Sutton Foster and Shuler Hensley (center) in The New Group production of “Sweet Charity” (photo by Monique Carboni)

Last week was not the first time I’ve been puzzled by Hilton Als’s writing on theatre.

I didn’t understand the rather cruel rationale by which he described the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein as follows, in a capsule review of Julie Salomon’s biography of Wasserstein:

Wendy Wasserstein was the kind of woman many women didn’t feel comfortable befriending, especially since she was what they feared being themselves: overweight, single, and a fag hag.

I was stumped when Als, wrote the following about Annie Baker, in reviewing her play John.

Baker has produced only one play about a woman’s life, and it was a one-act comedy, a relative trifle compared with her other work. Sometimes, it has been difficult to distinguish between Baker’s world of guys and her own ethos.

What about Circle Mirror Transformation? Is it explicitly about one woman’s life? No, not necessarily singularly, but do her plays genuinely warrant this characterization of them by Als? Are they collectively, in Als’s shorthand, “dude fugues”?

Baker projects her complicated, sometimes disappointing, but never less than human relationship to men, who interest her because they display their competitiveness more readily and openly, and thus more theatrically, than women do.

Interestingly, the review of John, in which Als felt that Baker was at last engaging fully with female characters, seemed focused on the naturalistic interaction of the characters, three out of four of whom are women. But he does make a generalization, suggesting that one or more of them may be “crazy,” a timeworn dismissal of women’s behavior. He does so without ever engaging with the play’s strong supernatural elements, which are almost impossible to overlook when we find one character reading H.P. Lovecraft to another, subverting the motivations and altering our perceptions of the characters and events as played on the surface. Indeed, we are to understand that the character who initially seems most unmoored from reality is in fact the most perceptive, not a madwoman.

So what has me – and based upon what I’ve seen on social media, many others – rather frustrated with Als now? It’s his review of The New Group’s Sweet Charity, which goes out of its way to critique not only director Leigh Silverman’s work on the revival itself, but her body of work as a director and perhaps even her personal attributes. It’s certainly fair for a critic to do much of that (reviewing people as opposed to their work, however, strikes me as unwarranted) – and to be clear, Als absolutely has the right to write about the theatre as he sees fit – but it’s the apparently gendered critique of Silverman, in a way that seems to overwhelm actually engaging with The New Group’s Sweet Charity itself, that’s striking many as problematic.

At this point I should acknowledge that as a cisgender, heterosexual middle-aged white man, I am perhaps singularly unqualified to weigh in on this subject, given my identity and the identities of the parties involved. If any readers feel that’s the case, I would urge them to stop reading this now. They might wish to consider an essay by Victoria Myers at The Interval (worth reading even if you choose to read on here), the most sustained, non-Facebook piece prompted by Als’s review that I’ve seen to date.

In the very first paragraph of his Sweet Charity review, Als writes, in reference to Silverman:

The problem is that she’s too serious about theatre; she wants her shows to count—to have a moral purpose. Sometimes a play is just a play, and not all of her productions can bear the weight of her imperative.

He goes on to refer to her “joyless directorial form” when she directed a piece for The Five Lesbian Brothers. He describes thinking of her as “downtown’s ‘woman’s director,’ in the old M-G-M George Cukor sense of the phrase.” He characterizes her work on Charity as having “very little shine or imagination” He compares her unfavorably to the director and choreographer of the original production, writing, “Silverman’s moral stance is different from Fosse’s. She’s not excited by display; she keeps things small, somehow.” He concludes by saying that like the show’s character, Oscar, who dumps the character of Charity at the very moment other shows would deploy as happy ending, “Silverman may have been driven by the same impulses: instead of trusting in and directing the flow of Foster’s natural wellspring of talent, she set out to dam it.”

So Silverman is, in Als’s view, a woman who is far too serious about her work and should just lighten up; in every way inferior to the man who originally conceived, directed and choreographed Charity; generally yet mysteriously reductive; and someone whom actors (those who, given his examples, are other more exuberant women) have to fight past in order to give engaging performances.

