Why I'm not an actress

I introduce myself as an actor. It's right there in the name of this blog. I can't remember when I last chose to call myself an actress.  I don't know if it was conscious at first, but here's why.

I'm an actor because actors have more options.  Actors play the hero or the comic relief or the villain.  They're at the center of the action, the one the story is about.  That's who I want to be.  Actors are the total package - a voice and a body and technique and more.

I can feel objectification in the word actress - it's not too different from the word starlet, somehow.  And starlets are usually hot or sultry or sexy, and not much beyond.  For me, there's also something in this word that connects to the ideas in the poem/story  'Ladies First'  written by Shel Silverstein and read by Marlo Thomas on Free to Be You & Me, the supremely awesome 70's collection of poems and songs and stories with an anti-gender stereotype message.  The protagonist of 'Ladies First' is a 'tender sweet young thing' who goes on safari, and keeps insisting on special treatment, and meets an untimely end.  I'm not looking to be treated differently because of my gender, and identifying as an actress feels like I'm asking for that.

Ultimately though, it comes down to this: there are women's films (chick flicks), women's novels (chick lit) and women's plays.  But the other category isn't men's films, men's novels or men's plays - those are just called films, novels and plays.
I'd like to see the various 'stories for women' categories become 'stories for humans' categories.  And I think part of the way to get there, is to use a gender-neutral term for what I do.  I act.  I'm an actor.

Do other people feel this way about the word actress?  I'm very curious...

Counting Actors May 2012

8 Shows Counted:
Impact/Crevice
ACT/Play & Endgame (count below does not include local union understudies 2m,1w)
Aluminous Collective/Dusk Rings a Bell
Playground/Best of Playground 16 (festival of 7 short plays with 7 directors, 7 writers and 2 composers incl. as writers below)
San Jose Rep/The Understudy
Shotgun/Great Divide
Cutting Ball/Tenderloin (the director and writer are the same person - piece is a collage of first person interviews collected by the artists involved)
Berkeley Playhouse/Lucky Duck (not credited as actors below are 21 youth performers, 19f, 2m, 2 credited as directors on this piece are director and music director, 3 credited as writers are the music/book/lyrics writers)
City Lights/In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play

The Stats:
5 male directors, 11 female directors
12 male writers, 7 female writers
63 total actors, 34 male, 29 female
21 union actors, 42 non-union actors
12 union men, 9 union women
60 local actors, 3 non-local

Thanks so much to all who helped count this month, including Melissa Hillman, Karen Thompson Hall and Alona Bach

Please share these stats with others, use them to start conversations, and if you see a show or are working on a show with June performances, go here to learn more about how to share the stats w/this project. 

June stats will go up between July 1 and July 5.

large female casts, women at tech conferences & counting actors reminder

Some fantastic links to point out:

First, a list of plays with 6 or more characters, and 5 or more roles for women is here.  Lots of links, lots of opportunties.

Next, an OT article with a lot of resonances for the theater field is Courtney Stanton's 'How I got 50% Women Speakers at my tech conference'  Take a look!  (and thanks Alicia Coombes for the link).

Also, if you've seen a show or are working on a show with performances in May, send me that info so it can be included in the May Counting Actors post.  It's not too early to send in things for June too! How to send is here.