The Flip Side: Women Artists Are Also Just Artists

News>The Flip Side

/By Hannah Antaki / May 24, 2016

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Women featured prominently in theatre news this week. Refreshingly, this is pure happenstance. Apparently we’re getting to a place where some of the most interesting theatre-related reading are features and articles about female artists that have nothing to do with the fact they’re female. It’s not everyday (yet) that women artists creating thought-provoking, innovative work are reported on merely for their work and not for the fact that they accomplished their work as females. So congrats world, progress is being made! And now, negating all such progress, I shall list a few of the articles below under the heading:

“Interesting Articles about Women in Theatre – May 2016”

• The first, written by J. Holtham for American Theatre, celebrates the work of the legendary Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun.

• The second highlights a very bold group of women who have chosen—that is, willingly volunteered—to perform Shakespeare naked in Central Park [1] in an effort to “promote the normalization of the naked female body.”

• The third is an interview with Broadway star Laura Benanti. Okay, so she discusses being a feminist (as she should; she has interesting, important things to say), but let’s be honest, the “career-spanning stage retrospective” of her work held last week wasn’t staged because she’s a woman. It was staged because she’s an exquisite talent.

In other, less female-centric news:

• Cara Joy David writes an interesting piece about how Broadway’s cell phone problem, which really is a problem in theatres across the globe (I’ve had to tap the person in front of me on the shoulder to say “Um, excuse me, you’re blocking my view with your iPad, do you mind finding some common sense and courtesy and putting it away?”) might actually be caused, at least in part, by the theatres themselves.

• Dom O’Hanlon, writing for London Theatre, turns the spotlight on the unsung heroes of theatre: the understudies.

• And finally, London Theatre sat down with Rupert Goold, the artistic director of the Almeida, for a chat about his illustrious career, which only appears to be picking up speed.

 

 

[1] Central Park is visited by roughly 42 million people each year. It’s not exactly secluded.

WRITTEN BY

Hannah Antaki

Hannah works in casting, the only profession that allows her to truthfully use work as an excuse to stay home and watch TV. A dropout of both preschool and law school, she loves Montreal bagels, Harry Potter, and conversations about diversity. Her diet starts tomorrow.

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