Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender by Casey Kayser (review)

Casey Kayser's new book, Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, counters the "deep, historical prejudices against every term of the label 'Southern Woman Playwright'" (p. 5). She positions her work as a response to the call by Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige for scholars to expand their 2002 collection Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism, the first and hitherto only book-length study of female dramatists with attention to their southern roots. Agreeing with McDonald and Paige that the works of women playwrights have been omitted from the history and criticism of southern literature, Kayser widens her critical scope to include dramatists well beyond the "artistic Trinity" of Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman (p. 5). Marginalized represents Kayser's detailed intervention into the twenty-year silence that followed Southern Women Playwrights as she outlines "the factors that affect the prejudice and the problems" these artists face, "which are rooted in geographical, ideological, interpretive, and genre-based challenges" (p. 5). Her study of their works unearths a pattern of the playwrights' conscious strategies to counter their marginalization.

Kayser responds to Gary Richards's claim that "the South's relation to theater remains a troubled one," explaining this "fraught relationship" most simply as "a departure geographically from the northern center of American theatre culture, New York City" (p. 17). She acknowledges, however, an ideological opposition as well:

The South is often seen as an aberration alongside the rest of the nation, for which New York City serves as an iconic symbol. I argue that the uneasy relationship Richards describes is also rooted in factors related to the nature of the dramatic genre, which is marked by unique features that present a challenge for depictions of the South, especially on stage.

(p. 17)

Kayser employs Una Chaudhuri's theory of "geopathy"—which delineates places as problematic for dramatists and the characters they create—to illuminate the particular restraints on southern women playwrights.

Kayser demonstrates the deliberate attempts of Hellman, Henley, and Norman to avoid assumptions based on the regional identity of their characters or their own southern roots (p. 5). As Kentucky-born Norman mentioned in a 1986 reading at Alfred University and emphasizes in her prescript notes to her 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'night, Mother, "Under no circumstances should the set and its dressing make a judgment about the intelligence or taste of Jessie and Thelma. . . . Heavy accents, which would further distance the audience from Jessie and Thelma, are also wrong" (qtd. p. 3). Norman clarifies the rationale for her approach in a 1987 interview:

When you are even remotely from the South, there is always this judgment: People in the South talk funny and they aren't very smart, and they sit around on the porch all the time. One has to fight that. I want to give the characters a real chance at getting through to the audience. To do that, I had to get rid of all the things that stood in the way, like locale, accents, dialect.

(qtd. pp. 3-4)

Kayser establishes in clear, relatively jargon-free prose that southern female playwrights are quite aware of the South's identity in the national imaginary as a "backwards" region. They also recognize their critical audience to be what Jill Dolan describes as "the privileged, visible, speaking 'majority,' widely known as white, middle-class, and male" (and, Kayser would add, not southern) and their theatrical success to be reliant on the staging of a play in an American city most antithetical to the South, New York City (p. 4). Ultimately, Kayser asks, how can their marginalized position as female playwrights within American literary and theater culture, in some cases lesbians or women of color, not affect their dramatic choices?

While she draws from a broad theoretical basis, including American drama and theater scholarship, feminist and queer theory, performance studies, and southern...