What is the impact of our work?

“If life were like theatre, four out of every five things you ever heard would have been said by a man.”

Marsha Norman, playwright

Artistic impact

As artists, as women, and as human beings, we have important ideas to share and the theatre is the way we share them. Women are 51% of the United States population, yet are still less than 30% of the professionally produced playwrights. Women are allowed fewer opportunities to direct, to act, and to design. Women are 60% of theatrical audiences, but only 43% of the characters on stage and 14.3% of the directors behind the scenes. By creating a space and a place where women are in charge of choosing, writing and creating the stories being told, we validate our experiences for ourselves and for our audiences. It’s not just about providing opportunities for women, it’s about telling honest stories about all of us who live in the world. All of us.

Professional impact

By building a mentoring community within the broader theatre ecosystem, TSGP will provide women the most powerful tool they need for getting the next job and for finding a way to create the next project: a former collaborator and future recommendation in their back pocket. The Shattered Glass Project will serve as a nexus for women theatre artists to support, collaborate in and further one another’s careers beyond TSGP; and will serve as one more greenhouse contributing to the health of Seattle’s theatre community.

Feminists work to overcome the internal obstacles to choice – self-abnegation, lack of confidence, and low self-esteem – that women often face from internalizing norms of femininity.

Elizabeth Anderson, philosophy professor

Rather than accepting the existing assumptions about what a woman is and then trying to prove that she fit the standards, [Sojourner] Truth challenged the very standards themselves.

Patricia Hill Collins | author, “Black Feminist Thought”

Social impact

The theatre is already a special world with a powerful impact on both its creators and audience members. In the ArtsFund report “Social Impact of the Arts Study”, art of any kind is described as being “sticky”, functioning as a universal language that can transcend socially constructed differences. Theatre is particularly sticky - not only does it transcend barriers of gender, race, economic status but what we see and feel sticks with us and is carried away to change the world. TSGP uses theatre as the artistic tool that translates the lived experience of women and women artists for the broader world in a way that will transform the audience as they return to their own everyday lives.

Community impact

TSGP is emotionally and artistically rooted in the theatre community, and physically rooted in the Madrona and Madison Valley neighborhoods, as well as the broader Central District. By choosing to locate in a neighborhood with a rich cultural history of music and visual arts as well as a deeply rooted African-American cultural influence, with restaurants and shopping, libraries, schools and community activities, but no performing arts base, The Shattered Glass Project will be an ally to other cultural organizations, and fill an unoccupied niche in an otherwise rich cultural environment.

Theaters, like grapes, grow best in bunches.

Gregory Falls, founder, A Contemporary Theatre