My first question (which I said to myself, out loud in an incredulous tone) was, "Why do they keep doing these shows?!" These were two well-established theatres, whose producers and directors had to be well aware of the available acting pool in the community, and yet they produce male-heavy shows, knowing full well they will spend auditions making difficult decisions about the preponderance of excellent female actors all vying for the few good female roles, then spend the next week trying to find males that can stand in one place without falling over. Never mind acting, can they speak English well? Do they understand the basic principles behind walking from one spot to another? Cast that guy!

Believe me, I’m not trying to say we don’t have great male actors in this community, we do, and plenty of them. But a look at the numbers will tell you why they’re not available. For every Steel Magnolias that’s produced, there’s a couple of Glengarry Glen Ross(es), a few 12 Angry Men and the odd-er, Odd Couple. Sure, sometimes there’s gender-blind casting, (though one should never attempt that with Mamet without safety goggles) but that’s rarely done for artistic reasons so much as absolute necessity because three of your four male auditioners for I’m Not Rappaport are teenagers and one can’t seem to get rid of that funny gesture he uses to punctuate his verbs.

As a hard example, I took a look at the previous fall calendar, and it looked something like this (with speaking roles in parentheses); The Foreigner (5m,2f), Damn Yankees (16m,6f), Corpus Christi (13m,0f), The Nerd (7m,2f), The Boys Next Door (7m,2f), The Complete Word of God - Abridged (3m,0f), One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (13m, 4f) and Drift (4m,3f). That totals up to 68 male speaking roles to 19 female roles, or a ratio of roughly 7-2. I don’t have the specific demographics for the Charlotte acting community, but at just about every audition I’ve been to, over half the auditioners were female.

What to do? We can only produce Crimes of the Heart and Nunsense so many times. Well, there’s no simple solution, this isn’t only about the work that’s out there, it’s about the work that gets chosen for production, what we think audiences want to see, and this very real male-centric patriarchal culture in which we live and create. We are taught that male characters are universal while females are not. We want to survive as arts companies, so we must give the audience what we think they want. But it takes only a little bravery to make small changes, to go beyond a few creative gender-switches in the cast; Introducing new works by female playwrights, hiring more women in management and production, writing more and better roles for women, telling women’s stories. But before all that we simply have to acknowledge there’s a problem. Since I have the floor, I’ll do that for you. THIS IS A PROBLEM!

But it’s fixable. And the good news is, it looks like we’re starting to fix it. Chickspeare, of course, has been on a serious mission to provide great opportunities for women to play the great classic roles for years. Actor’s Theatre’s season has greatly improved upon last year’s in terms of the number and quality of women’s roles. You can see some great female characters in action on stage right now in their production of The Waiting Room, as well as BareBone’s upcoming production of Eleemosynary.

It’s a slow evolution that requires continued effort. Talented women are walking away from audition after audition, wondering where all the roles are. Let’s not lose them, let’s keep stretching and reaching beyond the tired old male-centric traditions. We can create better opportunities and at the same time show the audience how wonderful, passionate and universal the female story is.

~ Stan Peal