In this, her first monograph, Casey Kayser analyses the work of marginalized authors – women, specifically, sometimes also black and/or LGBTQI+ – writing from and/or about a marginalized region in the USA and abroad – the South – in what has been considered a marginalized genre within the field of southern literary studies – drama. In doing so, the author succeeds in filling a persistent void in American theatre and literary scholarship regarding southern women playwrights. The only other book-length study on the subject, Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige's Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism was published in 2002 and regrettably did not encourage any further thorough studies of the subject.
Inspired by Una Chaudhuri's concept of ‘geopathology’ (1995), which sees place as a problem in modern drama, Kayser expands the notion and argues that, in the American South, this geopathic relationship determines the entire creative process, from the burgeoning stages of playwrighting to the play's reception. Drawing on Jill Dolan's concept of the ‘universal spectator’, the author rightfully denounces how the American theatrical establishment has systematically characterized the South as a ‘backwards’ region, thus marginalizing southern women playwrights even further. In their attempt to negotiate and confront their marginalized position as southerners within the American scene, Kayser identifies three strategies to represent the South and its (many) identities: placing, displacing and re-placing. While placing refers to an explicit southern setting, with identifiable tropes and characters from that region, often depicted with a certain irony to avoid stereotypical images of the local identity, displacing involves a slightly peripheral South, only present in characters' memories, usually set in opposition to the North, specifically New York. With re-placing, playwrights return to a southern setting but abandon any genre, temporal or spatial restrictions to explore a less monolithic southern identity within the globalized world.
Kayser's study explicitly deals with a diversity of contemporary southern women authors, some more critically acclaimed than others – Beth Henley, Elizabeth Dewberry, Sandra Deer, Paula Vogel, Pearl Cleage, Shay Youngblood and Sharon Bridgforth. Interestingly enough, she begins her analysis by dedicating a chapter to a pioneer (southern) playwright, Lilian Hellman, ‘an ambivalent figure in both her critical reputation and her regional identity’ (p. 39). As such, Hellman perfectly incarnates some of the concerns southern women playwrights still face today regarding race and gender issues and critical reception. In that regard, Kayser's retake on Hellman from the perspective of region, race and gender is definitely a contribution to the field of American and southern drama and a perfect segue to the following sections of the book.
Focusing primarily on prescript notes, the dramatic text and rhetoric of reviews for each production, the author draws her theoretical framework from different fields, ranging from women's and feminist drama and theatre to southern literary and cultural studies. This rich interdisciplinary perspective underlines the complexity of the subject matter and favourably broadens the monograph's potential readership. Although mentioned in the introduction (p. 9), performance studies seem to play a minor role compared to other fields, such as literary studies. Therefore the interpretation of plays tends to focus almost exclusively on plot, storyline and character description, and much less on style or overall dramaturgy. The exception that proves the rule would be the analysis of Bridgforth's play Loveconjure/blues (2007) in chapter 5, which deviates from a more naturalistic writing style and thus leads the author to focus more on different elements of the text. However, possibly in an attempt to demonstrate to a broader readership how this particular work does not conform to more ‘traditional’ drama, Kayser at times suggests outdated explanations for non- or postdramatic playtexts: ‘while the text has been categorized as drama and is meant to be performed, it lacks stage directions and is written in combination of poetry and prose (it breaks from dramatic convention)’ (p. 150). Hence it would have been preferable to reference more recent scholarship on contemporary drama and performance to avoid clichés regarding texts of these types.
Overall, Marginalized remains a convincing, original and well-written monograph on a relevant and seemingly invisible topic in which its author successfully integrates different fields and ideas toward a productive, nuanced study of contemporary southern women playwrights and the issues of region, gender and race.
