Charlotte Canning

A look at the rise (and fall) of feminist theatre in the 1970s and early 1980s. The author profiles a handful of feminist theatres in detail, and touches on other theatres without a lot of detail. She does a good job of capturing the diversity of these not-monolithic theatres that all happened to go under the same name for their genre, without making them look cooky cutter. She also looks at the various ethnic and lesbian women's theatres that arose in response to the failure of feminist theatres to diversify to consider these other areas of discrimination. There is some discrepancy at times about what she says she is going to talk about and what she does talk about; for instance, in the chapter on mothers/daughters, she takes more than half the chapter to get to discussing mothers and daughters, instead repeating much of the material she had written earlier on lesbian and ethnic women's theatres, which didn't really have anything to do with the topic. Also, in her conclusion, while discussing why the feminist theatres disappeared in the 1980s, she glossed over what is probably a very real reason - the difficulty of sustaining a collective enterprise that became apparent from other attempts of the time. She mentions that no one wanted to do the administrative work; this is frequent with collectives, and she probably should have addressed that, as well as why you can't deal with the problem of erasing women's identities in theatre by refusing to allow women working in your feminist theatre to have individual identities! Otherwise, a well researched history and analysis.… (mer)