Gender Breakdown, Collaboraction’s angry and absorbing ensemble piece about inequity in the theater community, is rooted in something equally dramatic, but a lot drier: a ten-month research project undertaken by Kay Kron, an actor, writer, and, currently, development associate at Chicago Children’s Theatre, as the “capstone” project for the DePaul University master’s degree in nonprofit management she’ll complete this year.
Even allowing for the likely conservative tilt of the Jeff-nomination filter, those numbers are revealing: 75 percent of the plays produced in Chicago in 2015-2016 were written by men. And 77 percent of those produced by large Equity theaters had majority-male casts.
Still, Kron’s 38 percent finding for female artistic directors is significantly higher than the 15 percent the League of Chicago Theatres reported among its member organizations in 2010. And it’s hugely higher than recently released figures for the film industry, where, according to a University of Southern California-Annenberg School study, only 4 percent of the 1,000 top-grossing films in the last decade were directed by women. (For more about that, check out this weekend’s Chicago Feminist Film Festival at Columbia College.)
Kron quotes playwright Marsha Norman in reference to another study that showed only 22 percent of shows produced were written by women: “If life worked like theater, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.” v
