Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, eds.Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 316 p. $34.95. ISBN: 978-0-472-05435-0.

Abstract

Capturing the hugely diverse body of contemporary plays by women across the globe is an ambitious undertaking, even if the aim is to cover as short a period of time as the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Editors Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris have approached this task with care, curating a cohesive volume which builds on their collaborative work as part of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and their previous publication on Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2013). Taking a consciously intersectional approach, this edited collection covers a range of themes such as environmental risk, indigenizing colonial narratives, race and protest, the mythicmigrant, gender, and class-based violence, to mention a few. The geographical scope of the essays is wide-ranging as they bring together playwrights from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Italy, New Zealand (Aotearoa), South Africa, the US, and the UK. Although the majority of plays discussed refer to the UK and North America, the playwrights’ cultural identities reveal the strong cultural heterogeneity of these particular contexts which reflects the volume’s intersectional ethos. The collection is comprised of twenty-eight short essays which are divided into seven sections: replaying the canon, representing histories, staging lives, re-imagining family, navigating communities, articulating intersections, and new world order(s). This curatorial choice sharpens the book’s focus on distinct topics and the aesthetic approaches the playwrights adopt. The thematic frames bring the works discussed into dialogue with past feminist theatre legacies from women’s loaded relationship with the theatrical canon to their exploration of issues of contemporary global importance such as Elfriede Jelinek’s irreverentAm Königsweg [On the Royal Road: The Burgher King] (2017), as analyzed by Sue-Ellen Case. Each essay examines one key play-text with the aim of providing ‘a resource for students at all levels’. This is one of the main strengths of the collection, as it can be readily integrated in undergraduate and postgraduate literature and theatre studies curricula. The essays offer original close readings of the plays in question which have not yet received much scholarly attention, with some due consideration of staging choices. The editors advocate for the creation of ‘a level playing field’ and for this, Ferris’s ‘Afterwords’ section pays a brief tribute to women in theatre, from María Irene Fornés and Elyse Dodgson to Sahar Speaks, in order to conclude with a call to arms for persisting to improve women’s representation in the theatre industry. The book certainly achieves its aimof creating an appetite for discovering hidden and emergent theatrical voices; in doing so, it provides a wealth of material for amplifying the canon of plays encountered in theatre scholarship. Although the term ‘women’ mostly appears as an uncontested identity category, the collection creates a fertile ground for further discussions around decolonization, equality, and diversity in the theatre and in the classroom. marissia fragkou