BiblioVault - Books about Dolan, Jill

The Feminist Spectator as Critic

Jill Dolan

University of Michigan Press, 2012

The Feminist Spectator as Critic broke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new introduction and up-to-the-moment bibliography, detailing the progress to date in gender equity in theater and the arts, and suggesting how far we have yet to go.

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Memories of the Revolution

The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater

Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2015

The women’s experimental theater space called the WOW Café (Women’s One World) has been a vital part of New York’s downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to create, perform, and witness a cultural revolution. Its renowned alumnae include playwright and actor Lisa Kron, performance artists Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana, the theater troupe the Five Lesbian Brothers, and actors/playwrights Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin, among others.

Memories of the Revolution collects scripts, interviews, and commentary to trace the riotous first decade of WOW. While the histories of other experimental theater collectives have been well documented, WOW’s history has only begun to be told. The anthology also includes photographs of and reminiscences by Café veterans, capturing the history and artistic flowering of the first ten years of this countercultural haven.

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A Menopausal Gentleman

The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw

Peggy Shaw

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"With classic butch finesse---that handsome combination of vulnerability and toughness---Peggy Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950s. Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."
---Gay Community News

Obie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.

This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.

A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance
Cover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

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Presence and Desire

Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance

Jill Dolan

University of Michigan Press, 1994

Explores current controversies and significant concerns in feminist theater and performance

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Utopia in Performance

Finding Hope at the Theater

Jill Dolan

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"Jill Dolan is the theatre's most astute critic, and this new book is perhaps her most important. Utopia in Performance argues with eloquence and insight how theatre makes a difference, and in the process demonstrates that scholarship matters, too. It is a book that readers will cherish and hold close as a personal favorite, and that scholars will cite for years to come."
---David Román, University of Southern California

What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change.

She traces these "utopian performatives" in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of "feeling utopia" found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

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Wendy Wasserstein

Jill Dolan

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006), author of The Heidi Chronicles, wrote topical, humorous plays addressing relationships among women and their families, taking the temperature of social moments from the 1960s onward to debate women’s rightful place in their professional and personal lives. The playwright’s popular plays continue to be produced on Broadway and in regional theaters around the country and the world. Wasserstein’s emergence as a popular dramatist in the 1970s paralleled the emergence of the second-wave feminist movement in the United States, a cultural context reflected in the themes of her plays. Yet while some of her comedies and witty dramas were wildly successful, packing theaters and winning awards, feminists of the era often felt that the plays did not go far enough.

Wendy Wasserstein provides a critical introduction and a feminist reappraisal of the significant plays of one of the most famous contemporary American women playwrights. Following a biographical introduction, chapters address each of her important plays, situating Wasserstein’s work in the history of the US feminist movement and in a historical moment in which women artists continue to struggle for recognition.

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