (Read Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book The Gift for more on this.) We do it because it’s what we really want to do. And for whatever reason, we’ve managed to value doing that higher than we value making it value driven.

Think about how radical a notion that is. Seriously.

For most, the conversation about how to navigate career is so thoroughly dominated by money that it’s almost hard to imagine how deeply strange it is to most people. No one is surprised that a doctor might choose a specialty that pays more, but we often feel guilt about picking a role or working with a company for the same reason. We make our work and then we are dying to give it away. We are inclined (and often do) so whether or not other people want to pay us. We don’t want to choose jobs on solely on income potential but equally (if not more) on artistic merit. The fact that you feel that at all means you have decided to step outside a value system that many people accept as a large guiding path in their entire lives.

And weirdly, because art does live outside of this metric in some ways, I think the oddity of such a thing, the mystery of how art can “charm” people out of this traditional way of thinking, becomes romanticized in its own right. We think about “poor” art as something that must be so enrapturing and enthralling that one would give up money to do it. Even I still bring forth the specter of the young impassioned creator in a terribly tiny apartment and having no money but loving your art so so so much that it’s worth it. This is in the cultural subconscious and it’s something we have to contend with.

But we’re not oblivious. There are tangible ways that money matters: it influences who has power and status, it can give us access to security and education, it feeds and houses us, and can give us cool stuff. Wealth can determine an artist’s path – to pursue art in the best way that the work demands or to make difficult choices about the kinds of personal investment they can leverage or the resources and programs they have access to. Frustratingly, training in the arts is almost always expensive. Compensation in the career is generally not. As creators we don’t want to care about it, but as citizens in this country we see we need it. We don’t want to make our work about the money, but we also don’t want the people we work (or ourselves) with to live in an unhealthful and unsustainable way.

This must be why some parents bitterly resist their children embracing a life in the arts. If you don’t have the experience of the intensity and depth of the artistic practice and experience, of course doing such a thing looks like a waste – like deciding to work at the GAP when you could be saving lives in the medical professional or running a business. Not all artists are poor. But in general, a great painter or theater actor or dancer is not making the same income as a doctor or lawyer. We are indoctrinated early that we do our work for love and not money. We are told ad nauseam by our society that “starving” and “artist” are nearly synonymous.

So as artists, we live daily with some pretty insanely contradictory attitudes and behaviors in relation to money. There are a lot of voices saying that we should want to make a lot of money if we’re good at what we do and there are a lot of voices also saying at the same time that if we are doing this art thing then it must be fulfilling enough to do for it’s own sake.

Take for example the phrase: “Sell out.” What’s your gut reaction to it? Is it good or bad? Well, it all depends on what context you’re looking at.

When you are mounting a new work there is this thing that happens when a show starts to “sell out.” This is true even outside of the self-producer realm, where you actually are counting the dollars that those ticket sales are bringing in. Yes, I’d say even in a straight up “actor for hire setting,” if you’re a “sell out” show there is a sense of accomplishment, of pride, of elevation in your work having reached a certain kind of level. That it’s something people connect to. Even if you receive not a single extra cent for the sold out-ness, it makes you feel better, doesn’t it?

What does that phrase even mean? Literally, that all the seats were bought. But it’s come to roughly equate with artistic quality. If all the seats are bought it must be valuable. And if it’s valuable it must be good or why would so many people pay for it? Conversely, there’s an unspoken pressure that says if a beautiful and amazing production has few buyers that something is wrong it. It’s a value system that isn’t concerned whether a piece happens to have picked a bad time of the year to perform. Or that the subject matter happens to have a smaller audience base but for that base the work is HIGHLY impactful. Or that your 3/4 full houses absolutely LOVE your show compared to the full houses for the work down the street that is merely entertaining enough to spend 20 bucks on. It’s a message that uncomplicatedly says more money equals better art.

Even if you know it’s not true, it’s still working on you somewhere in the back of your mind. So it’s worth sometimes saying out loud, even when it seems obvious, that small houses don’t mean you’re a bad artist. You might be, but the two aren’t necessarily related.

