DID YOU KNOW?

• The first known playwright in Christian Europe was Hrotsvitha, a tenth-century German nun.

• In Yuan Dynasty China (1271-1368), women frequently appeared onstage — in fact, it’s likely that most Yuan Dynasty actors were women.

• In Mantua, Italy, in the 1560s, two women achieved celebrity as actresses and managers of troupes performing commedia dell’arte.

• Kabuki was invented by a woman.

• The first woman to appear in a Shakespeare play did so in 1660 — 44 years after Shakespeare’s death.

• Playwright Aphra Behn was one of the first women to earn her living as a writer.

• Female playwrights had better odds of being produced in eighteenth century London than they do in today’s United States, according to scholar Melinda C. Finberg.

• Twentieth-century impresario Minnie Fiske was one of the first producers to bring Henrik Ibsen’s plays to the United States.

• Girls and women slightly outnumber boys and men in the population of the United States, but male characters significantly outnumber female characters in plays, television shows and movies.

• In a typical year, less than 20% of the plays produced in the United States are written by a woman.

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