BiblioVault - Books about Feminism and theater

Curtain Calls

British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820

Mary A. Schofield

Ohio University Press, 1991

“I here and there o’heard a Coxcomb cry,
Ah, rot—’tis a Woman’s Comedy.”

Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow—and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines—women truly took the theater world by storm.

For each woman who chose a career in the theater world of the eighteenth century, there is a unique tale of struggle, insult, success, good or bad fortune, disaster, seduction, or fame. Whether acting, writing, reviewing, or stage managing, women played a major, if frequently unacknowledged, role in the history of the theater from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. From Alpha Behn’s earliest plays through the glorious celebrity of Sara Siddons, women molded the taste of the age and carved out in the theater one of the few available opportunities for independence and renown.

Not all the women who tried succeeded, of course, and even the best faced opposition as they challenged the male stronghold of playwriting and theater managing. Curtain Calls maps the new territory as these pioneering women staked it for their own; it chronicles their lives, their triumphs, and their losses.

We begin with Aphra Behn, whose first play was staged in 1670, and conclude in the early decades of the nineteenth century with Inchbald and Siddons. The one hundred and fifty years encompassed by their lives contain the careers of dozens of lesser–known women, a network, as Dr. Johnson would have it, encompassing both talent and tribulation.

Contributors include: Edward Langhans, Linda R. Payne, Pat Rogers, Maureen e. Mulvihill, Deborah Payne, Betty Rizzo, Ellen Donkin, Frances M. Kavenik, Jessica Munns, nancy Cotton, Edna L. Steevs, Doreen Saar, Jean B. Kern, Katherine M. Rogers, Constance Clark, William J. Burling, Judith Phillips Stanton, Douglas Butler, Rose Zimbardo, and the editors.

[more]

Female Spectacle

The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism

Susan A. Glenn

Harvard University Press, 2000

When the French actress Sarah Bernhardt made her first American tour in 1880, the term "feminism" had not yet entered our national vocabulary. But over the course of the next half-century, a rising generation of daring actresses and comics brought a new kind of woman to center stage. Exploring and exploiting modern fantasies and fears about female roles and gender identity, these performers eschewed theatrical convention and traditional notions of womanly modesty. They created powerful images of themselves as ambitious, independent, and sexually expressive "New Women."

Female Spectacle reveals the theater to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women. Ironically, theater also provided an arena in which producers and audiences projected the uncertainties and hostilities that accompanied changing gender relations. From Bernhardt's modern methods of self-promotion to Emma Goldman's political theatrics, from the female mimics and Salome dancers to the upwardly striving chorus girl, Glenn shows us how and why theater mattered to women and argues for its pivotal role in the emergence of modern feminism.

[more]

Fornes

Theater in the Present Tense

Diane Lynn Moroff

University of Michigan Press, 1996

The work of Maria Irene Fornes, author of such acclaimed plays as Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, and The Conduct of Life, has for over three decades earned the attention of theater-goers, scholars and critics. She has won eight Obie awards, has provoked considerable controversy, and has consistently challenged and delighted the reader and spectator with her idiosyncratic voice and her serious and yet profoundly playful approach to the theater and to the issues of humanity, gender politics, and art.
Diane Lynn Moroff focuses on Fornes's major plays, providing illuminating readings of her unique and irreverent body of work. The book traces the career of this influential playwright, director, and teacher, including the reception of her plays, the range of critical responses (particularly those of feminist critics), and an introduction to Fornes's theatrical philosophies. It looks at such critical issues in Fornes's work as the representation of female subjectivity, theater as metaphor and context, art as ritual, and the role of the spectator. In a final chapter, Fornes's plays including Abingdon Square and her most recent work, What of the Night? are examined in the context of the sexualization of character, an ongoing theme for Fornes.
Fornes: Theater in the Present Tense will appeal to scholars and students in theater studies and women's studies and to anyone interested or engaged in contemporary theater.
Diane Lynn Moroff is Assistant Professor of English, Oglethorpe University.

[more]

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

[more]

A Stage of Their Own

Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era

Sheila Stowell

University of Michigan Press, 1994

Upstaging Big Daddy

Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter

Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1993

The essays in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter argue that directing, as it has been taught and handed down over the years, has worked in the service of a body of dramatic literature that has routinely minimized or distorted the lives of women, people of color, gay men, and lesbians. The book’s contributors see directing not as an ideologically neutral set of skills, but as something that has served historically to preserve existing forms of authority.

What happens, then, when a feminist who directs for the theater decides that there is something called a feminist director, someone who sees her job as protesting and intervening in the existing system of representation? The contributors to this volume provide a wide range of answers, in original essays that disrupt traditional approaches of directing by showing how feminist theory might be applied in practice.

Essays and interviews by a wide variety of directors, scholars, and other theater specialists offer fresh new models for thinking about directing. The collection includes essays on African-American theater, feminist “classics,” and male directors working on feminist plays, as well as concrete suggestions for directing a variety of plays, from works by Shakespeare and Euripides to those by Caryl Churchill, Aishah Rahman, and Helene Cixous. The theoretical material, drawing from a wide range of contemporary critics and theorists, has been written with the director in mind, partly for the purpose of analyzing texts but also for inspiring creative directorial and design solutions.

[more]

Women Writing Plays

Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

Edited by Alexis Greene

University of Texas Press, 2006

Women's playwriting burgeoned in the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Ever since, playwriting women have been embracing new subjects, experimenting with form, and devising new ways of looking at the world. To honor their achievements and inspire future endeavors, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize was established in memory of an American actor, journalist, and feminist who died of breast cancer. In the nearly three decades of the award's existence, more than three hundred English-speaking women playwrights have been finalists for the Blackburn Prize in recognition of their work, including such prominent writers as Marsha Norman, Cheryl L. West, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of women's playwriting, as well as a celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It combines critical essays, playwrights' memoirs, and conversations and interviews with playwrights to explore how women's playwriting evolved in relation to the women's movement and how it continues to map new territory and find fresh modes of expression. The majority of contributors to this volume—playwrights, arts journalists, and theater critics—have had some connection to the Blackburn Prize, either as award recipients, play readers, or judges. The memoirs, conversations, and interviews come from some of the finest women playwrights of the last three decades. These dramatists offer fascinating insight into the playwriting art, theatrical careers, and women's goals in writing for the theater.

[more]