“And All the Men Merely Players: Gender in the Classical Theater” (2021-2022)

At the beginning of the drafting process for this essay, I had no idea what I wanted to write. My professor had encouraged our class to orchestrate questions that we could not answer without substantial research and I really took that instruction to heart. I tried again and again to form questions about topics I thought would be valuable or interesting. Each time I attempted to write through those questions, I got stuck. First I decided to write about the naturalist movement in film, then the naturalist movement in theatre, then the ethics of documentary filmmaking, then media division in the US, and by that point I was fed up with writing drafts and scrapping them. In all honesty, developing this essay was deeply frustrating. Reflecting on it now, I see that I spent the bulk of my time trying to find a topic I thought was smart, original, and important to the rest of the world. I finally landed on gender inequity in theatre education when I asked myself what questions I actually wanted to answer and what problems I actually wanted to solve. The desire to research why sexism persists in arts education stemmed from my own experience attending an arts high school, where, despite my directors’ and teachers’ best of intentions, I was systematically treated as less than my male equivalents. Art is indicative of the culture and values of a given paradigm and I therefore thought it crucial to find ways to detangle gender inequity from the institutions that shape our art. I started by learning why inequality exists in those institutions in the first place. After writing “And All the Men Merely Players,” I realized that the uniqueness of my writing did not come from the most innovative topic, but from the specificity of the topic’s meaning to me.

Ella Webb (Tisch ’24), originally from California, is a drama major in the Meisner Studio at the Tisch School of the Arts. Introduced to the world of arts nonprofits by her mother at a young age, Ella became interested in exploring how artistic media, specifically performance, could help people to heal. Given her hopes of making performance more accessible to communities and individuals impacted by trauma, Ella thought it essential to investigate the inequities within our performance institutions. Her essay, “And All The Men Merely Players,” tackles the role of gender in theatre education in order to democratize an artform that remains dominated by male participants and influences.