5 Playwriting Principles from Don Zolidis: Writing More Parts For Girls

Walk into just about any theatre classroom in the country (or in the world) and you're going to see one thing right away: There are more girls than boys.

My first theatre class as a middle school teacher had 14 girls and 2 boys in it. (Try finding a play with that gender split.) I ended up adapting Hamlet, setting it in a juvie home for girls, which was the first Shakespeare play I tackled.

And most of the plays written in the western canon have exactly the opposite problem: more male roles than female. And not only that, male characters are generally the ones driving the action. (I also found, as a teacher, that my girls tended to be stronger actors than the boys, because they’d been encouraged to be involved in theatre more from a young age.)

With most of my work I want the female roles to be at the center of the story. I was very conscious, as I was choosing the plays to adapt for HOW TO SURVIVE BEING IN A SHAKESPEARE PLAY, to choose as many parts with strong female roles as possible. Since I was focusing on death, this was a little tricky, since most of the people who end up being stabbed in wars are men. But it did give me some direction on where to look.

For Shakespeare, though, there’s ample precedent for casting any gender in any role. Obviously, we all know that the “female” roles were all cast with young boys in Shakespeare’s time. Gender-bending is a common occurrence in many of his comedies. So there’s absolutely no reason that any “male” role couldn’t be cast today with a female-presenting person. Why can’t Othello be a woman? Why can’t we see Richard III cast with a girl?

Once again, the theatricality of theatre is a resource. The characteristics of the actor are never going to line up perfectly with the character, so why are we insistent that the gender of the actor match? If you tell the audience that this character is male, the audience will believe them. We tell them that this character is King of England, and the audience seems to buy that too, even though the character is clearly being played by a teenager.

More Playwriting Principles from Don Zolidis:

Writing for the New Digital Landscape
The Imagination is King or Queen
Writing Small Parts
Dealing with the Visual
The Joy of Making Fun of Shakespeare

About the Play:

How to Survive Being in a Shakespeare Play (Virtual Version)
By Don Zolidis

Some day it’s going to happen: You’re going to find yourself on stage, wearing tights, and saying things in iambic pentameter. Face it, you’re in a Shakespeare play, and that means it’s a pretty good bet you’re going to DIE. The Bard is out for blood, but this play is here to stop him! How could Romeo and Juliet survive? Julius Caesar? A nameless soldier in Henry the Fifth? What if King Lear had an emotional support llama and didn’t need to make terrible mistakes? Join us in discovering how a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays could’ve turned out differently! If only they listened...

One-act, 30-60 minutes. 10-50+ actors, gender flexible.