Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century ed. by Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century ed. by Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris
This lively collection of sixteen scholarly essays investigates the work of a variety of contemporary women playwrights since 1990 from multiple critical perspectives. Divided into three sections, “Histories,” “Conflicts,” and “Genres,” the volume’s scope is ambitious and its contributions diverse. Particularly noteworthy is its international emphasis. While it includes pieces on the work of American and British playwrights, other essays examine plays from Egypt, South Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and Canada. Equally varied are the playwrights with whose work the collection engages. Some—most notably Caryl Churchill, but also Lynn Nottage, Maria Irene Fornes, Marie Clements, [End Page 367] and Cherríe Moraga, to name just a few—are familiar to theatre scholars, while dramatists like Tanya Saracho, Nadia El-Banhawi, Briar Grace-Smith, and Yael Farber, among many others, may be less wellknown. Nor is the collection’s diversity limited to its treatment of female playwrights. Contemporary Women Playwrights gathers together wide-ranging essays that employ a variety of critical, theoretical, and historical frameworks to contextualize their subject matter and offers readers an anthology that highlights the work of contemporary feminist scholars and critics, as well as that of the playwrights whom they consider.
Elaine Aston’s important essay “Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Playwriting,” anchors “Histories,” the collection’s first section, and with its perspective on “postfeminist” culture demonstrates the critical need for an anthology like this. Aston argues that Kane’s seminal Blasted (1995), written in an era of “feminist fatigue” (24) in which “girl power” and personal empowerment had eclipsed second-wave feminism’s emphasis on shared political and social commitments, evokes the feeling of the loss of feminism and the social transformation it promised. Aston locates Kane in an “experiential genealogy,” a point on a line between established female playwrights like Churchill and later playwrights such as debbie tucker green and Lucy Prebble. While Aston engages the recent history of feminism to contextualize the work of Kane and contemporary British playwrights, other essays grouped in this section take different historical tacks. Sara Warner explores the “seemingly outmoded feminist poetics” of lesbian playwrights Lisa Kron, Lenelle Moïse, and Madeline George, who, she suggests, “put the past in touch with the present so as to reimagine the future” (52). Nehad Selaiha and Sarah Enany provide an illuminating recent history of Egyptian women playwrights and examine their work against the backdrop of political and social upheaval in Egypt since the late twentieth century. Soyica Diggs Colbert reads Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, set on the night before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as part of “a tradition of black playwriting that reimagines historical figures in order to craft revisionary and recuperative narratives and to give voice to histories that may otherwise be forgotten” (98). Ana Elena Puga examines four dramatic texts by prominent Latin American writers “in order to consider how they stage the tensions and negotiations intrinsic to the formation of alliances between and among women” (35), while Natalie Alvarez draws on theories of transculturation to complicate notions of Latina subjectivity in the work of Caridad Svitch, Tanya Saracho, and Carmen Aguirre.
The five essays that comprise “Conflicts,” the second section of Contemporary Women Playwrights, demonstrate a similar diversity of subject and perspective. Amelia Howe Kritzer’s incisive “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israel–Palestine Conflict” takes on Churchill’s controversial short play Seven Jewish Children (2009) and two plays written in response. Kritzer analyzes these plays and others, including Naomi Wallace’s Fever Chart (2008), to demonstrate a range of strategies that dramatists have used “to present viewpoints that have been unheard or ignored by governmental decision-makers and influential media institutions” and evaluate their efficacy (131). Sharon Friedman’s essay “The Gendered Terrain in Contemporary Theatre of War by Women” examines Ruined (Nottage), Eclipsed (Danai Gurira), Nine Parts of Desire (Heather Raffo), and Palace of the End (Judith...
