Working+Session

**MORE ABOUT WORKING SESSION**

In 2008, nearly twenty years after Hart’s volume signaled a kind of golden age of women’s theatre writing, playwrights Sarah Schulman and Julia Jordan convened a “standing-room-only” town hall meeting in New York City to discuss a bias in the subsidized New York theatre that has male writers being produced four times more than women. Clearly, despite the ground-swell of feminist dramatic and critical writing that Hart captured in 1989, what she called “the last bastion of male hegemony in the literary arts” has, in the early twenty-first century, not yet been dismantled.

This working session will focus on contemporary playwriting by women, considering, but not limited to, the following questions: - Who are some of the key voices in contemporary playwriting by women? What are some of the concerns and techniques that distinguish their work? How is the work of contemporary women “playwrights” being “written”? Are “playwright” and “playwriting” adequate terms for describing contemporary practices? - What contextual research, theoretical frameworks, and critical methods are required to articulate the political and aesthetic affiliations and interventions of contemporary women playwrights? - What work by contemporary women playwrights gets produced, where, why, how, and for whom? What work by contemporary women playwrights is not making it to production, and why? - How have such developments as the critical turn to feminist performance in the 1990s, the move toward gender studies, the rise of queer theory, and the articulation of postcolonial criticism affected academic and scholarly engagements with contemporary women playwrights?

In her manifesto “Feminist Performance and Utopia,” in Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case’s 2007 edited volume //Staging International Feminisms//, Jill Dolan recalls the feminist “academy-community synergy” that helped to circulate challenging work by women beyond its original performance venues in the 1980s. This working session aims to re-produce some of the synergy that vitalized 1980s feminist theatre writing, extending and updating that earlier conversation so as to continue to intervene into the ‘default position’ of producing the white male playwright.

The working session will be a combined reading group/seminar. The plays and statements will serve as the basis for a pre-conference email discussion and the working session at the conference.

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