Thursday, January 14, 2010

Diversity XX: OOB Diversity

The fantastic folks at the New York Innovative Theater Awards have published a report on the demographics of Off-Off Broadway. It seems to fall in line with my previous belief that in some areas we make diversity happen (women are slightly disproportionally over-represented as producers, men as playwrights, just to take one random dataset). One of the more surprising results, actually, his how in many areas we fall roughly along national averages (income, for instance, although most of that income is not from Off-Off-Broadway), or race (I think our slightly disproportionally low percentage of African-Americans might be explained by our slightly disproportionally high percentage of people identifying as "multiracial."

(I say this, by the way, with the caveat that I'm not really highly versed in statistical analysis. These are just my impressions as I read through).

So, I guess the take-away is that we on Off-Off-Broadway are young, well educated, politically motivated, and then... basically average.

Oh dear. I don't know if we're going to like that...