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  • Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists ed. by Barbara Ozieblo Noelia, Hernando-Real
  • Jerry Dickey
Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. By Barbara Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. pp. 204. $80.00 cloth.

The Research Group on American women writers, coordinated by Barbara Ozieblo at the University of Málaga, continues to foster impressive scholarship on American drama and theatre. The group has been the driving force behind four international conferences in Andalusia, as well as resulting publications of expanded conference essays. Scholars in the group also have published widely on American women dramatists, most notably on Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell. Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists—a collection of nine essays and an introduction—proves yet another valuable contribution by this research team to the latest theoretical discourse on women and American theatre.

The book’s subject, sadly, remains insistently current. As the editors, Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real, note in their introduction, “Violence against women, in the home or outside the home, in peace as in war, a result of fanaticism or of structural inequality in society—in every part of the world—continues to confound our civilization” (1). By embracing the inclusive concept of “gender violence,” the authors of these essays emphasize the interconnectedness of various forms of aggression toward women, uniting in a continuum such diverse acts as “rape, psychological violence, battering, female mutilation and others” (20). The volume focuses on plays written during the last forty years and includes close analyses of plays by both well- and lesser-known dramatists: Julia Cho, Pearl Cleage, Maria Irene Fornes, Rebecca Gilman, Carson Kreitzer, Heather McDonald, Emily Mann, Susan Miller, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, [End Page 113] Linda Park-Fuller, Suzan-Lori Parks, Heather Raffe, Cheryl L. West, Paula Vogel, and Stefanie Zadravec. The editors’ goals in this volume are not only to situate recent plays by these women within the evolving theory and practice of feminist theatre, especially since the 1960s, but also to interrogate the potential effect of these plays specifically on audiences and more generally on American society at large.

Most of the essays posit a belief in the efficacy of theatre to initiate reform of a patriarchal society that subdues women into passive roles and whose legal system fails to offer sufficient protection to women as targets of gender violence. As stated in the introduction, “The theater, particularly women’s theater, has been a useful tool in awakening awareness of violence” (2). The various essays draw upon multidisciplinary research to demonstrate how ground-breaking women dramatists have helped bring taboo or silenced subcategories of gender violence, such as breast cancer treatment and family abuse, into a wider public arena. This optimistic celebration of the act of performance as a tool to ignite social reform proves one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Another strength is the overall unity of the structure and tone of the essays. Most chapters follow a similar pattern, which includes an overview of the sub-category, clear definitions of key concepts, theoretical antecedents, social statistics and behaviors, and detailed interpretations of select plays. After the introduction, which lays out the scope of the book, each chapter builds upon the next, with the authors cross-referencing concepts and conclusions presented elsewhere in the volume. The two opening essays provide an overview of forms and responses to violence against women in critical theory and society, as well as the emergence and evolution of violence as a key theme in women’s drama. The essays then progress to discussions of violence in the family (authored by Hernando-Real), the role of female bonding (María Dolores Narbona-Carrión), psychological abuse (Miriam López-Rodríguez), biomedical violence (Marta Fernández-Morales), survival strategies in African American plays (Inmaculada Pineda-Hernández), and war violence (Ilka Saal). Although the book does not contain a concluding chapter per se, Ozieblo’s essay on the effect of stage violence on the audience’s “pleasure” provides a suitable coda to the book’s argument. Although seven authors contribute, the book often reads as though written by one voice...

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