And weirdly, while on the one side we’re putting pressure on ourselves to be financially successful, we also have another voice inside telling us that making art for money is a cop out, a cheapening, a bastardization of the “true” impulse for creation. “Sell out” also has the connotation of the artist that is corrupted by money, who makes their work for financial gain alone and has lost touch with a “real” creative spirit. We tend to romanticize the bohemian life, both from within and outside the profession. It’s also a fallacy, this idea that our work without the pressure of money is “purer,” but it’s equally as potent.

It is strange, no, that the exact same phrase is both an indicator of our highest measure of success as well as a total debasement of the form. It is a frustrating dissonance that an art maker is trying to navigate all the time. And if we aren’t vigilant about what the goal is at a given moment we can end up in a kind of schizophrenic negativity where no matter what we do we’re coming up short.

Look, if we only made the work that made the most money, we’d probably cut out the most ambitious, and personally fulfilling projects. And yet, it’s also true that there are limitations on what’s possible with our work and those limitations are often determined by a project’s bottom line.

There are times I’ve looked back at works I made with a thousand dollars and felt wistful about the “purity” of my choices. I look at that work and think about how I did it just because I loved the art, that it was uncomplicated and “true” (or whatever). But, really, when I’m honest, that’s pretty BS right? The impulse for the work wasn’t actually less complicated by money, I was just making the same kinds of choices about how and where to allocate cash but on a much tinier scale.

I think that as we become more successful, we more obviously have to confront these questions – how does money work in out work, what do I spend it on, what kind of aesthetic am I after and how does cost play into that – but I don’t actually think they are new. People who want to always spend all the cash on fancy stuff do it when they have a little. They do it when they have a lot. We just notice it more.

And troublingly, I have no good answers here. Just an observation that we, like everyone, have to figure out what standard of living we want and what we are and aren’t willing to do to achieve it. What we can do is not abdicate the decision to others but continue to make it for ourselves. You can argue whether you agree with the way that America equates wealth with success and decide how much you’re willing to let it influence your goals in life. You can create a work environment you believe in and pay people whatever you decide you want to and allow them to make the choice if the monetary recompense is equal to the task. Your project can lose money or knock it out of the cashola park. It can be the best thing your ever made or a total hack job. With every choice there are two assessment tools we need to use – one financial and the other artistic. And it’s up to you to decide which one needs to take precedence at this particular moment.

We don’t want to make money the value on which we measure our creations, so we should be wary of allowing it become an indicator of our success. On the same token, our ability to make work is predicated on the rest of our life being functional enough to keep the artistic part going. Money plays a part in that.

I don’t want money to drive my art making process.

I want to make enough money as an artist to live sustainably.

Two statements.

Two totally different standards of measurement.

So the trick is to remember that they have to be either/or and they don’t have to be correlated directly. They both are like spinning plates that I need to pay attention to in order to keep them in balance. Which might mean a little nudge on one for a while and then run back and push on the other a little.

And my guess is that I’ll always have to keep an eye on that balancing act.

– A

Middle of the Road

Yesterday we looked at the folks on the upper end. Now let’s look at some people in the middle. Here are data sets for four mid sized companies: The Lantern, Interact, Theatre Exile, and Act II Playhouse.

Using this website I found the “revenue” listed for each of these companies to be in the mid to high hundred thousands. I’m assuming that’s for the most recent tax filing. For comparison yesterday’s figures for the Arden, People’s Light, PTC, and Wilma had revenues listed at 5.29 million, 4.11 million, 3.95 million, and 3.64 million respectively. So on the whole we’re looking roughly at an order of magnitude smaller.

This is useful to note for two semi-self evident reasons:

1) Larger companies tend to employ more people and therefore a difference in representation in these companies has a higher impact on the community as a whole.

2) We can make a reasonable assumption that jobs at better funded theaters will tend to pay at a higher pay grade.

This is obviously not always true in every instance, but gives a useful bit of context when comparing numbers across company sizes. Still, unfair representation is, obviously, unfair at any scale.

PS –

1) Act II’s data on designers was particularly tough to find (especially for seasons 08/09 and 09/10). This is why the total numbers of designers is lower than the expected based on corresponding number of productions. This data is less complete than the other theaters’ info. If you’d like the raw data feel free to ask.

2) Again, if you want to know how I calculated these numbers you can check back on the PS from yesterday’s post.