Lauren Briggeman
Our Women’s History Month guest blogger is Lauren Briggeman, a local professional actor, writer and director. Named as one of the Indianapolis Business Journal’s “Forty Under Forty” in 2019, she was recently recognized as one of Indy Maven’s “Women to Watch in 2023.” #SheSharesStories by amplifying the lives and experiences of women through her work as the founding artistic director of Summit Performance Indianapolis, a professional nonprofit theatre company. Since the company’s debut in 2017, Summit has continued to actively represent and provide creative opportunities for women through four fully mounted productions, eight staged readings and six original community conversation one-acts.
The inspiration to found Summit Performance Indianapolis grew from a desire to counteract the ugly, blatant misogyny — along with the racism and xenophobia — that revealed itself so boldly in our country leading up to the 2016 presidential election. That sense of women of all backgrounds facing bias and bigotry ran headlong into an opportunity presented to me by the late Bryan Fonseca, founder of the Phoenix Theatre. Bryan shared that the Phoenix Theatre was planning to foster a handful of small or newly formed theatre companies as part of a theatre collective to be formed once construction of the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre was complete. These two experiences became the yin/yang that moved me to found Summit in 2017.
At the time, I asked myself, “what is within my power to do that could make things better?” Although I was not completely convinced I could start and run a theatre company with no business training or background, I decided to take the leap. I reached out to my friend and colleague Georgeanna Smith Wade, Artistic Director of REACT (formerly Young Actors Theatre), to see if she would take the leap with me. She agreed, and the two of us began recruiting friends, mentors and — at times — complete strangers to go on this journey with us.
As we laid the foundation for Summit, we reviewed nationwide statistics on gender parity issues in the theatre industry. We were sadly unsurprised to learn that women are dramatically underrepresented across nearly all functions in the theatre: as playwrights, directors, designers, actors, technical artists -- the list goes on. Despite being 52% of the U.S. population, only one out of every three roles at professional theatres in this country goes to a woman. Roughly 20% of the plays produced every year are the work of women playwrights as opposed to men. In the 76-year history of the Tony Awards, only ten women have won the Tony Award for Best Director — and the first of those was in 1998, meaning no woman won Best Director until a half-century after the inaugural Tonys ceremony. The data we received from two other professional theatre companies in Indianapolis reflected gender disparities equal to or worse than those found in the national data.
These facts would be concerning on their own, but when you consider that, nationally, women buy 70% of theater tickets sold, women make up 60%-70% of the live theatre audience, and, on Broadway, shows written by women (who statistically write more female roles than men) actually pull in more revenue at the box office than plays by men, we had to ask: how and why is modern theatre not catering to its primary patrons?
Summit was founded to counterbalance those trends locally and create a dialogue with the community and with women in our community who have traditionally been silenced. The value of a company like Summit lies in that dialogue. Women matter. Our stories and experiences matter. Our work matters. Summit strives to be a company that reflects those values in all we do.
Keep up with Lauren and Summit Performance Indianapolis through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and through their website. Click here to purchase tickets for Summit’s current production, The Convent.
