Fair play Martha Richards on women in the arts BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Fresh fare Perishable Theatre’s 12th Annual International Women’s Playwriting Festival will take place through October 30, with three one-act winners culled from 270 plays submitted from five countries. This year’s selections are: • The Dog, written by Holly Hildebrand and directed by Becca Wolff. It follows the exploits of a young student struggling to survive her teacher’s terror alerts in 1962, during Cold War fears of the Russians coming. Our own species is suddenly not the most comforting. • Gone With the Window, written by Jennifer Haley and directed by Vanessa Gilbert. This comedy revisits Margaret Mitchell’s classic tale of the South, relocating the conflicts to modern-day corporate America. • How High the Moon?, written by J.C. Samuels and directed by Brooke O’Harra. A 15-year-old Minneapolis girl and a young man from Rwanda meet at a bus stop and help each other look toward the future. On October 2 at 10 p.m., performance artist Holly Hughes will present excerpts from her new work, Preaching to the Perverted, which addresses issues of civil liberties and the US Supreme Court. Tickets are $20. On October 3 at 3 p.m., there will be staged readings of winning one-act plays in this year’s Women’s IMPACT high school competition. Admission is free. Call 621-6123. — B.R.

This year, all of the action at Perishable Theatre’s 12th Annual Women’s Playwriting Festival isn’t taking place on stage. "What Do You Know, Dude? The Politics of Women and Theatre in 2004," a sure-to-be lively panel discussion, will take place off-stage on Saturday, October 2 at 4 p.m. at the space on Empire Street in downtown Providence.

Moderating will be Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, head of the graduate playwriting program at Brown. The three speakers were also well-chosen, representing distinct areas of the subject. Holly Hughes is an internationally recognized performance artist, who will perform at Perishable that evening; Morgan Jenness is creative director at the New York literary agency Helen Merrill Ltd.; and Martha Richards is executive director of the Fund for Women Artists, based in the Berkshires (www.womenarts.org).

While Richards stresses that she has never been an artist, she has helped to solve their problems for more than 30 years. First she worked at Brooklyn College’s performing arts center, eventually as its executive director, and then she was managing director of StageWest, a regional theater company in Springfield, Massachusetts. She brings a degree in economics and experience as a practicing lawyer to the problems of artists of every genre, which is what her organization deals with. Since 1994, the Fund for Women Artists has assisted artists in various ways, from advocacy, fundraising, and management services to, in recent years, providing individual grants.

Richards spoke by phone recently about the state of women in the arts and the arts themselves.

Q: The theater used to be pretty much a boys’ club. What changes in gender issues have you seen in the arts in your time?

A: I worked at StageWest, where we had five years with only one woman playwright there. The New York State Council on the Arts did a study two years ago that showed that of the 2000 plays produced nationally, women directed only 16 percent of them and only wrote 17 percent of the plays.

Q: And that’s gone down recently, after having gone up steadily for several years.

A: Yeah. So it’s not as though we’ve made huge progress in this area. There’s a lot of room for growth. I think that also the film and television statistics are kind of scary, because in fact quite a few more people go to movies and watch television than go to the theater. So to see that those numbers are still so low is pretty daunting.

Q: What are the factors that keep things from advancing as they should?

A: Martha Lauzen, who’s done a lot of the studies — you see her quoted on my website under advocacy — she has said that when women get behind the scenes more, there tend to be many more women characters and representations of women in movies and TV, which is what she studied. I think that that’s a lot of the problem — that women are locked out of jobs across the board . . . When you have women on the team, that changes the conversation. If there’s a woman in the room, there is someone advocating on behalf of women.

Q: One would think that since we artsy folks consider ourselves so much more high-minded than the rest of humanity, social advances and gender issues would be solved in this forum much sooner than at large.

A: You’d think so. I’ve always been kind of shocked at that myself. You think of arts people as being very progressive. I’m not sure it’s completely true. Because if you look at the institutional settings — think about the large arts institutions that you know and who are the key donors to those organizations. Especially these days, since there’s so little government funding, we’re more and more reliant on wealthy individuals, who are often more conservative.

After the Mapplethorpe crisis in the early ’90s, government agencies became much more conservative and careful because they were under so much relentless attack for that. If you want to look at who was funding works by artists of color or just more experimental works, it was often the government, the state, or federal arts agencies. That’s really not true anymore. I think five states have had legislation pending or are considering the option of completely eliminating their state arts council. Here in Massachusetts, the state arts funding got cut by 64 percent two years ago. California was more than 90 percent cut two years ago.

I think this is the biggest problem. For women looking for funding, there are a bunch of different problems. First of all, there’s less arts funding available these days than there was earlier in my career. Government funding has dramatically dropped. Foundation funding, it’s just more competitive because there are so many more people and so many social service programs that aren’t getting funded by the government anymore, so there is competition for that. Corporate funding has shifted. It tends to be more about a public relations effort for the corporation, so a lot of women’s work, if it’s about some challenging social issue, whether abortion or domestic violence or even war and peace, that may not be a very appealing thing for a corporation to want to fund, if they’re mainly concerned about what their public image is going to be.

Q: You cite the stereotyping of women in the arts as a separate concern. Because that’s the root problem?

A: Partly it’s because it’s the problem that I respond to the most, personally, as a woman. I mean, I turn on a TV and I see all young blond skinny people! (Laughs) I’m in reasonably good shape, but I’m never going to look like that!

As a woman who’s aging, you realize: "Geez, there are not very many people who look like me on television, or in the films for that matter." I want my stories told. Not necessarily my personal story, but I want to at least see somebody in my general age group who’s still a functioning member of the world. The other thing for me is I grew up in a family where my mother was a lawyer. And I could see how much she struggled with that. She went to law school back in the ’50s, and she was one of three people in her class — it was considered very unusual for there to be any women lawyers. I worked in her office for a long time as a kid. I could hear her on the phone with male lawyers, and they were clearly being condescending and she was fighting back. It takes its toll. And then in my own career I kept observing how I’m treated as a woman employee as compared to a male employee with similar skills. It’s something most women are quite aware of.