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I don’t know what happened at the meeting–for some reason, the Times doesn’t appear to have covered it–but based on a sampling included as part of Cohen’s story, the women have a point. Of 141 plays produced by five important off-Broadway theaters over the last five seasons, only 36 were written by living women. Theater by theater, the percentage of plays by living women over that period ran from a low of 18 percent (interestingly enough, for Manhattan Theater Club, which is run by a woman) to a high of 32 percent.
And the results? First, we eliminated Black Ensemble and Chicago Shakespeare early on: Black Ensemble’s five-year percentage is incredibly high because most of what it does these days is juke-box shows by artistic director Jackie Taylor; Chicago Shakespeare’s total is remarkably low (5 percent) because its seasons tend to be dominated by the work of a certain dead Elizabethan male.
