Feminist Playwright Research Articles

Identity Issues in German Feminist Movements and Theatre

Identity politics, understood as the analysis of the ways in which social roles are inscribed on the body, affects and behaviour, and in which collective experiences of oppression also produce resistant practices, informed German feminisms and performances during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, major feminist playwrights have shifted into literary production, or abandoned gender as their central critical concern in view of other urgent issues that arose after reunification, including historical revisionism, economic restructuring, rising racism and xenophobia, and globalization fears. Younger white artists playfully unbundled gender and sex and supported the postfeminist consensus that feminist identity politics had become obsolete. The work of Bridge Markland, which can be found on YouTube, emblematizes a burgeoning transgender and drag culture that was transnationalized through film, video, photography exhibitions and workshops. In this critical vacuum, immigrant and minority women were saddled with intensifying, ever more essentialist discourses of gender and ethnic difference, and continued to grapple with them through deconstructive and historicizing, as well as essentializing, deployments of identity.

Feminist Strategies of British Feminist Playwrights in Caryl Churchill's Owners and Pam Gems' Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi

Feminist Strategies of British Feminist Playwrights in Caryl Churchill's Owners and Pam Gems' Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi

That Stinking Hot Summer

That Stinking Hot Summer Judith Thompson (bio) "But Judith you have said emphatically that you are NOT a feminist writer." "No I didn't." "Yes you did." "No, I did not. I wouldn't say that." "Well you did." "Couldn't have." "I have the article right here." "REALLY?" "Would you like to see it?" "NO! . . . I didn't really . . . Did I REALLY say that I am not a feminist playwright?" "Yes, I'm afraid you did." Thirty years ago, I denied being a feminist playwright. I am not sure why I denied this. I now vibrate with rage when I hear a successful woman—well, ANY woman or girl—deny that she is a feminist. I can't believe I was that woman. But then again, I still ate meat then. I was intimidated by sales people and anyone in a uniform or too stylishly dressed or obviously rich, I barely knew my left from my right, I was still impressed by a British accent, I was surprised when any official or priest was exposed as corrupt, I didn't understand how electricity works, and I was afraid of flying. I still don't understand how electricity works, but the rest of that long-ago persona has been ripped off, torn to pieces, and burned. I am a new woman. I am the woman I have chosen to be rather than the woman I was constructed to be. I was ridiculously slow to bloom into myself. I'd always been late for everything, I suppose that was part of being late for myself. Maybe one of the reasons I denied being a feminist playwright is that I did not want to be marginalized or ghettoized. I didn't want people to think that my plays were only about feminist issues, which might keep audiences away. Even though most of the theatre audience is women—middle-aged women—they wouldn't be able to drag along their husbands if the plays were only about women. [End Page 505] Although I was a different woman then, only half-bloomed, mostly unaware politically, the first play that emerged from me, The Crackwalker (1980), was fully formed, not juvenilia in any sense of the word. It was a kind of miracle, a gift from the theatre gods for which I will always be grateful. I didn't plan to write a play, I just started on a whim. I was all alone and very restless one weekend in Montreal, and in desperation, I dug out my roommate's typewriter and began writing scenes based on a character named Theresa that I had discovered in mask class, a character that was based on a person named Theresa I had met during a summer job as a teacher of life-skills I didn't have myself. She was one of our clients deemed "permanently unemployable"; she was also illiterate, so I tried to teach her to read and write while we walked around the charming city of Kingston, Ontario, occasionally stopping by Zal Yanovsky's new, cool café for some organic raspberry juice and a homemade carrot-poppyseed-blueberry-fig-date cookie. Many a morning I would get a call from Theresa—"I won't be doin' readin' writin' today, Judiss, I not feelin' too good"—and I would be crushed, and spend the day with other less interesting clients. In the evenings, if I was carousing with my friends in a local bar, Theresa would often appear, her face as bright as a child, and she would yell out, "I'm tellin' the social worker, Judiss, I'm telling her you drinkin'!" And strangely, even though I was already in my mid-twenties, I felt caught out, and usually turned bright red. I just loved Theresa, and clearly she was not finished with me. And neither was the tragedy of that hot summer, when a tiny baby was murdered by his mentally delayed and emotionally deranged father, who was one of our "clients." It was August, about five minutes after nine, and I was enjoying my first takeout coffee of the day, when the phone rang: "Kingston Community and Social Services, Judith speaking." "Donny...

Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein

This essay suggests that the taxonomy of feminisms—liberal, cultural, and materialist—while usefully lending precision to our analysis, has inadvertently become hierarchical, privileging materialist feminist projects at the expense of more popular or mainstream plays and productions by liberal feminist playwrights. By returning to the oeuvre of Wendy Wasserstein, the author argues that although some of her initial critical misgivings about the playwright’s relationship to the feminist movement maintain, Wasserstein’s liberal feminist success on Broadway and in regional theatres needs careful consideration for what it accomplished for women. The essay analyzes two recent productions of Wasserstein’s final play, Third , written just before her death from cancer in 2006. Although the Geffen theatre production in Los Angeles panders to anti-or post-feminist perspectives, the Philadelphia theatre company production explores the tensions and contradictions between second-and third-wave feminists in ways both illuminating and useful to contemporary academics and activists.

Mrs. Linde, Feminism, and Women's Work, Then and Now

To call Ibsen a feminist playwright or to describe A Doll's House as a drama in favor of women's rights is no longer controversial. For this, we have a series of scholars to thank. They include Kat...

Rewriting the Odyssey in the Twenty-First Century: Mary Zimmerman's Odyssey and Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad

This essay examines two contemporary rewritings of the Odyssey, Mary Zimmerman's Odyssey and Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad: both respond to the Odyssey's own representation of the creative process as feminine and reflect the reassessment of the epic by recent feminist criticism. Zimmerman telescopes the epic by focusing on female characters such as Penelope, Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso, though she chooses not to emphasize the problematic Helen in her celebration of female creativity and agency. She updates the Odyssey by referring to the comic satire of contemporary feminist playwright Caryl Churchill. Atwood mounts a critique of the Odyssey from a perspective that foregrounds issues of class as well as gender, calling attention to the unjust fate of the executed maids and to Penelope's responsibility in their sacrifice to the interests of patriarchy and the ruling class. She presents this challenge through the dramatic form of the Greek chorus, inflected by vaudeville and burlesque, re-envisioning the maids not merely as silent victims but as energetic satirists of the dominant order.

Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–48. By J. Ellen Gainor. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002; pp. vi + 327. $52.50 hardcover

For close to two decades, Susan Glaspell has served as the virtual poster child for feminist playwrights of the American Little Theatre movement. One can no longer call her an unknown, but J. Ellen Gainor's insightful and meticulously researched new book makes it clear that Glaspell as a subject remains, if I may coin a term, underknown.

Res(Crip)ting Feminist Theater Through Disability Theater: Selections from The DisAbility Project

The presence of disabled bodies on stage has recently begun to be theorized in the context of an emerging disability culture. Does the application of feminist principles of theater-making to disability performance serve as a catalyst by which an aesthetic of disability theater can be advanced? What are the implications that emerge to the feminist theater practitioner working to create a disability theater? These questions are explored here and include the scripts for three performance pieces created by The DisAbility Project and directed by feminist playwright Joan Lipkin. The DisAbility Project uses feminist strategies in the creation of script and movement; this essay explores how these facilitate discourses about the disability experience. But it also extends to ask how an emergent disability aesthetic can complicate and expand the interrogations of feminist theater, both in text and in performance. The work of The DisAbility Project suggests that a disability aesthetic can mitigate some of the limitations feminist theater faces in constructing its own subtle re-inscriptions of normalcy, leading to a reconsideration of the use of metaphor for feminist ends. Disability theater, like disability studies, asks the viewer not just to trouble gender or ability, but the entire matrix of identities constructing-and constricting-our understanding of the normate.7

