Alumni Outreach: Women’s Work

by Alexa Topolski

Maybe the day will come when the phrase “woman playwright” will sound as dated as “lady doctor.” Unfortunately, successful women playwrights are still rare exotics in the hothouse playwriting world. In Canada, more than a few of this select group are graduates of the National Theatre School. Below, three of them discuss what it’s like to write plays in Canada when you’re a woman.

Celia McBride (Playwriting, 1995) vividly remembers the moment she realized that being a female playwright in Canada carries extra freight: “I was in Stratford for the unveiling of the new studio theatre. The press was there as well as a lot of important people, it was very exciting. They lowered this giant purple velvet banner with a poster of the 11 plays that were going to be produced for the studio’s first season. I looked at the list and realized I was the only woman on it. “It was an eye-opening moment.”

Claudia Dey (Playwriting, 1997) has been Playwright in Residence at Toronto’s Factory Theatre for four years and was nominated for both a Governor General’s Award and a Trillium Award in 2002 for her play The Gwendolyn Poems. Both Dey and McBride say that while they haven’t encountered sexism in their own careers, they are keenly aware that it is a fact of life in Canadian theatre. “Women are vastly underrepresented — as artistic directors, playwrights, and actors,” says Dey.

“Of course I’m treated differently as a woman,” says Dey. “Our storytelling traditions are different. But in terms of reception, I do believe there’s a series of assumptions that accompany the work of a man that we don’t benefit from. These politics are real and they have affected me in the larger action of sharing my work with the world. However, as for my work, I am fortunate in that it unfolds in this very sheltered place.”

Structure and Opportunities

“So much of the success of a writer is the structure that you create for yourself. The opportunities that the NTS provided us, as far as surrounding us with artists who were out there practising and thinking and were hugely generous about sharing their artistry and strategy, were tremendous,” says Dey.

The award-winning McBride, whose critically acclaimed works include What a Cad and Walk Right Up, acknowledges the importance of women mentors and teachers in her career, notably Judith Thompson and One Yellow Rabbit’s Denise Clark.

McBride made a conscious decision early in her career to write lead roles for women. “I try to write for women because I think ‘If women aren’t being produced more often, there’s more roles for men’”, says McBride.

Morwyn Brebner (Playwriting, 1996), Playwright in Residence at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre for the past four years, has received widespread recognition for her stinging comedies. Her first play, Music for Contortionists, received both Dora and Chalmers award nominations, and her musical Little Mercy’s First Murder garnered 6 Doras. “[Director and NTS graduate] Eda Holmes said my plays were inherently feminist because they are about women you don’t usually see in the theatre,” muses Brebner. “I tend to write about women who are poor, but intelligent and funny.”

Though she considers herself a feminist, Brebner says she “doesn’t write at all in a PC voice.”

“What would be unusual would be to write a character assuming that the female point of view was not exceptional, but normal. I think the culture is represented in a male voice, so when the new voices come in it takes a little longer for them to be integrated.”

Because of the lack of precedents, says Brebner, “writing from a woman’s perspective” demands an extra leap of imagination and steady faith in one’s vision. “If the playwrights you’ve always read are male, then that is the model you tend to see as worthy and good,” she explains. “It’s easier for the male writer to be seen as a continuation of the past.”

Different Voices

While all three women write from a distinctly female point of view, each writer’s body of work is completely different from the others. Just as there is no one “male voice,” there are as many “women’s” plays as there are women playwrights. As Celia McBride puts it, “What I’m writing about — the search for self or identity — is universal. But because I’m a woman, I write about it from a woman’s perspective.”

Nonetheless, the struggle to move from the exception to the norm is vulnerable to doubt and sabotage from within and without. “The world trusts the work of male playwrights more, in terms of acceptance and promotion,” asserts Dey. “Audiences, critics, and artistic directors make different assumptions about female writers.”

But all three women contend that the climate is changing, and that the “new voices” are being integrated. A 2003 survey commissioned by the Ontario Arts Council seems to bear them out. A study of English-language theatre companies in Ontario found that, compared to 20 years ago, there are more women on operating grant committees, more women directors, more produced women playwrights (33% as compared to 10% in 1981), and more women artistic directors. It also cautions that the majority of these women are still on the fringes, in low-budget and children’s theatre. But there’s reason to be gingerly optimistic. As Claudia Dey puts it, “What we hope for is not to become equal, but to redefine the playing field.”

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