She Also Wrote Plays: An International Guide to Women Playwrights from the 10th to the 21st Century, and: Women Who Write Plays: Interviews with American Dramatists (review)

These two books are a boon to researchers, students, and performers with a solid commitment to, or even a mild curiosity about, the practice of feminist theatre. Susan Croft's She Also Wrote Plays bears evidence of the author's expertise as a curator of contemporary performance at the Theatre Museum in London. Approximately two thirds of the entries in Croft's guide are devoted to British and North American women playwrights of the later twentieth century. The remaining one third include entries for earlier writers, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and Jane Austen, as well as more recent women playwrights from Jamaica, India, Singapore, Israel, Denmark, Egypt, and other international locations. Further, Croft's book documents the dramas of authors widely known for their writing in other genres, such as fiction (e.g., Kathy Acker, Edna O'Brien), poetry (e.g., Michael Field, Edna St. Vincent Millay), or gender theory (e.g., Hélène Cixous).

Croft has written for a wide audience, including directors and performers seeking plays by women with an eye to their performance requirements. Her book lists playwrights alphabetically, under their most commonly used name; indicates nationality, birth and death dates (where known); includes anywhere from one to several paragraphs describing their life and work; sometimes includes plot summaries of plays; and concludes with a listing of play titles, publication details, number of female and male parts, and references, where appropriate, to one of the book's three appendices (appendix 1, a listing of anthologies and series in which plays appear; appendix 2, a bibliography of books on women playwrights and women in theatre; and appendix 3, including addresses for locating unpublished translations and for major drama publishers in five national locations). Finally, she adds a list of "other contacts," listing addresses for "New Dramatists," "Writernet," and "Playworks," among others. The Guide's brief plot summaries together with condensed commentary can help readers decide whether an author's oeuvre or a single play might match their resources and complement their performance goals.

A second audience likely to find Croft's book of essential interest would include graduate students searching for a suggestive thematic patterning of women playwrights or for national and/or historical groupings of writers. For example, several plays offer stage treatments of native peoples in the US, Canada, and New Zealand, while a string of others rewrites Greek classics. A whole series of dramatists rewrites history in their plays—Byrony Lavery, Maureen Lawrence, Liz Lochhead, and Claire Luckham, just to name a few. Still others worked or continue to work collaboratively with such collectives as the Living Theatre, the Women's Project, and the Anna Project. Many plays by the non-anglophone writers remain unavailable in English, such as several by Hélène Cixous—a reminder of a translating project many would like to see completed. Croft points to other plays awaiting attention, such as those by Australian "Miles" Stella Franklin.

While Croft favors writers aligned with the avant-garde against the commercial theatre, she includes commercially successful playwrights (e.g., Lillian Hellman and Jean Kerr) and several performance artists (e.g., Holly Hughes and Anna Deavere Smith). Her criteria for inclusion were to make "visible those who have been invisible" and to show the "spread of dramatic development in each English-speaking country over the centuries" (vii). Croft's book has much to tell performers and graduate students about the breadth and depth of women's playwriting, especially in the twentieth century. As a book designed above all to be useful, its only...