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"American drama -- Women authors -- History and criticism"
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Loca motion : the travels of Chicana and Latina popular culture
2006 Honorable Mention for MLA Prize in US Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies
In the summer of 1995, El Vez, the “Mexican Elvis,“along with his backup singers and band, The Lovely Elvettes and the Memphis Mariachis, served as master of ceremony for a ground-breaking show, “Diva L.A.: A Salute to L.A.’s Latinas in the Tanda Style.” The performances were remarkable not only for the talent displayed, but for their blend of linguistic, musical, and cultural traditions.
In Loca Motion , Michelle Habell-Pallán argues that performances like Diva L.A. play a vital role in shaping and understanding contemporary transnational social dynamics. Chicano/a and Latino/a popular culture, including spoken word, performance art, comedy, theater, and punk music aesthetics, is central to developing cultural forms and identities that reach across and beyond the Americas, from Mexico City to Vancouver to Berlin. Drawing on the lives and work of a diverse group of artists,Habell-Pallán explores new perspectives that defy both traditional forms of Latino cultural nationalism and the expectations of U.S. culture. The result is a sophisticated rethinking of identity politics and an invaluable lens from which to view the complex dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
eBook
Lives in Play
Lives in Playexplores the centrality of life narratives to women's drama and performance from the 1970s to the present moment. In the early days of second-wave feminism, the slogan was \"The personal is the political.\" These autobiographical and biographical \"true stories\" have the political impact of the real and have also helped a range of feminists tease out the more complicated aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality in a Western culture that now imagines itself as \"postfeminist.\"
The book's scope is broad, from performance artists like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Bobby Baker to playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Kane. The book links the narrative tactics and theatrical approaches of biographyand autobiography and shows how theater artists use life writing strategies to advance women's rights and remake women's representations.Lives in Playwill appeal to scholars in performance studies, women's studies, and literature, including those in the growing field of auto/biography studies.
\" A fresh perspective and wide-ranging analysis of changes in feminist theater for the past thirty years . . . a most welcome addition to the literature on theater, in particular scholarship on feminist practices.\"
-Choice
\"Helps sustain an important history by reviving works of feminist theater and performance and giving them a new and refreshing context and theorical underpinning . . . considering 1970s performance art alongside more conventional play production.\"
-Lesley Ferris, The Ohio State University
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Preaching the blues : black feminist performance in lynching plays
\"Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays examines several lynching plays to foreground black women's performances as non-normative subjects who challenge white supremacist ideology. Maisha S. Akbar re-maps the study of lynching drama by examining plays that are contingent upon race-based settings in black households versus white households. She also discusses performances of lynching plays at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the South, and reviews lynching plays closely tied to black school campuses. By focusing on current examples and impacts of lynching plays in the public sphere, this book grounds this historical form of theatre in the present day with depth and relevance. Of interest to scholars and students of both general Theatre and Performance studies, and of African American Theatre and Drama, Preaching the Blues foregrounds the importance of black feminist artists in lynching culture and interdisciplinary scholarship\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922
Black examines the roles a remarkable group of women played in one of the most influential theatre groups in America, demonstrating their influence on 20th-century dramaturgy and culture. Perhaps most notable for its discovery of two significant American playwrights--Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell--and for its role in developing an American tradition of non-commercial theatre, the Provincetown Players collective has long been appreciated for its meaningful contributions to American drama. An outgrowth of the Greenwich Village community of politically minded artists and intellectuals, the group became convinced that theatre was essential to America's spiritual and social regeneration. The company ultimately produced nearly 100 plays by more than 50 American writers. In this thoroughly engaging work, Cheryl Black argues that Provincetown has another, largely unacknowledged claim to fame: it was one of the first theatre companies in America in which women achieved prominence in every area of operation. At a time when women playwrights were rare, women directors rarer, and women scenic designers unheard of, Provincetown's female members excelled in all these functions, making significant contributions to the development of modern American drama and theatre. In addition to playwright Glaspell, the company's female membership included the likes of poets Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes; journalists Louise Bryant and Mary Heaton Vorce; novelists Neith Boyce and Evelyn Scott; and painter Marguerite Zorach. A solidly researched and engagingly written piece of social history, this book offers new insight into the relationship between gender and theatre and will attract a broad readership, including students and scholars of theatre, women's studies, feminism, and American Studies, and members of the general public interested in any of these issues.
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The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights
This volume addresses the work of women playwrights throughout the history of the American theatre, from the early pioneers to contemporary feminists. Each chapter introduces the reader to the work of one or more playwrights and to a way of thinking about plays. Together they cover significant writers such as Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Lillian Hellman, Sophie Treadwell, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Megan Terry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Wendy Wasserstein, Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Maria Irene Fornes. Playwrights are discussed in the context of topics such as early comedy and melodrama, feminism and realism, the Harlem Renaissance, the feminist resurgence of the 1970s and feminist dramatic theory. A detailed chronology and illustrations enhance the volume, which also includes bibliographical essays on recent criticism and on African-American women playwrights before 1930.
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Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in History and Criticism
This timely collection addresses the neglected state of scholarship on southern women dramatists by bringing together the latest criticism on some of the most important playwrights of the 20th century.Coeditors Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige attribute the neglect of southern women playwrights in scholarly criticism to \"deep historical prejudices\" against drama itself and against women artists in general, especially in the South. Their call for critical awareness is answered by the 15 essays they include in Southern Women Playwrights, considerations of the creative work of universally acclaimed playwrights such as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Lillian Hellman (the so-called \"Trinity\") in addition to that of less-studied playwrights, including Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Alice Childress, Naomi Wallace, Amparo Garcia, Paula Vogel, and Regina Porter.This collection springs from a series of associated questions regarding the literary and theatrical heritage of the southern woman playwright, the unique ways in which southern women have approached the conventional modes of comedy and tragedy, and the ways in which the South, its types and stereotypes, its peculiarities, its traditions-both literary and cultural-figure in these women's plays. Especially relevant to these questions are essays on Lillian Hellman, who resisted the label \"southern writer,\" and Carson McCullers, who never attempted to ignore her southernness.This book begins by recovering little-known or unknown episodes in the history of southern drama and by examining the ways plays assumed importance in the lives of southern women in the early 20th century. It concludes with a look at one of the most vibrant, diverse theatre scenes outside New York today-Atlanta.
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