The publication of this book attests to at least three important truths: there is a wealth of recent playwriting by women that warrants systematic explication and high-profile scholarship; within a single volume, it is impossible to do justice to the diversity of such work, or to do more than nod to its artistic and topical breadth; and in recognition of the first (and despite the last) of these observations, 28 chapters on as many plays can provide rewarding insights that engender a desire for even more. Whereas the editors’ 2013 volume Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave) includes numerous essays that survey national, regional, or thematic outputs, contributors to Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century each limit their scope to a single work. A preponderance of examples hail from the USA, Canada, and UK, but there are also single cases of writers from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Italy (Sicily), New Zealand/Aeoteroa, South Africa, and Syria. The eclecticism of this set of plays could be questioned, yet as the editors stipulate, their success in developing papers originally discussed in a long-standing ASTR working group explains the heterogeneity of the selection. Coverage includes several generations of writers (from Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous, Elfriede Jelinek, and Adrienne Kennedy to younger generations including debbie tucker green, Suzan-Lori Parks, Julia Cho, Lynn Nottage, and Lola Arias, with Lucy Kirkwood, Leah Maree Purcell, and Yaël Farber).
The essays are endlessly fungible for teaching purposes, inspiring many kinds of curation: aesthetically varied approaches to stagecraft and collaboration; exposés of intersectional inequities facing women around the globe; adaptations of the canon; Indigenous and global majority perspectives on issues such as policing, disability, aging, and co-optation; transculturalism contrasted with cultural insularity; and the stakes and missteps of activism. Each essay is concise (averaging eight pages) yet never breezy in tone, well-suited to assigning along with a play text. Some authors focus on rendering the singularity of a play’s socio-historical situation by closely reading the plot in relation to history and recent circumstances, as with global warming in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole, access to abortion in Lisa Loomer’s Roe, the challenges of pluralist belonging in Alia Bano’s Shades, reimagining a hate crime in Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root, and ways in which men expunge women’s prospects in The World of Extreme Happiness, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s play about migrant rural workers seeking opportunities in China’s cities. Some chapters focus on staging techniques that support a play’s politics, as with Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, in which the actresses tell the whole story, performing male and female roles; Farber’s Molora, an adaptation of the Oresteia (in light of the truth and reconciliation process in postapartheid South Africa) in which music and sound convey brutal racialized violence; split scenes and free jazz in Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes; motion and inertia enacted on a small rolling platform in Cixous’s Le Dernier Caravansérail; a real-time cooking class in Whiti Hereaka’s Rēwena; incorporation of the live titular animal in Liwaa Yazji’s Goats; audience proximity, in Por Elise by Grace Passô, to invoke trust but also referencing the hermeneutical gap inherent to neighborly coexistence; and in Emma Dante’s mPalermu, reinforcement of the consequences of poverty compounded by male dominance, allegorized through characters’ literal inability to leave the confines of a depicted domestic space. A combination of close reading techniques, discourse analysis, and formalism characterize most authors’ approaches. Too infrequently there are hints of performance analysis or a production history, though occasionally staging choices are highlighted in order to explain a text’s interpretive challenges (notably in Sue-Ellen Case’s comparativist exegesis of Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Burgher King).
Penny Farfan stipulates her desire to produce a resource for students, theatre-goers, artists, and even season-planners. The book is highly readable, and thus likely to fulfill that capacious goal. The introduction provides a glancing orientation to what follows; dipping into this repeatedly serves as an amuse-bouche to whet the appetite anew when a reader might otherwise find their curiosity unfocused. Lesley Ferris’s afterword emphasizes how feminist and queer plays emerge from a tradition devolved from writers such as Maria Irene Fornes, Ntozake Shange, Judith Malina, Simone Benmussa, and Nehad Selaiha. Ferris prominently credits the late Elyse Dodgson for fostering workshops in Central and South America, Africa, Lebanon, Eurasia, and India jointly with the Royal Court, which brought emerging writers in direct contact with working British playwrights. I earnestly hope for a third volume from these editors that will feature more of the legacy of thousands of works that arose from these residencies.
