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Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century
Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, EditorsThis book foregrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage. The book is framed by a substantial introduction that sets forth the critical vision and structure of the book as a whole, and an afterword that points toward emerging currents in and expansions of the contemporary field of playwriting by women on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Within this frame, the twenty-eight chapters that form the main body of the book, each focusing on a single play of critical significance, together constitute a multi-faceted, inevitably partial, yet nonetheless integral picture of the work of women playwrights since 2000 as they engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Some of these issues include the continuing oppression of and violence against women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and ethnic minorities; the ongoing processes of decolonization; the consequences of neoliberal capitalism; the devastation and enduring trauma of war; global migration and the refugee crisis; the turn to right-wing populism; and the impact of climate change, including environmental disaster and species extinction.
The book is structured into seven sections: Replaying the Canon; Representing Histories; Staging Lives; Re-imagining Family; Navigating Communities; Articulating Intersections; and New World Order(s). These sections group clusters of plays according to the broad critical actions they perform or, in the case of the final section, the new world orders that they capture through their stagings of the seeming impasse of the politically and environmentally catastrophic global present moment. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book's contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous, Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood.
Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.
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Cover
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
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Introduction
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I. Replaying the Canon
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Chapter 1. Feminist Adaptations/Adaptations of Feminism
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Chapter 2. Indigenizing the Colonial Narrative
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Chapter 3. Does Revenge Fall Softly?
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Chapter 4. Indecent Collaborations and/in Queer Time(s)
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II. Representing Histories
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Chapter 5. The Bloodstained Distance
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Chapter 6. Unmaking a Devil’s Bargain
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Chapter 7. “A Change Is Gonna Come”?
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Chapter 8. Maternal Agency and Reproductive Justice in Lisa Loomer’s Roe
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III. Staging Lives
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Chapter 9. The Mythic Migrant, the Witnessing Self
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Chapter 10. Exceptional Embodiment in Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy
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Chapter 11. Acting and Reenacting the Malvinas/Falklands War in Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado
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Chapter 12. Fun Home
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IV. Reimagining Family
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Chapter 13. A “Rock Inside the Flesh”
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Chapter 14. Quiara Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful and the Dramaturgy of Free Jazz
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Chapter 15. British Muslim Feminism and the Marriage Trap
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Chapter 16. Lesbian Interspecies Performance
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V. Navigating Communities
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Chapter 17. Bread of Life
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Chapter 18. Transcultural Memory and Food in Julia Cho’s Aubergine
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Chapter 19. Truth and Absurdity on the London Stage
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Chapter 20. “I Will Tend Your Garden”
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VI. Articulating Intersections
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Chapter 21. Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root
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Chapter 22. Inside Palermo
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Chapter 23. The Magic of Change
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Chapter 24. “But Nostalgia’s a Disease”
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VII. New World Order(s)
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Chapter 25. Miss Piggy the Seer in the Land of Trump’s Blind
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Chapter 26. Has She “Escaped Alone” to Tell Us? Caryl Churchill
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Chapter 27. Climate Change and the Capitalocene in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole
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Chapter 28. The Ghosts of Greenham Common in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children
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Afterwords
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Contributors
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Index
- 978-0-472-12632-3 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-07435-8 (hardcover)
- 978-0-472-05435-0 (paper)