American women playwrights

Abstract

The standard historical narrative of American drama and theater tends to privilege male writers even more than the narratives of fiction or poetry do. In the historical narrative, the important aesthetic developments and cultural moments tend to be linked to the careers of playwrights, almost exclusively male, who have achieved fame, fortune, and critical acclaim, principally in the last 100 years. Thus Eugene O’Neill is linked with early realism and modernism; Clifford Odets with the leftist theater of the 1930s; Tennessee Williams with post-World War II psychological realism; Arthur Miller with politically minded realism; Edward Albee with absurdist drama; Sam Shepard with hyperrealism and postmodernism; David Mamet with a tough dialogic realism characterized by the pseudonymous “Mametspeak”; Tony Kushner with an open, epic theater that addresses issues of politics, identity, and religious myth; August Wilson with African American history, myth, and identity. A similar list of female writers and their cultural moments might include Rachel Crothers with the social realism of the Progressive Era and the society comedy of the Jazz Age; Susan Glaspell with feminist realism and modernism; Lillian Hellman with the social melodrama of the 1930s and ’40s; Lorraine Hansberry with the social realism of the Civil Rights movement; Adrienne Kennedy and Alice Childress with experimental hybrid dramatic forms in the 1950s and ’60s; Mar´ıa Irene Forn´es, Ntozake Shange, and Megan Terry with feminist experiments in the 1970s; Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Beth Henley with a neo-realism that emphasizes women’s issues in the 1970s and ’80s; and, into the twenty-first century, Paula Vogel with an open dramatic form and a focus on family, gender, and identity; Suzan-Lori Parks with remaking both dramatic structure and American history and myth; Anna Deavere Smith and Eve Ensler with a new, socially aware monologic theater.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 174 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.