Theatre audience demographics

Mostly what I'm getting from this thread is that men think sexism is no big deal and white people think racism is nbd.

It doesn't matter one jot if people who generally superserved complain about isolated shows, companies or venues which offer something different and not to their personal taste.

But it does matter if no one is offering anything at all to underserved audience sectors.

Isn't "buddy" just autocorrect for "burly"? (In which case count your blessings, it might have come up with "Bundy".)

As a female, I would certainly like to see more plays with strong female roles - or even with a few more parts for women, thinking of some I've seen recently, which had few or none. But I certainly don't wish to see women playing roles written for men, as to me that's just gimmickry. Luckily it seems mainly to happen with Shakespeare and I simply don't go to see any Shakespeare anyway, so I'm spared; just hope it doesn't spread too far.

In films at least it's incredibly difficult for open gay actors to play straight roles. Women can't sleep with them, men don't want to be them. It's prob different in theatre as its infamous for the pink pound

For me, theatre is an extremely unrealistic artform. A good show will always mine real emotional depths, but the method of getting there is pure artifice. For example! If a film or TV show has a scene set in, say, a living room, they will either build a beautifully realistic living room set, or they'll find a real living room that suits their needs and film in it. Either way, the finished product is a scene that takes place in what has every appearance of being a real living room. Theatre does this too, of course it does, but it's just as likely that they'll present you with a bare wooden stage, or a perspex box, or a couple of upturned milk-crates, and leave you to fill in the gaps yourself.

So with all the many inherently unrealistic ways of telling the story that theatre presents, why on earth would it bother me if there's a woman playing a man, or a black actor playing a Swedish character, or a homosexual playing a heterosexual, or a human playing a dog (or three humans playing a horse)? I mean, if people take the built-in flexibility of casting and use it to put straight white able-bodied men in all the roles with a weak cry of "but it's ALL pretend" when people question the blinding lack of diversity, then we've got a problem. But if people look at a play and go "well, there's literally no reason why we can't have that role played by a woman, or why that role can't be played by a deaf actor, and there's nothing in the text that would be affected if we had this character played by an Asian actor, so let's do it", then it's a great way to ensure representation and visibility of all types of people on stage while simultaneously not actually "ruining" anything, because theatre is so very very open to creativity and interpretation in a way you'd rarely get away with in other media to begin with.

To be fair I did ask the women on the board if they where more likely to go see production with gender blind cast as there is the idea that colour blind casting atracts more minorities. Chill

I am very keen on gender blind casting (and blind casting in other cases). Just that if the gender blind casting produces a result one way or another it is unlikely (on its own) to affect my choice of whether I go to see a production.

Sorry, Baemax, I did not mean to say your ways of deciding are foolish - it was just an attempt to say how I would feel about myself if I preferred a predominantly male cast on principle.