Penny Farfan and Leslie Ferris's new collection of essays (the previous one being Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century, 2013) provides a compelling and accessible picture of dramatic works written in the last two decades by women from a wide range of different contexts. The book's twenty-eight chapters examine some of the most representative works by both experienced and emergent voices on the global scene, as each of these playwrights critically represents the many ways in which violence, oppression and segregation are embodied in a world marked by the massification of social movements advocating change, such as Black Lives Matter or Me Too. Feminist in spirit, this compilation aims at ‘reflecting contemporary feminism's attention to how gender intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and age’ (p. 1), thus shedding light on the importance of intersectionality as a fundamental concept not only for feminist criticism, but also for studies on theatre, theatre practice and criticism.

Each chapter is an essay focused on a singular dramatic work. These essays are divided into seven parts, which have been organized according to themes such as gender and race in the reception of classics, history, memory, new family structures, migrant communities, neo-liberalism and current concerns about the environment. However, this distribution is meant only to help readers navigate through the anthology, inasmuch as the playwrights share some or almost all of these concerns regardless of their age, experience, culture, geographical region, set of beliefs and so on, thus emphasizing the collection's interconnectedness despite its plurality of voices. Moreover, each contributor highlights technical aspects which range, for instance, from the complexities of adapting canonical works following gender and/or post-colonial perspectives, through the myriad of possibilities that archive and historical documents offer in order to elaborate new challenging theatrical experiences, to the reception and reformulation of techniques influenced by Brechtian aesthetics as political theatre has become the dramatic form par excellence to comment on segregation, oppression and violence.

Part I addresses most of the curators’ concerns, as the contributors focus on, for example, the way that works such as Homer's Odyssey or Aeschylus’ Oresteia (which represent the Western patriarchal tradition) are critically updated in Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2007) and Yaël Farber's Molora (2003), under the light of gender and race criticism. A critique of colonial narrative is also explored in Denise Varney's essay on The Drover's Wife (2016) by Indigenous Australian writer Leah Purcell, who reformulated the homonymous and controversial short story written by Henry Lawson ‘by means of a historical and political intervention that develops from a manifestly different time and place’ (p. 32). In this sense, many essays examine how adaptations allow playwrights to comment on their own present by re-evaluating former literary and dramatic expressions through the lenses of our time and political context, and how they can also provide the space and methodology for the reconstruction of an entire community's history. This is what Katie N. Johnson and Sara L. Warner expose in their analysis of Paula Vogel's Indecent (2015), a play that merges reality and fiction in order to portray the marginalized presence of lesbian characters in the history of American theatre.

Part III is also worthwhile, as it shifts the focus from adaptations to the staging of historical subjects’ testimonies. For instance, Helene Cixous's Le dernier caravansérail: Odyssées, as Emine Fişek explains in her essay, ‘represents the two conjoined realities that structure contemporary experiences of migration: mobility and immobility’ (p. 100), a conjunction that is echoed by the interweaving of testimonies and intertextual references to ancient myths. Along the same lines, Lola Arias's gathering of Argentinian and English veteran soldiers who fought in the Malvinas/Falklands War in her play Minefield/Campo Minado (2017) is, according to Paola S. Hernández, a good example of how traumatic experiences can become a crucial source for the creation of new perspectives on painful historical events and the role of memory.

Critical Perspectives is thus of the utmost importance for researchers and scholars interested in keeping up with the countless possibilities that contemporary female playwrighting offers for the development of (political) theatre in the face of social unrest and the new challenges brought about by this century.