While working on a story about the theater, I came across aninteresting, though as yet anecdotally-based tidbit: There are morefemale than male actors in New York, and the women are more talented toboot.

I learned about this phenomenon from the members of The Dark Lady Players,a Shakespearean theater company devoted to exploring, throughperformance, the theory that the works we know as Shakespeare’s wereactually written by a Marrano Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier.I touched on this topic before, when I interviewed the founder of the Bassano theory, John Hudson, but this time, for The Jewish Channel’s “Week in Review”, I also spoke, on camera, with the actors in Hudson’s company, who are currently staging “Shakespeare’s Anti-Christian Satires: The Virgin Mary Parodies,” and who are all women.

Wasit an artistic choice to make the Dark Lady Players all female, Iasked? Turns out, not exactly. The company has had men perform in someof their productions, but they have predominantly female actors becausewhen they hold auditions, significantly more women than men show up,and, according to Hudson, the men who do show up tend not to be astalented as the women.

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Rebecca Honig Friedman is a regular contributor to The Sisterhood blog, which will be cross-posting weekly with Jewesses with Attitude. She also writes about women's issues at Jewess and is a producer for The Jewish Channel.