Winnie in the Attic and the Joys of Feminist Theater: An Artist’s Statement

Emerging from personal experiences with a theater modeled after Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater and a staging of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days during the era of the Romanian communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, this artist’s statement offers a set of musings about the urgent need for women’s and feminist theater performances and their potential for initiating social change. This artist’s statement further discusses the scarcity of experimental women-created and women-led performances that display a feminist aesthetics in the landscape of American and much of Western European theater. It argues for the imperative need to create such a theater scene that gives voice to feminist and female creativity in the full diversity of its artistic expression and that resists the corporatization of performance, turning it into another object of capitalist consumption. Ultimately, it is by both rediscovering protofeminist performances of the past and imagining a utopian feminist theater future of new ideas crafted into new forms that the dream of full gender parity in the theater can become a reality and women’s voices can have a transformative impact.