Women Directors Take Broadway

"This has been something of a banner year for female directors in New York, a development that wouldn’t be worth noting if it weren’t so rare. In July alone three new Off Broadway shows directed by women (including Ms. Ivey) are beginning previews. On Broadway eight shows last season — a record — had a woman in charge, with most of them garnering outsize praise for their work. “Hair,” directed by Diane Paulus, won the Tony for best musical revival this month, for example, while Phyllida Lloyd is one of the few directors — male or female — to have two shows running simultaneously (“Mamma Mia!,” which has raked in a fortune over the last eight years, and the new entrant, “Mary Stuart,” which earned Ms. Lloyd a Tony nomination).

“It’s getting better and better,” said Ms. Ivey, 57, during a break between rehearsals. The fourth-floor studio is air-conditioned to ice-cream store temperatures, so she wears a lime-green scarf wrapped around her neck. On her feet are colorful tapestry slippers. How often, she asked, do middle-aged women without an Olympic-type record get a crack at directing a show? “I feel that’s what Second Stage is doing for me,” Ms. Ivey said. She has directed a few plays in recent years but no musicals before this new version of Jack Heifner’s 1976 show. “They are giving me a chance.”

That chance, however, is something that does not come as easily or as frequently for female directors as it does for their male counterparts, many people in the theater contend.

Leigh Silverman, 35, who directed “Well” on Broadway in 2006 and the musical version of Neil Gaiman’s children’s tale “Coraline,” which is running Off Broadway, is optimistic about the uptick in directing jobs for women. “I think it is really exciting,” she said. “There were multiple women nominated for Tonys this year. In the short range it’s incredibly encouraging.” Still, she maintains: “It’s not a level playing field. There is no parity.”

Pretty much everyone in the business is quick to acknowledge that with so much money at stake, it’s understandable that producers want to work with people they know, and with people who have already had box-office success. Such established directors are generally men.

“It’s a self-perpetuating circle,” Ms. Paulus, 42, said after slipping into a recent matinee of “Hair.” “That’s why I’m so grateful to Oskar Eustis,” the artistic director of the nonprofit Public Theater, who hired her to direct the initial production that ran in Central Park last summer. “He has opened the Public up to the next generation of artists. He said, ‘Who are the young directors, the up-and-coming directors I need to meet?’""