In my preview of this year’s summer theater season (“The Rohmann Ratio,” June 11) I made a tally of upcoming productions written and/or directed by women, or with women characters in central roles. Of the 49 productions I surveyed, 33 fulfilled at least one of the criteria and 16 satisfied more than one — encouraging in a national theater environment in which women continue to be underrepresented.
That third criterion, women characters, deserved more attention, I thought. Just how many women would we see in juicy, center-stage roles, and how many women would be on stage in comparison to their male colleagues? So during these summer months I’ve been keeping track of those two benchmarks, and here are the results.
The 37 professional productions I saw this summer at 10 area theaters put a total of 99 women and 122 men on stage, a better ratio than the national average. And 28 of those shows had women in leading roles.
Beyond the stats, I found a majority of the summer’s standout performances were by women — in many cases outshining their male costars. They included Jessica Hecht in a brilliantly textured performance as a midlife mother in the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Legacy; Jane Pfitsch, who nailed the style, swagger and velocity of screwball comedy in His Girl Friday at Barrington Stage; and Kate Baldwin, the epitome of ’50s high spirits in the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Bells Are Ringing. Jeannine Haas convincingly embodied a feisty nonagenarian in Pauline Productions’ 4000 Miles, and Audra McDonald’s luminous performance brought a provocative new dimension to A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill’s tale of lies and longing at WTF.
Several impressive pairs of women performers anchored strong productions. Cate Damon and Sue Dziura balanced fierceness and poignancy as a conflicted social worker and an evangelical foster mother in Luna Gale at New Century Theatre. Keira Naughton and Linda Gehringer locked horns humorously and painfully as an unwilling foster mom and her own eccentric mother in BTG’s I Saw My Neighbor on the Train and I Never Even Smiled. Kelley Curran and Cloteal L. Horne were hilariously trashy in a Jersey Shore take on The Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare & Company.
I was struck repeatedly this summer by performers who stayed emotionally alive even when the focus of a scene wasn’t on them. I’m thinking especially of Susanna Apgar, the earth-mother always a step ahead of disaster in Silverthorne Theater Company’s The Skin of Our Teeth; Therese Plaehn, making organic transitions in the back-and-forth of the two-hander Blink at Chester Theatre Company; Corinna May, her very stillness radiating suppressed feeling in The Unexpected Man at S&Co; Ravin Patterson, quietly eloquent as the black servant girl who’s all but invisible to her white employers, in S&Co’s Red Velvet; and Emery Henderson, feeling every rip as her family tears itself apart in New Century’s The Little Foxes.
Patterson and Henderson were exciting young newcomers to the summer stages. So were Nicolette Robinson, coolly navigating a houseful of men in Barrington’s A Little More Alive; Ashley Malloy, a teen mother battling addiction in Luna Gale; Caitlyn Griffin, reaching for identity in Memory House at Chester; and Mary Wiseman, torn between love, duty and faith in Off the Main Road at WTF.
Several of these remarkable young women were featured in plays centering on mother/daughter relationships, where they paired with seasoned veterans — Griffin with Debra Jo Rupp in Memory House, Henderson with Aimee Doherty in The Little Foxes, and Wiseman with Kyra Sedgwick in Off the Main Road. At S&Co, Bridget Saracino made a volatile foil for Tod Randolph in The How and the Why, and Anne Troup was a tenacious Joan of Arc opposite Tina Packer in Mother of the Maid.•
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann.