But while idolizing Bob Fosse (and Sutton Foster), Als doesn’t explicate what Silverman has actually done with Charity, a 50-year-old relic of an era when entertainment was frequently trapped in telling stories where women fell only along the virgin-whore duality. That was certainly evident in Charity’s source material, the film Nights of Cabiria.

How do we engage with this type of material now? Do we, to employ Als’s metaphor, admire them as eternal soap bubbles or, as so many works of entertainment now do, mine them for a grittier take, which rather than blowing ash upon works, strips them of their glitzy patina to better engage with the reality that might lie underneath? Certainly taking a darker view is not only a man’s right. Silverman has even made small revisions to the work, which go unremarked upon.

Broadway’s last Sweet Charity played out in pop colors along more Fosse-esque lines, though I recall Oscar’s rejection of Charity at the show’s end, in Denis O’Hare’s performance, as particularly ugly and cruel. In Silverman and Shuler Hensley’s hands, it seemed a genuine expression of personal failing, filled with regret. Both are perfectly valid readings of the script, which while written by the hugely successful Neil Simon, has become dated in the half-century since it debuted. It is hard to find Charity’s repeated humiliations as funny, as they were once intended to be. While my memory of O’Hare’s performance in contrast to Hensley’s is inevitably subjective, I’m intrigued that its dissonant harshness has stuck with me for 11 years, while my most recent experience seemed rueful and compassionate.

During an interlude from assailing Silverman, Als notes in his review the age of Sutton Foster, a relatively atypical critical practice, and it seems an arbitrary choice. It would be more pertinent had he connected it to his description of Charity as a “youngish girl.” In fact, Foster is the same age as Gwen Verdon when she created the role. While she reads as eternally youthful (the basis for her TV series Younger), a key element of Charity’s character, then as now, is that, in the time and society in which the show is set, the character is decidedly not youngish, with essential implications for the character’s motivations, and how we perceive them against the typical expectation of women in the 1960s. That Foster and Silverman chose to address that element is not diminishing Foster under Silverman’s cloak of darkness, but rather an actor and director working in concert to mine truth from what the text offers them.

That seems to be the operant motivation for Als’s critique – Silverman is denying the charm of the piece, and of the leading lady. But The New Group itself is noted for a repertoire that explores dark stories and ugly truths; that they were producing Sweet Charity seemed a dissonant concept when first announced. In fact, the concept that Silverman and Foster brought to the company (instead of Silverman simply being “hired,” in Als’s assumption) was in keeping with artistic director Scott Elliot’s aesthetic – and an experiment more reasonably undertaken in a 222-seat venue than a 1500 seat Broadway house. Has Charity been reduced, shrunken, made small, as Als would have it, or has it been made more intimate, more human, less razzle-dazzle in service of character and storytelling? Even before entering the theatre, all signs pointed to the latter, lest anyone be confused about intent.

To reiterate: Als is welcome to his opinion, as we all are. But as a critic, he repeatedly denigrates Silverman for ostensibly applying the same aesthetic to all of her work because she had the effrontery to tamper with Sweet Charity. He categorizes Silverman as a downtown women’s director, an implied pejorative, yet beyond a fleeting mention of her Broadway debut with Well, fails to acknowledge her “uptown” work, with three Broadway shows to date, which is unfortunately a rare achievement for any woman – or her ongoing collaboration with David Henry Hwang.

Instead of analyzing the choices Silverman made in Charity, he attempted to divine her motivation. Als tells readers of his disappointment with the show not being what he wanted it to be, rather than interpreting it according to what was there. Even in a much-reduced cast, why did Silverman choose to have Joel Perez essay all of the main male roles other than Oscar? Is it possible that Silverman was looking at male mores of the time and seeing a sameness that she wanted to emphasize? In reading Als’s review, we don’t even know that Perez plays multiple roles. The fundamentals of reviewing are made subordinate to an agenda.

