In the late days of June, as the old theatre season was ebbing away and new-season announcements were rolling in, a shock hit New York. Playwrights Horizons, the birthplace of shows including the Pulitzer Prize winners “Sunday in the Park with George” and Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” announced its programming for 2025-26. It was, in some ways, a standard mix, including works by returning Playwrights artists (John J. Caswell, Milo Cramer, Shayok Misha Chowdhury) and several writers new to its stage (Jacob Perkins, Nazareth Hassan, the writing team of Jen Tullock and Frank Winters). These days, a six-show season is a surprisingly full slate; many theatres of similar size, crippled by rolling funding crises, have reduced their offerings. But something else stood out, too: in a notably diverse lineup (the majority of lead artists are queer, and two are nonbinary), there was only one woman writer, and she occupied half a slot.

Playwrights Horizons wasn’t alone. Other major theatres revealed their programming, some of which reverted to familiar patterns from a decade ago. The Roundabout Theatre will give one slot out of four to a woman, whose work will appear in the nonprofit’s Off Broadway space. The Manhattan Theatre Club, which, like Roundabout, uses both Broadway and Off Broadway theatres, will host two plays written by women of the four shows it has announced so far; however, in what’s become a common trend, both will be produced on its smaller, and thus less remunerative, Off Broadway stage. Classic Stage Company, under its artistic director, Jill Rafson, confirmed a season of three shows, all written and directed by white men. And the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoying its first summer under its new director, Jeremy O. Harris—the playwright who, in 2021, requested to withdraw his “Slave Play” from Center Theater Group when it presented a season with only one woman in it—has zero plays written by women among its 2025 productions.

In 2015, the Lillys, a group that honors women in the American theatre, published the Count, a national survey that assessed the demographic makeup of playwrights found on the country’s stages. As one of the group’s founders, Julia Jordan, puts it, “Statistics are our superpower.” For years, advocates had been protesting the underrepresentation of women playwrights, particularly women of color, but they were getting little traction. Some theatres pointed to the canon and shrugged helplessly—was it their fault that Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Shakespeare were inconveniently male? Notably, when a theatre did program a woman, her play was relegated to the so-called “second space” or to a reading series. The Count gave theatres a way to see their place in the larger field. Individual programming choices—reflections of one theatre’s, or even one person’s, taste—looked rather different when placed in a national context.

Attention-getting methods like the Count—and, later, accountability projects such as “We See You White American Theater,” which published an extensive statement calling for the American theatre industry to address racial imbalance, as well as publishing hiring metrics on Instagram—pushed the field toward change. In 2023, the Lillys announced at its annual awards that, for the first time, New York theatres had achieved what the Lillys called “parity,” with the city’s playwriting lineups roughly paralleling the gender and racial distribution of the country at large. Was this victory? The Lillys began to think about disbanding; perhaps its work was done.

So when the new Playwrights season hit inboxes, Jordan called the company’s artistic director, Adam Greenfield, to ask what had happened. (Greenfield is a longtime friend of the Lillys; the group actually got its start at Playwrights, in 2010, back when Greenfield was still an associate artistic director, and the group holds its annual awards ceremony on the Playwrights main stage.) The Lillys told him that it wanted to convene an open meeting about what felt like a serious backsliding, and Greenfield instantly responded.

At the ensuing town hall, the Tony Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron said, “Adam acknowledged it as a ‘misstep,’ ” and noted that he quickly offered the Playwrights theatre for the occasion. Six days after the Playwrights announcement went public, a capacity crowd turned up to talk about representation and curation, and to try to imagine how to regain progress already fought for and, if temporarily, won. “We are here to mark that something seems to be amiss,” Kron said from the stage. “It feels emotional to us because this happened at Playwrights; it happened under Jeremy O. Harris. We feel these people to be our allies—they are our allies.” She went on. “Our issue is not with each other but with a system that considers one group central and the others as disposable.”

