Story of the Week: “Best Actor” and “Best Actress” Are Becoming Obsolete Terms

This week, the Drama Desk revealed that its annual awards for outstanding work on the New York stage will stop segregating performers by gender. That means winners will no longer be recognized as “Outstanding Actress” or “Outstanding Actor,” but “Outstanding Performer.” It also means that Ben Platt is likely to find himself competing against Annaleigh Ashford, should both be nominated for their performances in Parade and Sweeney Todd, respectively.

The Drama Desks are one of the last major New York theater awards to make this switch (although there is still one big outlier) in a Broadway season that has featured more gender nonconforming performers than ever before — several of which have a good shot at winning.

Story of the Week will look at the rise of gender-neutral acting categories and whether this trend is here to stay. But first we ought to answer the question…

Why were acting awards separated by gender?

It’s true that the vast majority of roles in the theater are written for male or female characters, and are performed by actors whose personal gender identity corresponds to that of their character. But this isn’t always the case: Whether it’s Mark Rylance playing Olivia or Ruth Negga playing Hamlet, recent seasons have seen plenty of performers take on roles not typically associated with their sex (Shakespeare himself oversaw all-male companies, with male actors playing women, some of whom were further disguised as boys). The theater has a long and rich history of drag performance.

And what of roles that don’t easily fit into the human gender binary? It’s hard to see how identifying as a male or female has any bearing on one’s ability to portray a cybernetic dictator or something as abstract as a thought.

As I argued in this 2018 point-counterpoint, we don’t speak of “doctors” and “doctresses,” nor does the Nobel committee present separate awards to the Best Male and Best Female Physicists. So why should the theater persist in a practice that is, at best, an excuse to give more awards — and at worst, a relic of gender segregation?

Critics of the move to eliminate gender-specific categories have a valid concern that unisex awards will only result in more trophies for men, as somewhat embarrassingly happened at this year’s Brit Awards, when all five nominees for “Artist of the Year” were men. But this is indicative of a recording industry that is already giving a disproportionate number of contracts to male artists. That’s not something an awards show can remedy, but it can highlight the disparity and start a conversation.

There’s a robust debate to be had about the value of sex-segregated sporting events — whether it is fair that someone who went through male puberty should be able to compete against biological females (or similarly, whether it is fair that someone who identifies as a man, and would like to compete with other men, should be forced to compete against biological females). But these same concerns don’t extend to the craft of acting — the judgment of which is already highly subjective and rarely determined by physical strength.

The advent of gender-neutral acting categories is appropriate and a long time coming.

Which awards have gone gender neutral?

The Obie Awards, recognizing work produced off- and off-off-Broadway, were the very first of the major theater awards to do away with gender specific acting categories: Al Pacino and Billie Dixon were the last performers to be hailed “Best Actor” and “Best Actress” by the Obies, way back in 1968. After that, the Obies opted to compile a list of distinguished performances that expands or contracts depending on the year.

Chicago’s Non-Equity Jeff Awards dispensed with gender-segregated acting categories in 2018, shortly after TheaterMania critic Pete Hempstead predicted, “Theater award committees will begin serious discussion about how to replace actor and actress categories with gender-neutral labels.” The Jeff Awards that recognize AEA-affiliated performers followed later that year, expanding the new gender-neutral performance categories to 10 nominees, from which two winners are selected.

In 2021, the Lucille Lortel Awards (recognizing off-Broadway) announced the removal of gendered categories for the 2022 awards, keeping the categories to five nominees each, but adding a new category for Outstanding Ensemble. That year, Victoria Clark beat her Kimberly Akimbo co-star, Justin Cooley, in the Outstanding Lead Performer in a Musical category.

Across the pond, the WhatsOnStage Awards went gender-neutral for the first time this year, with women snagging five of the six acting awards.

The Outer Critics Circle announced in January its decision to remove gendered categories, but has opted to separate Broadway and off-Broadway performers, so the exact same number of awards will be given out in May (but more off-Broadway actors are guaranteed to win). Outer Critics Circle President David Gordon (who is also TheaterMania’s editor in chief) commented, “The move was especially important this season, since there are several performers who identify as nonbinary who have a great chance at not only being nominated, but winning. And if we’re trying to honor the full breadth of the theater community, we all found it pretty distasteful to ask someone who identifies as nonbinary to choose whether or not they want to be considered an actor or an actress, simply so we can maintain the status quo.”

Over the weekend, the Drama Desk announced its decision to embrace gender-neutral acting categories, which will be expanded to 10 nominees from which voters will select two winners, much like the Jeff Awards.

It’s now safe to say that gender-neutral acting categories have now become the norm when it comes to New York theater awards, with one major exception.

Are the Tony Awards next?

Not this year. The 76^th Annual Tony Awards will separate nominated performers into eight categories, four for “actors” and four for “actresses.” Those sex-segregated categories are further divided by play and musical, lead and featured. It has been consistently this way since the 1950s, although it is interesting to note that the first two years of the Tonys saw multiple winners in the leading categories, while two actors (a man and a woman) were presented with the “Best Newcomer” award in 1948.

There’s a tendency to treat the rules and practices of the Tony Awards as sacrosanct, as if they were handed down on stone tablets by Antoinette Perry herself. But this is patently untrue: As I noted in a recent Story of the Week, play and musical revivals were lumped into the same category until 1994. And just this year, the Tony Award Administration Committee changed a rule requiring voters to see every performance or element under consideration in a category (now they can miss one and still vote). The rules of the Tonys can be (and are) regularly revised, so there is nothing technically preventing the Administration Committee from deciding to do away with gender-specific acting categories.

Unlike the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Awards, however, the Tonys are broadcast to a national audience that may not be ready to embrace unisex acting categories. The awards are essentially an infomercial for Broadway, an attempt to convince Americans to spend their vacation money seeing shows in New York. It’s understandable that the producers would be reluctant to do anything to rock the boat when the industry is still recovering from the Covid shutdown. So the Tonys are not changing their categories this season, and may not change them next season, either.

This means that performers who identify as nonbinary have some decisions to make: In February, the Tonys Administration Committee announced that J. Harrison Ghee (Some Like It Hot) would be eligible for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, presumably after consulting with the performer. Similarly, a production spokesperson has confirmed that the nonbinary dancer Kolton Krouse (Dancin’) has been submitted for consideration in the Best Featured Actor in a Musical category.

Alex Newell, who is giving a showstopping performance as Lulu in Shucked and has been suggested by the Gray Lady herself as an ideal Effie in Dreamgirls, would seem like a frontrunner for Featured Actress in a Musical, but a spokesperson for the production commented, “After consulting with Alex Newell, the producers submitted him in the Best Featured Actor in a Musical category. That final determination will be made by the Tony Administration Committee at their next meeting.” One presumes they will honor Newell’s request.

Meanwhile, nonbinary performer Justin David Sullivan of & Juliet has withdrawn from Tony consideration, declining to choose between Featured Actor and Featured Actress. It’s a principled stand that I suspect few performers will make in a business as competitive as this one, in which an award can make the difference between a callback and a dial tone.

No matter how you feel about gender-neutral acting categories, it’s an issue that isn’t going away and cannot be avoided. Should Newell win the Tony for Featured Actor in a Musical in June, television audiences will still have to reckon with the fact that a voluptuous lady with a massive set of pipes beat out all the boys.