New York Times: Taking Your Child to Work, When Your Job Is Making Theater

6 November 2018

By Michael Paulson

There were babies at Studio 54.

That’s not a reference to actors dissatisfied with their dressing rooms or patrons griping about their seats.

It’s just that the play now being performed here — a journalism comedy, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones and Bobby Cannavale, called “The Lifespan of a Fact” — is the first on Broadway with an all-female design team. Most of them have children. And several of those children are very young.

Theater organizations are experimenting with programs to help women with children, like the projection designer Lucy Mackinnon (with her son Oscar), juggle careers and motherhood. Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times.

So when Leigh Silverman, the director of the play, was putting together her team, she asked what seemed like a straightforward question: What would the new mothers among her designers need to manage the long hours required for preparing a new stage production?

The question of how well — or poorly — the theater world accommodates child care has been talked about for years, and is closely bound up with the discussion of why women are so underrepresented as writers, directors, and designers at the industry’s highest, and highest-paying, levels. Of the 20 nonmusical playsannounced for Broadway thus far this season, just three — including “Lifespan” — are directed by women.

Read the full article in the New York Times.