THE COUNT 3.0, a program of The Dramatists Guild and The Lillys Foundation
“THE COUNT studies whose plays get produced on American stages—and whose don’t.”
RESEARCH PROJECT: The Count 3.0
COVERAGE: Count 1.0: 2011-2014; Count 2.0: 2014-17; Count 3.0 2017-2020
RESEARCH PARTNERS: The Lillys and The Dramatists Guild of America. Graphics by Bekka Lindstrom.
Begun in 2010 as part of the advocacy efforts of the Lilly Awards, in partnership with The Dramatists Guild, THE COUNT studies whose plays get produced on American stages, whose get revived, whose get a shot at entering the canon—and whose don’t. We gather production data from a diverse sample of 147 not-for-profit theatres nationwide, as chosen by The Dramatists Guild regional representatives. The focus is on theaters that produce contemporary work. THE COUNT studies gender, race, and nationality of the creators of plays and musicals. Due to the size of the data set and intersectionality, we could only reliably break down race into two groups, BIPOC and white. THE COUNT collects national statistics and breaks them down by region and city. Our findings are presented in three-year installments, in hopes of creating a dynamic record of change over time.
BACKGROUND: Previous to the inception of THE COUNT, The Lillys tracked productions in New York City by gender only. In 2007/8, the percentage of plays by women in NYC theaters with over 99 seats was under 13%. In 2008/9, Sarah Schulman and I hosted two townhalls and, later, I instigated an economic study of playwrights and gender that shed light on the systemic nature of the disparity in production. All three events were covered by The NY Times. The following year, 2009/10, the percentage of plays by women in NYC rose from 13% to nearly 39%, a height we have not reached since. The women produced that year, many for the first time in NYC, are our leading playwrights today: Annie Baker (two plays), Young Jean Lee, Sarah Ruhl (two plays), Bekka Brunstetter, Charlayne Woodard, Moira Buffini, Melissa James Gibson, Anna Deveare Smith, Polly Stenham, Leslye Headland, Claudia Shear, Rebecca Gilman, Lucinda Coxon, Lucy Thurber, Sheila Callaghan, and many, many more.
FINDINGS OF THE COUNT: In 2014, THE COUNT 1.0 found that the percentage of productions by women in NYC slipped back to 25%, while nationally it stood at 22%. The percentage of individual female writers who had at least one production stood at a mere 14% nationally.
When compiling THE COUNT 2.0, we decided that it was more informative and accurate to track the individual writers themselves, and not their productions, as our main metric. This is because we did not want to leave people with the impression that representation had been achieved due to the success of a single playwright when far fewer voices in her demographic were actually being heard. One playwright, especially in a smaller demographic such as female and BIPOC, can wildly swing percentages when she has nearly forty productions in one year. For example, this past year, Dominique Morrisseau was the most produced playwright in the entire data set, with multiple productions of multiple plays. If we had used productions as our metric, instead of individual writers, it would appear that BIPOC women were now fully represented. In fact, only 9% of playwrights who were produced in the past year were BIPOC women, though they comprise 20% of the U.S population and, according to membership at The Playwrights Center and New Dramatists, slightly more than 20% of our playwrights.
THE COUNT 2.0 saw some growth in representation on national stages of work by women generally, as well as a smaller increase in representation of work by men of color. Still, our stages continue to be dominated by white male-identified writers, at numbers out of proportion to national demographics, as well as to indicators of the demographics of the theatre specifically (i.e., who trains for it, who enters the profession, and who is represented in non-producing playwright development centers). It should be noted that men, both BIPOC and white, are under-represented in undergrad literature and performing arts degrees. White women are over-represented, and BIPOC women are fully represented and have been for quite some time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
THE COUNT 1.0 and 2.0 Percentages: Who Gets Produced:
American White Men dropped from 62.7% to 54.7%
American White Women rose from 14% to 20.5%
American BIPOC Men rose from 6% to 7.6%
American BIPOC Women rose from 3.4% to 6.1%
Foreign White Men dropped from 10.6% to 7.7%
Foreign White Women dropped from 2.5% to 1.6%
Foreign BIPOC Men and women were less that 1% in both COUNTS.
Those who identified as American Trans or Non-Binary were a mere .3% in COUNT 2.0
THE COUNT 3.0 will be published in mid-Oct 2021.
THE COUNT 4.0 will mark the 10th thru 12th year of the project. We have been tracking revivals, which we define as plays occurring ten years after their premiere. We hope to see a rise in the diversity of playwrights of revivals that mirrors the increases we’ve been tracking over the past decade.