At the start, I cited some examples of Als’s writing that I’ve found surprising. I have not conducted a years-long study of his work, and certainly his recent review covering both Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World displays none of the implied gender bias of his Sweet Charity review. So this is no blanket assertion of his motivations or beliefs, but simply an attempt to explore, overall, one piece of writing that has proven troubling to so many, including artists I admire. With Sweet Charity, Als – with guidance from his editors – could have critiqued the show, and Leigh Silverman’s work on the show, in a way that would have allowed readers to better understand the production on its own terms, rather than as a platform for his seemingly gendered survey of Leigh Silverman as a person.

Anyone claiming that there is equity or equality – by gender, by race and ethnicity, by disability – in the American theatre would have to be willfully ignoring the evidence. The Dramatists Guild’s The Count showed that only one in five plays produced in the U.S. is written by a woman. The annual survey of performers on Broadway issued by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition most recently showed that only 22% of Broadway performers in 2014-15 were people of color. The executive summary of a study of leadership in LORT theatres by gender states that at no time have more than 27% of leadership roles been held by women. Define your universe, choose your metric, and it seems quite clear that whites, particularly white men, remain in the majority.

That’s why it proves so maddening to so many when efforts to right the balance meet with opposition. Last week, in Raleigh NC, an effort to advance the cause of female directors in the city’s theatres began to fray just a day after it was announced. The participating theatres had agreed to hire only female directors for open directing slots in their 2017-2018 seasons; this followed on a Women’s Theatre Festival in the area this past summer. As reported by Byron Woods of Indy Week last week, with further updates just before Thanksgiving, a pseudonymous complaint of discrimination about the plan to the signatory companies and the Raleigh Arts Council was sufficient to have one theatre immediately withdraw and for Sarah Powers, executive director of the RAC, to re-emphasize the importance of their non-discrimination granting policy, and to say that the claim would be investigated.

For those who champion equity, as well as diversity, this sort of blowback is frustrating. After all, when statistics prove inequity, why do efforts to rebalance the scales get charged as discriminatory?  The fact is, while there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate a tacit pattern of discrimination favoring white men in the theatre, there is no explicit policy. But when there is a concerted, verifiable attempt to favor any subset of the population while excluding others in hiring, anti-discrimination policies and laws kick in, because they were designed to protect everyone from discrimination, not only defined populations.

It’s troubling that in the Raleigh situation, the complainants – there are now two – are pseudonymous, with Indy Week unable to verify their identities. But the press release about the Raleigh initiative on behalf of female directors is verifiable, as are the companies participating.

The situation is corollary to the one experienced by the musical Hamilton earlier this year, when a casting notice sought “non-white” men and women for its multicultural cast. While it is entirely within the purview of the production to choose actors according to the desired characteristics of the roles, the explicitly exclusive language about the actors being sought put the show at risk of violating discrimination statutes, as well as the policies of Actors Equity. It was quickly revised, even as the production made clear that its creative intent was unchanged.

Looking to the future, we are now less than four years away from the intended start of The Jubilee, an initiative begun by, per its organizing principles as stated on Howlround in October 2015, “a self-organized group of theatremakers from around the country,” asking both theatre companies and individuals to sign on to the following:

 In order to address equity in the American Theatre and in my community, I pledge to support a diverse, inclusive, and intersectional vision in the 2020-2021 season:

Every theatre in the United States of America will produce only work by women, people of color, Native American artists, LBGTQIA artists, deaf artists, and artists with disabilities.

It’s impossible not to look at the Jubilee plans in light of the Hamilton and Raleigh precedents, and indeed the political and social outlook of the still-forming new federal administration.  Similar initiatives could face an uphill legal battle, although The Jubilee may be protected by the fact that playwrights are not defined as employees under prevailing labor law. Public perception is another matter, especially at a time when apparently some white men perceive their primacy as being reinforced as a result of the presidential election.

