Suzan-Lori Parks

As demonstrated by Deirdre Osborne’s 2011 review essay for Contemporary Women’s Writing “Feminist Stages and Subaltern Sightlines,” theater and drama have proven to be important and challenging areas of exploration and intervention for contemporary feminists. Complementing recent publications on feminist theater are three new studies of individual American women playwrights of diverse backgrounds: Suzan-Lori Parks, Wendy Wasserstein, and Maria Irene Fornés. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship on women’s drama began carving out a significant place for itself with studies such as Helene Keyssar’s Feminist Theatre: Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women (1984), Lynda Hart’s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (1989), and Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991). This work inserted a feminist perspective into the existing scholarship on theater in English by focusing on women’s contributions. However, like much second-wave criticism, it inadequately addressed racial and cultural difference. By contrast, critics who emphasized diversity in late-twentieth-century studies, such as Misha Berson, in Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays (1990); Dorinne K. Kondo, in About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (1997); and Josephine Lee, in Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (1998), often prioritized race over gender issues. While the contributions of these works cannot be overestimated, clearly a void remained until the mid-1990s, in terms of, for instance, assessing the cultural impact of American women playwrights from a diverse range of backgrounds

Art · Drama · Literature · Performance studies · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Spectacle · Anthropology · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Theatre and Performance Studies · Gender Studies · History