Since the rise of feminism in the United States in the 1960s, cultural and materialist feminist theater playwrights have actively searched for new literary and theatrical that transcend the patriarchal strictures of realism. (1) As Jill Dolan suggested more than decade ago in The Feminist Critic as Spectator, realism is ultimately limited form for advancing political and social change. (2) In its presentation of a slice of life realism often perpetuates degrading and static stereotypes. Even female mimesis championed by cultural feminists, in which productions can mirror content through forms Dolan argues, often reinscribes the binary between gender and sex. (3) Moreover, even though cultural feminist theater practitioners have often embraced nonrealist forms, such as lecriture feminine, they ultimately value biology as the overriding criterion for unifying all women. As result, cultural feminist theater reifies women's primary roles in society as mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, and caregivers. Materialist feminism, on the other hand, looks at women as class oppressed by material conditions and social relations. (4) Rather than linking sex and gender together, materialist approach denaturalizes gender in order to show how society has constructed specific social roles for both men and women. Traditional Japanese theater forms--gigaku, no, kyogen, bunraku, and kabuki--have long prioritized stylization over realism in performance. (5) Paradoxically, their long history of all-male authorship and all-male performers has contributed to the notion that these theater are inherently sexist. Yet, since the 1960s, theater practitioners have drawn on these traditional to rediscover feminine and feminist messages. (6) In this essay, I discuss one of these experiments: Carol Sorgenfrei's 1975 work Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth. (7) By rejecting mimetic realism and drawing on the highly stylized no Sorgenfrei has crafted play that is politically engaged in order to expose the constructed nature of everyday lived experience and to present number of viewpoints. (8) By adhering to the structure of n6, Sorgenfrei creates world where time, place, and gender are transcended in favor of larger-than-life emotions and issues. As she explicitly states in her title Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth, Sorgenfrei's work is not so much singular no play as no of five plays. The cycle refers to the manner in which no plays were performed until recently. (9) While no performances today reflect the short attention span of contemporary audiences, performances--as they came to be codified during the Tokugawa period (1603-1867)--consisted of five different plays, thematically based, in order, on the following five categories: God, Warrior, Woman, Frenzy (and miscellaneous), and Demon. (10) Each play was individually written and performed to embody Zeami's requisitejo-ha-kyu [prelude (jo), development (ha), finale (kyu)] developmental structure, and the plays performed as whole worked to conveyjo-ha-kyu, so that with the final demon play an all-day performance would end with riveting climax. (11) As whole, the five plays were usually thematically unrelated, though it is possible that one or two of the plays performed in the day-long five-play may have been related, such as Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi) and Nonomiya (The Shrine in the Fields), two plays taken from The Tale of Genii. (12) In departure from the standard dramaturgy, however, Sorgenfrei develops the Medea myth through her play's five scenes, which progress through the different traditional categories despite the thematic linkage. In this way, she entitles her first scene God Play the second Warrior Play, and so forth. Thus Sorgenfrefs Noh Cycle, while profoundly inspired by the n6, works differently from pure no play in that it encapsulates the entire all-day no in one play that has five thematically related scenes. …