Masculinity Unmasked in Lidia Falcón'sTu único amor

Studies of Lidia Falcon's theatre have focused exclusively on the female figure in her works. As one who is intensely interested in the dynamics of gender relationships and gender constructs, Falco is understandably just as concerned with the characterization and conceptualization of her male characters. Other than in passing however, no study of Spain's premier feminist playwright has focused on the construction of masculinity in her theatre. Focusing on what is certainly one of Falcon's most representative short plays and, without a doubt, her most intriguing treatment of gender dynamics, Tu unico Amor, the present article illustrates that gender relations are neither casual nor accidental. More specifically, it demonstrates that the construct of masculinity is neither an inborn characteristic nor a monolithic social construct but evolves instead in the context of a particular political and material reality. Through an analysis of the dynamic interplay between male and female in Falcon's play, little-known and well-hidden truths are revealed about what it means to be male and pertinent questions are raised about masculinity and the ideology that informs it.

The Dandy and the Dowager: Oscar Wilde and Audience Resistance

Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel,The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by whichThe Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell)Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettesand (edited with Michael Booth)The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author ofA Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.

Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater

Reviewed by: Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre Shannon Jackson Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. By Elin Diamond. London and New York: Routledge, 1998; pp. 226. $75.00 cloth, $19.99 paper. With the publication of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre, Elin Diamond affirms her international reputation as one of the most important feminist theorists of Western theatre. Synthesizing and extending several of her trenchant critical essays from the last decade, Diamond vividly engages a host of theoretical concerns. Whether couched as a means of navigating psychoanalysis and historical materialism or as a way to reconcile representational and experiential feminisms, feminist theatre emerges again and again throughout this book as an arena of cross-disciplinary theoretical and political conversation. In the process, Unmaking re-makes feminist theatre criticism. Diamond’s introduction surveys and revises a range of Western mimetic theory, moving from Freud to Benjamin, from Irigaray to de Lauretis, from classical theorists to theorists of twentieth-century performance art. Rather than reproducing a critique of its conservatism, Diamond works toward a mimesis differently read—and sometimes differently made—through a feminist lens. She thereby exposes the generative potentials and self-deconstructive doubles that already circulate in conventional models of representation. Her follow-up chapter, “Realism’s Hysteria,” is based on earlier work that linked a feminist recuperation of hysteria to a feminist recuperation of dramatic realism. Now Diamond gives the link fuller historicization by situating her argument in the overlap between the histories of aesthetic and medical “theatres.” The combination produces inventive readings. At one point, Diamond interprets Ibsen reception as feminist hysterical excess; at another, she foregrounds the transferential underpinnings of Elizabeth Robins’s realistic acting. The chapter culminates with an analysis of Robins and Florence Bell’s Alan’s Wife, arguing that its re-use of realist convention simultaneously short-circuits the possibility of referential reading. This “realism-without-truth” will be one of many places that Diamond stunningly fulfills her promise to offer an alternative mimeticism. The next essay lays more theoretical foundation for arguments in Unmaking’s subsequent chapters. Adapting her nearly canonical TDR essay, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory,” Diamond investigates connections amongst feminism, critical theory, and Brechtian theatrical technique. Not only does she ingeniously match a Brechtian “not . . . but” to a Derridean “differences within,” she also maintains that a gender-conscious use of Brechtian performance de-naturalizes gender performativity. Theorizing feminist gestus as both a representational practice and a way of reading, Diamond goes on to make use of the latter mode in the next chapter on Aphra Behn. Reading gestically means, for Diamond, seeing Behn’s wedding tableau in The Forc’d Marriage or her many breeches-sporting females as early types of “historicization” onstage, moments that make seventeenth-century concepts of women’s commodity status available for critique. Having tested her models on earlier source material, Diamond continues with a study of Caryl Churchill’s plays, finding in this avowedly politicized feminist playwright’s work not only the usual forms of Brechtian defamiliarization but also yet another alteration of imitative convention. The result in works like Fen or A Mouthful of Birds, says Diamond, is not so much “the foregrounding of theatrical illusionism” but rather an extension of “the boundaries of what can be seen and said as representation” (93). Yet again Diamond makes good on her promise of a re-made mimesis. Devoted to the theorizing of a “feminist postmodern,” the third and final section brilliantly develops concepts of temporality and syncopatedness as central tropes. Diamond’s readings of [End Page 223] Adrienne Kennedy’s funnyhouses continue a penchant for unorthodox connection and theoretical revision. Not content to dismiss identification as inevitably regressive, for instance, Diamond finds gestic potential in Kennedy’s psychically devastating racial alignments and affective fantasies. Pushing further the belief that the “visceral and cognitive sense of temporal otherness” could become “methodological” for a gestic feminist criticism (104), Diamond’s final essay re-marshals Walter Benjamin and Teresa de Lauretis to frame the work of feminist performance artists such as Robbie McCauley, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin. Here the “not . . . but,” the deconstructive supplement, and the flash and shock of Benjamin’s dialectical...

