More than a dozen women audition for Harvard’s Hasty Pudding. Yet again, none receive callbacks.
Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals, an exclusive collegiate social and theater group, had gone 220 years without a female cast member.
The 2016 year will make 221 years.
The Harvard Crimson reports that, just like last year, more than a dozen women auditioned for the traditionally male-only club, in a sort of protest over the group’s history of gender exclusivity.
And just like last year, none received callbacks.
“As a woman in performing arts, I know that there are so many women who perform at such an amazing caliber and the fact that they’re excluded simply because they’re women makes me very sad,” Nora A. Sagal ’18 told the Crimson.
The president of Hasty Pudding Theatricals confirmed to the student paper that no women recieved callbacks, but declined to comment further on the decision.
The group’s website describes it’s all-male cast policy as an “artistic decision.”
“Men in women’s roles is the Hasty Pudding’s artistic trademark and its artistic merit comes from the fact that it challenges traditional perceptions of masculinity,” it reads.
Last year, the first time women tried out since 1993, the club’s president told the Crimson that allowing women would require “structural changes to the production, the company, and our larger institutional traditions.”
As Boston.com reported last year, over time women have come to participate with Hasty Pudding behind the scenes, but they still have yet to step on stage in any capacity as an actor. Amy Poehler, the Newton-born comedian and Hasty Pudding’s Woman of the Year in 2015, even blasted the policy during a roast hosted by the group.
“I want to say that it’s unsettling that there will be no women on stage tonight,’’ Poehler said, per WBUR. “You know it’s time for a change when the Augusta National Golf Club has lapped you in terms of being progressive.”
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