Critical perspectives on contemporary plays by women : the early twenty-first century / edited by Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Farfan, Penny.

Contributor:

Ferris, Lesley.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Drama--Women authors--History and criticism.

Drama.

Drama--21st century--History and criticism.

Drama--Social aspects--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (327 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Summary:

This 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 multifacted, 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.

Contents:

Feminist adaptations/adaptations of feminism

Indigenizing the colonial narrative

Does revenge fall softly?

Indecent collaborations and/in queer time(s)

The bloodstained distance

Unmaking a devil's bargain

"A change Is gonna come"?

Maternal agency and reproductive justice in Lisa Loomer's Roe

The mythic migrant, the witnessing self

Exceptional embodiment in Anna deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy

Acting and reenacting the Malvinas/Falklands War in Lola Arias's Minefield/Campo minado

Fun home

A "rock inside the flesh"

Quiara Hudes's water by the spoonful and the dramaturgy of free jazz

British muslim feminism and the marriage trap

Lesbian interspecies performance

Bread of life

Transcultural memory and food in Julia Cho's Aubergine

Truth and absurdity on the London stage

"I will tend your garden"

Dominique Morisseau's Blood at the Root

Inside Palermo

The magic of change

"But nostalgia's a disease"

Miss Piggy the Seer in the Land of Trump's Blind

Has she "escaped alone" to tell us? Caryl Churchill

Climate change and the capitalocene in Colleen Murphy's The Breathing Hole

The ghosts of Greenham Common in Lucy Kirkwood's The Children.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780472126323

0472126326

OCLC:

1243162561