So who is being produced in the American Theater?

“The numbers of The Count are useful because they lift us above the experience of any one playwright to give us a broad view of the field as a whole. Without numbers, there are only whining playwrights and their personal feelings. And the fact is, every single playwright has at some point believed that they wrote a better play than someone else who got produced. So when playwrights who aren’t white men say that they’re not getting the chances they deserve, it’s easy to think, “Right, join the club. That’s what it’s like to be a playwright.” And for those inclined to dismiss claims of bias, the Annie Bakers, Sarah Ruhls, Lynn Nottages, and Tarell McCraneys of the world are “proof” that white women and men and women of color are doing just fine, or even that they’re dominating the field in some way. But the numbers show otherwise. The numbers make it inarguably clear that these shining lights are exceptions to the rule.

We suggest that the answer can be found in the very word engendering so much anxiety: diversity. A diversity of perspectives is the fundamental requirement for dramatic action. Plays are made of the inevitable, unavoidable limitation of any individual perspective, the incompleteness of any single narrative, and the dire consequences of believing your own narrative is sufficient or globally true.

It’s the human condition: From where I’m standing, I can see all kinds of things that you can’t see because you’re standing somewhere else, and you don’t even know to wonder about what I see, because you could only know it exists if you were standing where I’m standing. This phenomenon of limited consciousness is our medium as dramatists: in essence, all plays are about what we can’t know and what it costs us. We see this play out in its most exquisite, terrible form at climactic dramatic moments —the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet, for example. But all pieces of theater turn on this reality: the essential human experience of limited consciousness.

And yet, the theater performs a sweet, miraculous paradox: through witnessing people stumbling around on stage trapped inside their limited perspectives, we in the audience are liberated from our own silos of isolation, if only for a moment. Theater makes us see our separateness so that we may feel our connectedness. We feel the joy of participating in something larger than ourselves —theater offers the unique pleasure of a group process of imaginative construction, as a play only exists in the moment of co-creation with an audience. And then there is the transcendent expansion of the soul we feel when someone else’s humanity is made legible to us on stage. The more separate we as spectators think we are from that character to begin with, the bigger the leap across the empathetic divide a piece of theater allows us to make, the more thrilled we are.”