I created the fortnightly “American Stages” column for The Stage in London in 2013 with the mandate to cover news of American theatre news that didn’t necessarily warrant a standalone story and wasn’t being widely covered in other UK media. It gave me the ongoing opportunity to mix commercial with not-for-profit, Broadway with regional, as I saw fit, all targeted primarily at a readership of theatre professionals in the UK. Beginning in October 2014, the column became a weekly feature. Given the relatively tricky formatting of the original pieces, this pages serves as an index that will take you to each column as it appears on The Stage’s website, and will be updated on a rolling (and somewhat erratic) basis.

Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon makes directing debut in New York, 6 February 2015

Proof that you don’t need a star to break even on Broadway, 30 January, 2015

Julie Taymor directing Anne Hathaway set to be this spring’s hot ticket, 23 January 2015

Ruth Wilson and Jake Gyllenhaal open Broadway premiere of Constellations, 16 January 2015

The Last Ship leads winter Broadway closures, 9 January 2015

The year ahead in US theatre, 19 December 2014

Matilda recoups its investment, 12 December 2014

Bradley Cooper opens in The Elephant Man, 5 December 2014

Sting tries to stop The Last Ship sinking, 28 November 2014

Glenn Close returns to Broadway after 20 years, 21 November 2o14

Up Here musical to premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, 14 November 2014

Holly Hunter and Martin Short return to New York theatre, 7 November 2014

Sting’s The Last Ship opens and Halloween on stage, 31 October 2014

Al Pacino to star in China Doll by David Mamet in 2015, 24 October 2014

Anna D Shapiro steps up at Steppenwolf and Doctor Zhivago musical heads for Broadway, 17 October 2014

Steve Martin’s new musical and America’s top ten plays, 26 September 2014

Broadway’s first female-penned play in two years, 12 September 2014

Is Broadway getting a new theatre?, 29 August 2014

A sneak preview of Broadway’s new season, 15 August 2014

Re-revivals and Icelandic oddities, 1 August 2014

Song catalogues continue to woo producers and bullets for Broadway shows, 18 July 2014

Les Mis reinvented, 4 July 2014

Chicago picks up the slack for Broadway’s summer lull, 20 June 2014

Californian premieres, busy Rees and Off-Off-Broadway finally hits Broadway, 6 June 2014

Blood, mud and magic of Shakespeare heads across the Atlantic, 23 May 2014

Irish revival, Lucille Lortel Awards and Abba goes Greek, 9 May 2014

Tony determinations kick off the awards season and God gets the theatre bug, 25 April 2014

Radcliffe on Broadway, King and I rumours and Carole King off stage, 11 April 2014

If/Then kicks off Tony Awards madness, 28 March 2014

Bryan Cranston plays the president, Randi Zuckerberg plays guitar, 14 March 2014

Disappearing clowns, prog-metal Sweeney Todd and The Bridges of Madison County, 28 February 2014

King Kong heads home, Hugh Jackman helms the Tonys, 14 February 2014

Bradley Cooper, Hugh Jackman and Fatboy Slim – the stars aline in New York, 31 January 2014

Ghostly appearances from Satchmo, Tupac Shakur and Patti LuPone, 17 January 2014

Hugh Jackman disappears from Houdini, Rebecca Hall makes Broadway debut, 3 January 2014

The Iceman Cometh (but not quite yet), unpaid interns and The Sound of Music, 20 December 2013

Punchdrunk’s new restaurant, Daniel Kitson and dinner with Alan Ayckbourn, 6 December 2013

Nelson’s quartet complete plus Broadway openers and closers, 22 November 2013

Bruce Norris returns, A Time To Kill dies and Idina Menzel flies back to Broadway, 8 November 2013

A costly Betrayal, Julie Taymor returns and new musical composers on Sesame Street, 25 October 2013

Orlando Bloom, Emma Thompson and the Donmar on Broadway, 11 October 2013

The House of Mouse, Shakespeare spoofs and Terminator 2 on stage, 27 September 2013

New York City Opera in trouble, Sondheim celebrated, 13 September 2013

“It’s one of my lost plays that I feel we can bring back,” says British playwright Alan Ayckbourn of 2003’s Sugar Daddies, which will make its U.S. debut this month at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre, directed by the author.

ACT has previously staged 10 Ayckbourn plays with other directors. So what prompted this in-person visit by the playwright himself to stage a work little seen beyond his home base of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England?

“They asked me, is the simple answer,” explained Ayckbourn. “I met Kurt Beattie the artistic director when he came to Scarborough two years ago. He slipped me the ground plan of their Allen Theatre, which is conveniently in the round, and he asked if I’d fancy working there.”

Ayckbourn says the plays – about a young woman who helps an elderly crime boss who she helped after he’s hit by car, and ends up as his protégeé –  is based in part on the Faust legend. “It is, in the end, the story of a girl corrupted by worldly goods, “ Ayckbourn says. “Do you sell your soul or do you hold on to it? There’s nothing particularly English about it.”

