“For our first 17 seasons we really focused on the mid-20th-century masters... people who are in the theater textbooks,” says Profile Theatre Interim Artistic Director Lauren Bloom Hanover. “Because of the nature of our society, those people generally were white and male.... The people who are going to be be the 21st-century masters are a much more diverse pool of people, and that’s really exciting and we want to be be part of establishing the canon of this new century... and making sure that canon is inclusive.”
That’s the thinking behind the local theater company’s commitment to deliberately producing diverse plays. “We have featured primarily white men,” says Hanover. “Let’s commit for three years to just absolutely do something different. For three years, we will only feature female playwrights and playwrights of color.”
It’s a common-sense response to a deep-seated, well-documented lack of diversity and gender equity in theater. According to the Dramatists Guild of America, a national organization of theater professionals which surveys theater companies across the country to get a breakdown of who’s being produced, only 22 percent of productions from three theater seasons between 2011 and 2014 came from female playwrights. The numbers were even worse for playwrights of color, whose plays accounted for a paltry 12 percent of productions. Regionally, Portland’s numbers were even lower: Only 18 percent of productions from theaters surveyed were written by women, and only 10.4 percent came from writers of color.