However, this doesn’t mean that diversity and equity cannot be proactively addressed. In Hollywood, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is more than a year into investigating the gender imbalance among film and television directors, prompted by efforts from the American Civil Liberties Union. If the theatre field doesn’t self-police and initiate real change in the face of overwhelming statistics, it might one day find itself under comparable investigation.

The myriad circumstances, practices and excuses that have maintained the American Theatre as a majority white male domain are unjust and unfair. None of the foregoing is intended to dissuade efforts towards equity, diversity and inclusion, or to suddenly treat white men as a specifically protected and oppressed class. But as various constituencies in the arts work to correct the historic imbalances, they need to remain aware of the legal ramifications of their efforts, and the language in which they define them, even given the significant irony of those seeking to end discrimination potentially running afoul of anti-discrimination laws.

A few weeks ago, the headline of a review rubbed me the wrong way.

I didn’t have an issue with the review itself, by Charles McNulty for The Los Angeles Times. But the headline for the piece, which covered the new Broadway productions of Old Times and Fool For Love, read as follows, “Clive Owen and Sam Rockwell hit Broadway in ‘Old Times’ and ‘Fool for Love’ with different results.”

Why was the headline only about men, I thought. Admittedly, I hadn’t seen either production at that point, but I was familiar with the plays, and knew that the character Rockwell plays in Fool is at least evenly matched with the role played by Nina Arianda, and Owen shares the stage in a triangle with characters played by Eve Best and Kelly Reilly. My theatre-centric brain took this headline as gender inequity.

Thinking on it, I can see why the men might have gotten the headline mentions, since both have done television and film work, with Owen currently in the second season of The Knick. But neither are exactly bankable stars who “open” movies. Best and Arianda are “only” Tony Award winners, which may mean less in the entertainment hierarchy these days than electronic media work, especially in the major paper of the city that is the center of television and film business.

That said, Best appeared in 51 episodes of Nurse Jackie, though she’s not the lead, as Owen is on The Knick, but she did that series for much longer on Showtime than Owen has been doctoring on Cinemax. Admittedly, Owen was making his Broadway debut, and Rockwell was only making his second appearance, making their gigs slightly rarer than Arianda and Best each taking their third Broadway turns. I decided this wasn’t a clear cut case of advancing men over women, despite my own perception of implied unequal worth among the players along gender lines.

But this male favoritism sprang to mind again just this morning, when I saw this headline on a theatre story on NorthJersey.com, a website that includes coverage from The Record and other New Jersey outlets: “The woman directing Al Pacino in David Mamet’s new play.”

Now I knew instantly that the piece was about Pam MacKinnon because it’s my business to know who’s working on what show, but also because Pam has quickly become one of New York’s most recognized female directors, for such works as Clybourne Park (for which she had received an Obie) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (for which she won a Tony). Yet the headline was all about the big, male names, even though neither of them had spoken to The Record’s Robert Feldberg. Only Pam had done so.

Pam MacKinnon

Sure, you can chalk it up to celebrity, to what might get the most clicks online, but once again it was a case of choosing male names over female, and in this case the article was about “the woman.” I don’t fault the writer, but an editor and perhaps someone at the copy desk, who figured they’d go with male fame, rather than the female subject of the story.

Obviously it’s not possible to say from the two headlines I’ve cited to say that there’s a widespread pattern here, but I would suggest to readers who care about this issue that they should be on the lookout for such casual disregard of women in the theatre and call it out (or let me know; I’m starting a list) whenever it appears. Yes, it’s a very small-bore, incremental game of standing vigilant, but if indeed there’s a pattern, then it has to be broken at every opportunity.

Before I wrote this post, I called out The Record on its headline on Twitter as follows, at 10:30 am:

Now I can’t know for certain there’s any cause and effect, but 25 minutes later, after multiple favorites and retweets of my message, The Record altered its headline to “Director’s hard work on ‘China Doll’ pays off.” It appears they got the message – though presumably the original headline is what’s in the print edition. It’s also worth noting that the headline was changed without any acknowledgement, so in the long memory of the internet, the male-centric headline never happened. That’s dishonest.

