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The New Women Playwrights
| Article
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18717 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,775 Words |
| Author
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Enoch Brater
Enoch Brater is professor of English and theater at the
University of Michigan. His books include Beyond Minimalism:
Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Beckett at 80/Beckett in
Context, and Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. This
essay is adapted from his recent work Why Beckett? (Thames and
Hudson, 1989). |
After a talk she gave in 1972 about Another Part of the Forest, Lillian Hellman responded to a question on the obstacles she might have faced as a woman writer for the stage: "Let me tell you one thing. The New York theater is so hard up for good plays, they'll take it from anywhere they can get it." "Besides," she continued while puffing on a cigarette, "there was a vogue of lady playwrights at the time." What she did not say was that her own tough-minded scripts were a far cry from the genteel conventions embraced by her "lady" playwright colleagues. Her first play, The Children's Hour, presented the scandal of an accusation of lesbianism, while the play for which she is most famous, The Little Foxes, posited a "top girl" as ruthless as any of her male counterparts.
Despite Hellman's caveat about her underdog status as a writer who happened to be female, she was indeed the only major playwright of her gender to emerge from the heyday of Broadway theater that lionized Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Robert Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, S.N. Behrman, William Saroyan, and, of course, Eugene O'Neill--standard fare for a survey of the American theater from the early thirties through the late fifties.
Woman Playwrights in the Seventies and Eighties
Several decades later the situation would be quite different. Any anthology of plays shown in New York in the seventies and eighties would be certain to focus on the work of the new women playwrights, most conspicuously Tina Howe, Beth Henley, Emily Mann, Rosalyn Drexler, Rochelle Owens, Wendy Kesselman, Honor Moore, Joan Schenkar, Ntozake Shange, Karen Malpede, Susan Yankowitz, Eve Merriam, Holly Hughes, Susan Sandler, Wendy Wasserstein, Cindy Lou Johnson, Julie Bovasso, and Marsha Norman. In 1983 Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times Magazine that Norman, the author of 'night Mother, was "at the crest of a wave of adventurous young women playwrights--a proliferation that is the most encouraging and auspicious aspect of the current American theater."
What Manhattan made visible, Hollywood soon made spectacular in a series of major motion pictures designed for popular consumption and studio profit. Writers from the long-ago sixties--and in some cases, even earlier than that--were being rediscovered all over the country. The work of Maria Irene Fornes, Megan Terry, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, and Joan Holden of the San Francisco Mime Troupe was gaining recognition not only in the regional theaters
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