Rachel Crothers’s Abandoned Play Venus and the Future of Gender

Abstract

This paper examines the 1927 play Venus, in which playwright and director Rachel Crothers veered from her prior conventions to deploy a futuristic plot involving gender transformation. The play closed after eight performances, the shortest-running full-length Broadway production of Crothers’s career. Venus features the androgynous Diana, a character with a clear genealogy. Crothers was long an advocate for women’s independence; her plays featured strong female characters that blended aspects of conventionally feminine and masculine behaviour. Exploring Diana’s fate and reconstructing the play’s production history give insight into both Crothers’s values and the Broadway theatre of the late 1920s.