But even in an effort to ameliorate their insensitivity, it seems The Record still can’t bring itself to give the “Director” a name. So I’ll say it once again: it’s Pam MacKinnon. Remember it and use it, because without it, the record is incomplete and the paper’s bias is showing.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts School of Drama.

A few weeks ago, the headline of a review rubbed me the wrong way.

I didn’t have an issue with the review itself, by Charles McNulty for The Los Angeles Times. But the headline for the piece, which covered the new Broadway productions of Old Times and Fool For Love, read as follows, “Clive Owen and Sam Rockwell hit Broadway in ‘Old Times’ and ‘Fool for Love’ with different results.”

Why was the headline only about men, I thought. Admittedly, I hadn’t seen either production at that point, but I was familiar with the plays, and knew that the character Rockwell plays in Fool is at least evenly matched with the role played by Nina Arianda, and Owen shares the stage in a triangle with characters played by Eve Best and Kelly Reilly. My theatre-centric brain took this headline as gender inequity.

Thinking on it, I can see why the men might have gotten the headline mentions, since both have done television and film work, with Owen currently in the second season of The Knick. But neither are exactly bankable stars who “open” movies. Best and Arianda are “only” Tony Award winners, which may mean less in the entertainment hierarchy these days than electronic media work, especially in the major paper of the city that is the center of television and film business.

That said, Best appeared in 51 episodes of Nurse Jackie, though she’s not the lead, as Owen is on The Knick, but she did that series for much longer on Showtime than Owen has been doctoring on Cinemax. Admittedly, Owen was making his Broadway debut, and Rockwell was only making his second appearance, making their gigs slightly rarer than Arianda and Best each taking their third Broadway turns. I decided this wasn’t a clear cut case of advancing men over women, despite my own perception of implied unequal worth among the players along gender lines.

But this male favoritism sprang to mind again just this morning, when I saw this headline on a theatre story on NorthJersey.com, a website that includes coverage from The Record and other New Jersey outlets: “The woman directing Al Pacino in David Mamet’s new play.”

Now I knew instantly that the piece was about Pam MacKinnon because it’s my business to know who’s working on what show, but also because Pam has quickly become one of New York’s most recognized female directors, for such works as Clybourne Park (for which she had received an Obie) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (for which she won a Tony). Yet the headline was all about the big, male names, even though neither of them had spoken to The Record’s Robert Feldberg. Only Pam had done so.

Pam MacKinnon

Sure, you can chalk it up to celebrity, to what might get the most clicks online, but once again it was a case of choosing male names over female, and in this case the article was about “the woman.” I don’t fault the writer, but an editor and perhaps someone at the copy desk, who figured they’d go with male fame, rather than the female subject of the story.

Obviously it’s not possible to say from the two headlines I’ve cited to say that there’s a widespread pattern here, but I would suggest to readers who care about this issue that they should be on the lookout for such casual disregard of women in the theatre and call it out (or let me know; I’m starting a list) whenever it appears. Yes, it’s a very small-bore, incremental game of standing vigilant, but if indeed there’s a pattern, then it has to be broken at every opportunity.

Before I wrote this post, I called out The Record on its headline on Twitter as follows, at 10:30 am:

Now I can’t know for certain there’s any cause and effect, but 25 minutes later, after multiple favorites and retweets of my message, The Record altered its headline to “Director’s hard work on ‘China Doll’ pays off.” It appears they got the message – though presumably the original headline is what’s in the print edition. It’s also worth noting that the headline was changed without any acknowledgement, so in the long memory of the internet, the male-centric headline never happened. That’s dishonest.

But even in an effort to ameliorate their insensitivity, it seems The Record still can’t bring itself to give the “Director” a name. So I’ll say it once again: it’s Pam MacKinnon. Remember it and use it, because without it, the record is incomplete and the paper’s bias is showing.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts School of Drama.