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Sample Chapter PROOF Contents Acknowledgements ix Contributors xi Introduction 1 Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris Part I Histories Chapter 1 Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting 17 Elaine Aston Chapter 2 Female Alliances and Women’s Histories in Contemporary Mexican and Argentine Drama 35 Ana Elena Puga Chapter 3 Chronic Desires: Theatre’s Aching Lesbian Bodies 50 Sara Warner Chapter 4 Women Playwrights in Egypt 66 Nehad Selaiha with Sarah Enany Chapter 5 Transcultural Dramaturgies: Latina Theatre’s Third Wave 82 Natalie Alvarez Chapter 6 Black Women Playwrights Making History: Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop 98 Soyica Diggs Colbert Part II Conflicts Chapter 7 The Gendered Terrain in Contemporary Theatre of War by Women 115 Sharon Friedman Chapter 8 Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 131 Amelia Howe Kritzer vii PROOF Contents Chapter 9 Women Playwrights in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Yael Farber, Lara Foot-Newton, and the Call for Ubuntu 148 Yvette Hutchison Chapter 10 Writing Across Our Sea of Islands: Contemporary Women Playwrights from Oceania 164 Diana Looser Chapter 11 Ecodramaturgy in/and Contemporary Women’s Playwriting 181 Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May Part III Genres Chapter 12 Making the Bones Sing: The Feminist History Play, 1976–2010 199 Katherine E. Kelly Chapter 13 Performing (Our)Selves: The Role of the Actress in Theatre-History Plays by Women 215 Lesley Ferris and Melissa Lee Chapter 14 Historical Landscapes in Contemporary Plays by Canadian Women 231 Penny Farfan Chapter 15 Asian American Women Playwrights and the Dilemma of the Identity Play: Staging Heterotopic Subjectivities 244 Esther Kim Lee Chapter 16 Deb Margolin, Robbie McCauley, Peggy Shaw: Affect and Performance 258 Elin Diamond Bibliography 275 Index 297 viii PROOF Introduction Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris The 21st Century will be the century of girls and women. –Michelle Bachelet, First Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women, 2010 1 In July 2010, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly voted unanimously “to create a new entity to accelerate progress in meeting the needs of women and girls worldwide.” The new UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, or UN Women, was the “result of years of negotiations between UN Member States and advocacy by the global women’s movement.” 2 Although the UN, founded in 1945, has a remit to serve the world at large in terms of human rights, it took until 2010 for member nations to vote unanimously for the creation of a sub-group to focus exclusively on gender equality and the empowerment of women. That same year, Michelle Bachelet became the first Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women, supporting initiatives on gender equality and the empowerment of women throughout the world. A centerpiece of her work was leading the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), established in 1946 with fifteen member states attending the first annual meeting. In March 2013, at the fifty-seventh session of the CSW, 131 member states attended the session. In her closing address to the commission at the 2013 meeting, Bachelet stated: We have all the evidence to know that progress for peace that is lasting, and for development that is sustainable, depends on progress, the long overdue progress, for the women and girls of this world. They are half the world’s popu- lation. If we are to make real progress for peace, equality and development, then we must make real progress for and with girls and women. 3 Bachelet also spoke clearly and concisely about the significant number of high- profile cases of violence against women that had been the continuous backdrop to the two-week meeting. Each CSW annual meeting designates a theme with plans to develop an agreement signed by the member states. In 2003 and again in 2012, the commission had pursued the issue of violence and human rights, but members were unable to reach an agreement either time. This issue was at the heart of Bachelet’s position in the UN – to keep pressure on world leaders to take action in relation to the continuous aggression against women. “We all know,” she stated, “how pervasive violence against women is. Violence knows no 1 PROOF Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris borders. Violence does not discriminate according to nationality, ethnicity, social class, culture, or religion. And it takes a heavy cost on individuals, families and societies.” 4 It was thus a significant achievement when, at the 2013 session, the CSW passed an agreement entitled “The Elimination and Prevention of All Forms of Violence against Women and Girls.” 5 While addressing the issue of violence was of crucial importance to Bachelet in her work with the UN, her more general sense of the need to “make real progress for and with girls and women” points toward how other primary issues interface with disquieting acts of brutality and aggression against women: lack of health- care (more women die from complications giving birth than from war or cancer), lack of education, and justice systems geared through a history of male domi- nance to deny women their human rights. A 2011 article in The Wall Street Journal reported that “[w]omen represent 40% of the world’s labor force but hold just 1% of its wealth.” 