A week or so ago, a front-page article in the New York Times described the dismay of a group of women playwrights who were trying to understand their exclusion from New York stages. They planned a meeting, and ninety some women playwrights--and this was from new York City alone--planned to attend, along ith a few artistic directors.

I didn't go.

Why not?

More then twenty years ago, I was part of the foundation of a theatre dedicatred to producing plays by women, directed by women: The Women's Project and Productions, in New York City.

Along with a handful of colleagues, including the director Joan Vail Thorne and the founding producer and artistic director, Julia Miles, we began to build an organization devoted to these women, producing at times six of more plays a year, first in rented space, and then in our own theare on West 55th Street.

But it was hard to attract an audience even to this small, off-off-Broadway theatre, which is curious, since women buy more theatre tickets than do men; women did come to our plays, but no in the numbers we had hoped, and money began to run out after a few years.

With Julia's retirement and drastic financial problems, the theatre tried to restructure itself; it was not even mentioned in the New York Times article, and it may be that its board and artistic director did not regret the exclusion. While it still produces a handful of plays by women, the Women's Project seems to me to have lost its edge, succumbing to the blunting and dulling of feminism which has been one of the great destructive achievements of the past fifteen years. Work that once seemed exciting, even dangerous, now seems to have lost its power, and a kind of pinkness has taken over: plays written by women that depend on charm, sweetness and humor, rather than the triumphant clarion calls of the early 1980's.

I don't know whether more people go to see these plays; perhaps they do, but ther uniformally vicious reviews that made out life so difficult seem to have become more moderate. After all, there is little in this work to raise objections. It is a form of feminism that seems to accept as its definition simply work by women, which may of course be as pallid and apolitical as work by men.

Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh, but what the theatre has become is a defeat for all of us who put out time, energy and money into what we believed was a theatre for change.

And it was, for a while: the percentage of plays by women produced in new York City increased from eleven percent to fourteen percent, still a pitiful amount, but better, and we hoped the percentage would rise.

Now, the percentage has fallen, again, to eleven percent, equally the number produced in 1908.

Why is this? I can only guess, but I think the absence of women willing to advocate for other women, whether directors, producers, agents of actors is at the core of this problem. No one is willing to sacrifice a chance for advancement in the increasingly perilous world of the theatre, and to champion the cause of feminism is probably a sure way to limit chances of success.

But is it worth working in a medium where one's basic truth is not acceptable?

What other compromises follow?

I wondered when i saw the latest production at the Women's Project why a prominent shoe manufacturer had supported this effort, until I realized that a pair of this manufacture's high-heeled shoes were pivotal to what happened on the stage.

Maybe coca-cola cans will be next.