Explores how women playwrights illuminate the contemporary world and contribute to its reshaping

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 multi-faceted, 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. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book’s contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous, Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood. Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.

This long-awaited book is the first full-length study of the work of the extraordinary contemporary black British playwright, debbie tucker green. Covering the period from 2000 (Two Women) to 2017 (a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun)), it offers scholars and students the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge critical debate engendered by tucker green’s innovative dramatic works for stage, television, and radio. This groundbreaking book includes contributions by a range of outstanding scholars, including black playwriting specialists, world-leading contemporary theatre scholars and some of the very best emerging researchers in the field. While always focused on the precision and detail of tucker green’s work, this book simultaneously reframes broader debates around contemporary drama and its politics, poses new questions of theatre, and provokes scholarly thinking in ways that, however obliquely, contribute to the change for which the plays agitate.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines: * this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot * specially-commissioned new essays by some of today's important feminist critics * a preface and introduction explaining this selection and contexts of the materials * a bibliography of secondary sources Playwrights covered include Joanna Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters.

Breaking new ground in this century, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first of its kind to address the work of contemporary international women playwrights. The book considers the work of established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Marie Clements, Lara Foot-Newton, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Caridad Svich, and Judith Thompson, but it also foregrounds important plays by many emerging writers. Divided into three sections-Histories, Conflicts, and Genres-the book explores such topics as the feminist history play, solo performance, transcultural dramaturgies, the identity play, the gendered terrain of war, and eco-drama, and encompasses work from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Oceania, South Africa, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. With contributions from leading international scholars and an introductory overview of the concerns and challenges facing women playwrights in this new century, Contemporary Women Playwrights explores the diversity and power of women's playwriting since 1990, highlighting key voices and examining crucial critical and theoretical developments within the field.