Sam Shepard, feminist playwright: The destination of a lie of the mind

Always honing the theatrical tools with which to chart unknown emotional territory, Shepard in A Lie of the Mind more radically than before creates a new stage language, returning to the battered, objectified, and silenced female subject a voice of her own. It is a highly physical language, yet one that aims at dissolving the splits between mind and matter, as well as between conflicting and mutually exclusive genders, in an approach towards a concept of love not based on power and submission. This new form is borne by the mockery of men and by their treatment as women. The ensuing redefinition of male consciousness towards a recognition and incorporation of the feminine offers the promise for a shared redemption of the male and female characters alike.

American feminist playwrights: a critical history

American feminist playwrights: a critical history

Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own by Lizbeth Goodman, and: A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era by Sheila Stowell (review)

Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own by Lizbeth Goodman, and: A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era by Sheila Stowell (review)

Only Prostitutes Marry in May

This is a collection of four plays written in the ’70s and ’80s by Italy’s foremost feminist playwright, as well as poet, critic and political activist. Editor Rhoda Helfman Kaufman states in her introduction that the volume is the first publication of plays by Maraini in English but this isn’t quite accurate. Maraini wrote a half-hour drama called Mussomeli-Düsseldorf, translated by Margaret Hollingsworth, for a collection of radio plays (Airborn, Blizzard Publishing, 1991), commissioned by CBC Radio to celebrate the Second International Women Playwrights’ Conference held in Toronto in 1991.

A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

Questions of Survival: towards a Postmodern Feminist Theatre

Deborah Levy is a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose theatre work is informed by a concern to combine visual imagery, music, and text. After working with visual artists and sculptors, and performing her poetry in pubs and galleries and on the cabaret circuit, she was commissioned by the Women's Theatre Group to write Pax. This was followed by Clam, three more plays for the fringe, and then by Heresies for the RSC. She is currently working on an adaptation of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. A collection of Deborah Levy's poetry, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, have both been published by Jonathan Cape. She has also worked as a writer and director with the Magdalena Project, for whom she directed a devised theatre piece entitled The B File, based on her own short story ‘Swallowing Geography’. This was performed in October 1991 in the theatre of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, where it was well received by both critics and audience, and has since been staged for the European Arts Festival at Chapter, and at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast. It was in Cardiff that Irini Charitou, who acted in both productions of The B File, talked to Deborah Levy about her concerns and interests as a feminist playwright who has chosen postmodernism as a means of articulating her cultural position. Irini Charitou, who complements the interview with a brief introduction to Pax, Clam, and Heresies, is presently researching towards an MPhil on contemporary British and Greek women's theatre at the University of Lancaster.

A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

A stage of their own: feminist playwrights of the suffrage era

A stage of their own: feminist playwrights of the suffrage era

Martha Boesing: Playwright of performance

In the work of the feminist playwright Martha Boesing, words as they are brought into performance illustrate the dependent relationship between text and performance that is characteristic of experimental theatre. As she scripts her plays, Boesing directs the use of the stage space for the specific purposes of the plays: in “empty spaces,”; she focuses on individuals who are expanding their interpersonal relationships; in “defined spaces,”; she shows groups interacting with society; and in “detailed spaces,”; she connects mundane objects to meanings that are culturally significant for both the characters and the audience. Throughout her work, Boesing constructs her stage elements as meticulously as most playwrights construct dialogue so that her political meanings, based on her avowed feminist agenda, are made visible at each moment in performance.