Female playwrights

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.

Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process.

One of the most distinguished intellectuals, major figures of National Struggle and major women writers of the Turkish Republic, Halide Edib had major contributions to the Turkish Theater. Mostly known for her novels and articles, the writer’s contribution to the Turkish theatre as a playwright, translator, director,actor, theatre critic were emphasized, the effect of her political views, her public persona in Turkish history and her other literary works that inspired her to write the play were analyzed. Her  unstaged  play Masks  and  Sous  (later developed as Masks Or Souls in a different version by the writer) was deeply analyzed in various ways. A method was suggested for a possible production of the play, the text was edited and simplified and a stage reading production was presented at the 20 th.Istanbul Theater Festival. The goal  was to present Halide Edip Adıvar to the theatre community from a different perspective and rediscover  her.

This paper on my creative writing process was delivered at the University of Oxford, May 31st 2018, Faculty of Byzantine and Modern Greek. It was in the context of the performance of my play Splinters at Simpkins Lee Theatre, Lady Margaret College.

The issue of corporeality is one of the dominant motifs in contemporary women's playwriting in the countries formed after the collapse of Yugoslavia. At the turn of the 20 th and 21 st centuries women's bodies function as a specific open register in their works, where real-life content is included. The body is also an instrument which detects the meanings of social actions and interactions. According to the authors-mainly from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro-the body becomes a constantly-transforming palimpsestic, multi-layered body-text which delivers information about the logic of control. The body-cen-tric perspective here is connected with the problematization of the characters' reactions to some mechanisms of normalization, classification, and increasing productivity of the bodies in their population. The changes in the configuration of control modes and everyday practices in some areas of women's life activity are presented. The female authors, e.g.: Milena Bogavac, Maja Pelević (Serbia), Lada Kaštelan, Ivana Sajko (Croatia), Jasna Šamić, Elma Tataragić (Bos-nia and Herzegovina), Nataša Nelević (Montenegro), Simona Semenič (Slovenia) illustrate some rituals and transgressions concerning procreation, female visual representations and the body losing its fitness and becoming isolated. In their artistic descriptions the authors confirm the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text.

Emma Dante burst on to the Italian national theatrical scene in 2001 with her absurdist and episodic mPalermu, a play about an extended Sicilian family who in the arc of one day fail to complete the single action of leaving their house. Since then, Dante’s work - which has toured extensively in Italy, France, Belgium and beyond, but is still relatively unknown in an Anglophone context - has been characterised by a steely determination to resist established modes and routes of creation, practice and reception. Having become disillusioned with her work in the established, institutional theatre in the cultural centres of Italy, Dante returned to her native city of Palermo where she began an individual artistic journey.  This return to her familial and geographical roots became a defining element of her work; her plays feature Sicilian settings, linguistic registers and address the peripheral region’s pressing social themes.
This paper will read Dante’s tenacious persistence in locating herself and her theatrical work in Sicily and Sicilian culture as standing in marked contrast and defiance to both the institutional theatre in Italy and the avant-garde. It will read her working approaches, positioning and use of marginal idioms as processes of anti-theatricality. Jonas A. Barish notes in his 1981 publication The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice, how forces of anti-theatrical bias present within theatrical works, instead of destroying theatre, can conversely act as agents of change and transformation within stagnant systems and forms. This paper will read Emma Dante’s theatrical practices in the same vein, identifying elements of anti-theatricality in her resistance to theatrical institutions and systems, and in her battle against complacency in theatrical representation itself. Such an alternative route to creation will be demonstrated to have the equivocal results of providing Dante with an enviable intellectual and artistic freedom while simultaneously restricting the distribution of her work.

This article examines the work of an Irish playwright, Marina Carr and an Italian playwright, Emma Dante. Both female playwrights show a recurring preoccupation with death, dying and living in their work. Contrasting the modern taste for signalling a clear divide between life and death, in Carr and Dante’s work the lines and divisions between this world and the next are not clearly drawn. A number of characters across the writers’ oeuvre occupy liminal spaces within the spectrum of life and death. Neither alive nor dead, these characters blur the edges of our modern understanding of death. Using Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, this paper seeks to investigate the position of two of these ‘betwixt and between’ characters, focussing on Woman in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow and Chicco in Dante’s Vita mia.