In the meeting, Jordan noted that the low representational numbers for women are difficult to square. By various measures (including the numbers of women graduating from degree programs in the arts), roughly two-thirds of the field’s writers are women—there is not, as artistic directors once argued, a pipeline issue. It seemed particularly bitter that, even as theatres made passionate arguments for diversity and new artistic directors took over from the old guard, certain habits were creeping back. Are we seeing a reflection of the country’s increasingly misogynist politics? Is there a kind of moral fatigue at play? “Last year, an all-male, all-white season didn’t exist,” Jordan said. “But this year . . . permission has been granted.”

At the meeting, Greenfield answered some questions from the crowd. “What does balance mean? In the past week, I’ve been thinking about that topic a lot.” Greenfield later wrote to me about his reasoning and about whether “misstep” actually describes his feeling about the season. “At the meeting, I wanted to immediately acknowledge that I should have prioritized women writers more in my decision-making. I see that, and I agree that it’s a shortcoming. In my efforts to uphold diversity and bring range to other aspects of the season, while staying mindful of budget constraints, I failed to make enough space for cisgendered and trans women,” he said. “But I would never call this slate of plays and artists a ‘misstep.’ I deeply love every one of the plays and artists programmed next season.”

Greenfield continued, “One of the many questions this meeting left me stewing over is, are we working from a shared definition? The definition of a ‘balanced’ season was vastly different five years ago than it is today, and it will be vastly different five years from now; it evolves alongside a global cultural conversation. Can any one season hold perfect balance from every person’s perspective?”

Rafson, from Classic Stage Company, wasn’t in attendance, but she told me later that she was aware of the paradox of announcing a season with no women in it while also strongly believing in inclusivity. “It would be wildly misleading to say I hadn’t noticed, and I feel confident that my colleagues were in a similar position. We know that it’s an issue when it’s happening,” she said. Rafson noted several factors that contributed to the situation: the brevity of a three-show season (“It is so hard to get a full representation of your theatre’s interests across so little work”) and the Classic Stage mission to reëxamine the canon (“I only have two commissions out right now. They are both to female writers doing adaptations of classics.”) “Don’t judge me by one season. Judge me by the breadth of work,” Rafson said. She takes comfort in the openness of the conversation around the issue. At least, she said, “we will not pretend that this is perfect and O.K.”

At the town hall, the question of what might happen next still seemed very much up in the air. One person suggested that artistic directors announce their next seasons early, weighting them more heavily toward women writers. One commenter levelled criticism at the Lillys for not studying another underrepresented group, disabled playwrights; others advocated for women writers over fifty. The playwright Chisa Hutchinson asked that the room stay “solution oriented” by reminding those present that women buy the majority of theatre tickets. “Show up! Buy some tickets!” she said.

And there did seem to be a certain amount of exhilaration, in fact, in the showing up itself. In the weeks after the meeting, Jordan said that she was actually feeling optimistic: “Our theatre community is so small and is so easily shamed!” She spoke warmly about Greenfield’s response, as well as Harris’s, who wrote to her immediately expressing his allyship. And—more than most—Jordan knows that this is a tide that can move back in the other direction. “There’s not that many theatres, maybe five hundred across the country, and, by and large, I would say 99.8% of them do not want to be assholes,” she said. “They don’t see themselves that way; they don’t want to be that way. Before, all we had to do was show them the mirror; once they looked in the mirror, they actually changed really quickly,” Jordan said. “So I just—I am extremely hopeful, and I feel like, if anybody can, we can make this correction of turning the ship.”

Perhaps the old strategy will work again: a public calling out, appeals to the well-meaning in power, careful application of both pressure and gratitude. But what’s worrying is how easy it was for the most conscientious among us to overlook such a huge swathe of the landscape. It’s true that it’s possible to program a diverse season—the Playwrights lineup shows a thrilling range of race, gender expression, sexuality, and artistic approach—and yet still almost ignore half the population. What is it that makes women so invisible? So many are standing right here. ♦