Still, Ayckbourn notes that he’s not planning to Americanize the play for the Seattle production. “I’d been down the road of Americanization early in my career. It turned out to be a very unfortunate choice. If you’re not an American writer, your vocabulary when you’re translating is much narrower. It’s the same as trying to squeeze Tennessee Williams into Cheltenham.”

The author of 77 plays (not including one-acts, children’s shows and holiday entertainments), Ayckbourn has directed American acting companies in two plays previously, Henceforward at The Alley Theater in 1987 and multiple engagements of By Jeeves after its stateside debut at Goodspeed Musicals in 1996. Does he find a difference when working with U.S. actors?

“Here [in Scarborough] I have the advantage,” Ayckbourn notes, “of having a rolling company and they are, to an extent, imbued with the ethos of the way I work and the style in which I write. It used to be difficult for American actors, because they went after the jokes in my stuff and fell flat on their faces – because there are none. Most of my jokes come from monosyllables like ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

“I have to ask people not to treat it like a broad English comedy. The more seriously you play my stuff, the funnier it gets. But these days, because of my age and reputation, if you like, they treat me a bit too reverently. I have to knock the reverence out of them.”

Gender and racial diversity in the arts has been a topic of discussion for as long as I can remember. But the ongoing inequities in the American theatre have been simmering for a long time. Intermittent signs of progress – Garry Hynes and Julie Taymor winning Tonys in 1997, dual firsts for women; the rich cycle of plays by August Wilson that brought a black voice to Broadway and stages across the country; the current Broadway season which featured two new plays by black female writers – are received with attention and even acclaim. Yet overall, there is general consensus that these constituencies are profoundly underrepresented.

While dissatisfaction can be directed at the commercial theatre, it is decentralized; each production is its own corporate entity and producers do not consult with all of the other producers. When it comes to new plays, as it happens, a majority of the work seen on Broadway (if not from England) has emerged from not-for-profit companies. Consequently, the publicly-funded resident theatres have become the locus of attention on these issues and, accelerated by social media, the continuing lack of meaningful process may be coming to a head.

The underrepresentation of women and racially-diverse authors on our stages has come into sharp relief recently as a result of the season announcement by The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, one of our oldest and largest companies. In announcing a season of 11 productions thus far, there are no plays by female playwrights (although a Goldoni adaptation is by Constance Congdon), no plays by any writers of color, and only one project with a female director (more accurately, a co-director, with Mark Rylance). In the outcry that ensued, it was noted that almost 10 years ago, while rallying support and funding for The Guthrie’s new home, Dowling had specifically said the new venue would allow for a greater variety of voices; responding to current criticism, he stoked the flames by invoking and decrying “tokenism.”

This prominent example generated press coverage beyond the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, let alone an ongoing rumble of dismay across blogs and Twitter. Perhaps it was Dowling’s defensiveness that made The Guthrie situation so volatile. After all, this past season, Chicago’s acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre mainstage season featured plays only by men (one an African American), and this from a theatre with a female artistic director; I don’t remember comparable outcry. Was this tempered by the season including several female directors? Or has the Guthrie flap made it easier to raise these issues?

Now each new season announcement is being held up to an accounting, not necessarily in its own board room, staff meeting or local press, but by activists seeking to lay bare this congenital issue. In 2012-13? Arizona Theatre Company: Six plays, all by white males. Seattle Rep: Eight plays, two by women, one of them African American. Alley Theatre in Houston: 11 productions, 2 by women (one of them Agatha Christie) and one by an Asian American man. Kansas City Rep: seven shows, six by men and one developed by an ensemble. Obviously I cannot go theatre by theatre, and I think more detailed data will be gathered, but underrepresentation of works by women and writers of color (of any gender) prevails. What of Steppenwolf? Their next five play season includes plays by one woman and one African-American man.

Is it fair to apply what some might call a quota system in assessing the diversity work on American stages? I would have to say, as so many of our resident theatres are on the verge of celebrating their 50^th anniversaries in the next few years, that a public declaration of these figures is not only fair, but necessary. Theatres have been asked by foundations, by corporations, by government funders to break down their staffs and boards by gender and race for years, and knowing that they were under scrutiny may have caused many companies to diversify internally more, or more quickly, than they might have otherwise. Actors Equity has conducted surveys of seasonal hiring, broken down for gender and race, for a number of years – another watchful eye. Now the focus must shift to the writers of the work on our stages if progress is to be made.

It is ironic that the civil rights movement in America is perhaps most associated with the 1960s, followed closely by the feminist movement — the very same period that coincidentally also saw the bourgeoning of the American resident theatre movement. How unfortunate that some of the language associated, for good or ill, with the first two efforts (tokenism, quotas) are even relevant in discussion of artistic breadth of the latter half a century later.