The Guthrie Theatre Announces Its 50th Anniversary Season With No Female Playwrights on the Program

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• danielle perata | April 30, 2012 10:25 PMReply

  There is no "tokenism" involved in staging the works of great female writers and writers of color. They aren't hard to find... IF you make the effort. My guess? Both the board and the artistic director have become entirely too self-assured about their theatrical sensibilities... to the detriment of audiences and artists everywhere. If anything is "killing" theatre in this country, it's stuffy boards and sneeringly condescending artistic directors like this.

• Susan Jonas | April 30, 2012 12:45 PMReply

  Dowling says he is responsible to the boards. Well it's about time the boards of theatres and the funders took responsibility for the programming they support, and ensured that the many theatres who pay lipservice to their commitment to diversity-- which almost all do in their mission statements and grant applications-- actually fulfilled those promises. If artistic directors can't find good work by women and writers of color, then they are blind or lazy and should be canned. Frankly, it's not as if the male barre was that hard to reach; so much of what we see is mediocre. But just as there are bad, good and great male writers, so are there bad, good and great female writers-- and they deserve equal opportunity. I am so pleased you are speaking out on this, moreover seeing it as part of a much larger situation in which women are silenced. The consequences of this in theatre are heartbreaking, but the consequences of taking women's voices away in other countries are unspeakable abuse and violence. It's all part of the same continuum.