6 Against this backdrop of international relations and affairs of state, with world leaders such as Bachelet setting an agenda that demands action for women within and beyond the borders of nation states, women playwrights are engaged and grappling with similar concerns. An event in 2013 that crossed borders and took a global perspective on women’s issues was the fifteenth anniversary of V-Day, created by Eve Ensler. Since its founding in 1998, V-Day, with its performances worldwide of Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues , 7 has raised more than $90 million for grassroots anti-violence groups. In 2012 alone, there were 5,800 performances around the world and the V-Day nonprofit established “spotlight” campaigns that “contributed directly to groups in particular danger zones, including Afghanistan, New Orleans, Haiti, Juarez, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.” 8 In an effort to acknowledge this work for its anniversary on 14 February 2013, Ensler and her team decided to organize a single event – “The Biggest Mass Global Action to End Violence Against Women & Girls in The History of Humankind” – entitled “One Billion Rising,” which was “an appreciation, amplification and an escalation” of its previous work. 9 Ensler explains the event’s rationale: “Fifteen years ago, we started V-Day to end violence against women. Fifteen years on, we’ve had a lot of achievements, but the violence is still going on.... We can either keep picking up the shattered body parts of women all over the world, or we can escalate.” 10 Ensler’s remarks recognizing tremendous achievement but also ongoing struggle against a deeply entrenched culture of devaluing women and their work resonate with the analogous situation of contemporary women playwrights, whose artistic and political interventions, like Ensler’s own work, are so often linked to the larger conditions and experiences of women’s lives. In 1989, Lynda Hart published a ground-breaking edited volume, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre , in which she remarked, “The latter half of the twentieth century has seen an emergence of women play- wrights in numbers equal to the entire history of their dramatic foremothers.” 11 Hart’s volume included essays on now-canonical playwrights like Maria Irene Fornes, Ntozake Shange, and Caryl Churchill, as well as Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the celebrated performance company Split Britches, among many other 2 PROOF Introduction important women writers for the stage during this key period in the history of feminist theatre. Clearly, the book captured a ground-swell of women’s writing for the theatre that seemed to augur well for the years to come, and indeed the intervening near-quarter-century has seen some truly remarkable work by women playwrights. The present book of essays foregrounds some of the extraordinary diversity and power of women’s playwriting since 1990, encompassing works by continuing yet still innovative playwrights who first came to prominence in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but also many striking new voices that have emerged since the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. The plays that constituted the creative ground-swell that Hart’s book both captured and fostered corresponded with the development of feminist theatre scholarship and the resulting promotion and circulation of the work of women playwrights within the academy, in undergraduate and graduate classrooms and the production seasons of university theatre departments, and as a field of research. Beyond Hart’s Making a Spectacle , a number of other key texts of the late 1980s and early 1990s included analyses of contemporary women’s playwriting, among them now-classic works of feminist theatre studies like Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre (1988, 2008) and Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988, 2012). 12 These key years generated a rich archive of women’s playwriting and of feminist theatre history, theory, and criticism that promoted and illuminated it. The following years also saw the increasing visibility of women’s stories in popular culture, ranging from the television sitcom Ellen , in which lesbian performer Ellen DeGeneres’s eponymous character came out in 1997, through to more recent series like The L Word (2004–2009) , Nurse Jackie (2009–), and Girls (2012–), on which Jill Dolan has posted commentaries on her blog The Feminist Spectator . 13 Despite such advances, in 2008, nearly twenty years after Hart’s volume signaled a kind of golden age of women’s theatre writing, US playwrights Julia Jordan and Sarah Schulman convened a town hall meeting in New York City, attended by more than 150 playwrights, to discuss the fact that the 2008–2009 Off-Broadway season included four times more plays by men than women.
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