Women's Theatre Groups

Abstract

Women's theatre groups in the United States have developed during the last five years as a means of exploring and expressing women's identity, potentialities, and the nature of oppression. By dramatizing their conflicts and joys, the women in these groups seek to make other women feel good about being female and to experience outrage at what they consider to be the gross injustices in the relationship between the sexes.Feminists began forming their own theatre groups because they felt stifled by male domination in both the traditional and experimental theatre worlds. The groups, most in the New York area, vary in performing style, intent and internal structure from the traditional mode of The New Feminist Theatre, a group with a well-defined leader, to the collective arrangement of the It's All Right to be Woman Theatre, where feminism is expressed through the structure of the group and theatre pieces.