Product Description

From Hroswitha to Wertenbaker Looking for plays by women to produce, perform or read? She Also Wrote Plays provides a comprehensive international guide to women playwrights and their work: - 500 entries - Biographical details for each writer - Outline of each writer's major plays - List of other works - Publication or library m/s details - Bibliography An essential guide to women play-wrights from the past and for the future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #551134 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Excerpted from ...She Also Wrote Plays by Susan Croft. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Charlotte Jones

British, 1968 -

A populist comedy writer, Jones however delves deeper exploring her subjects with warmth, compassion and irony. Her first play, Airswimming, involves two young women incarcerated in a mental institution since the early 1920s and moves backwards and forwards through the decades to show the effects of imprisonment and the drudgery of their repetitive tasks levened only by their ^Qairswimming^R to music. Imaginative and slightly surreal, it retains its edge as a social-historical commentary. In Flame uses a dual time scheme between two sets of women ^V one in 1908 in Yorkshire and the other in present-day London ^V to point up how little has changed within individuals even when external circumstances appear quite different. Again madness is a theme, one which recurs in Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis, a less structurally ambitious work which does however allow Jones to explore a broader range of quirky, oddball but continually believable characters. Four people assemble in Bolton for Josie Botting's sixteeth birthday party. Josie is a dominatrix who has lost the will to dominate, Martha is her obsessive/ compulsive cleaner, Lionel is a former client of Josie's but now just wants a full head of hair, while her daughter wants to be a champion figure-skater. Into this menage comes the surprise guest, the Chinese Elvis, an Elvis impersonator who can't do Elvis and doesn't know the songs. Jones explores the encounter of this disparate group with sympathy and much laughter, avoiding the potential for sentimentality through the sharpness of her writing.

Plays include: Airswimming (2f) MS, In Flame (4f,2m, 2000), Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis (4f,2m, 1999). Both Faber.

Dorothy Parker

American, 1893-1967

Poet, reviewer, short-story writer, wit, Parker was a key member, with Edna Ferber and others, of the influential Algonquin Round Table group of authors. She worked as drama critic for Vanity Fair and reviewer for other magazines, later writing for Hollywood. After the death of her second husband she took to drink, dying alone in a hotel Bedroom in Manhattan. It is a fate perhaps foreseen in Ladies of the Corridor, a poignant examination, delineated with compassion and Parker^Rs characteristic acerbic wit, of the lives of women, widowed or divorced, living in a hotel, struggling to stay financially and emotionally afloat, leading lives of isolation, desperation or defiance. The Coast of Illyria also charts a struggle against despair, focusing on powerful dramatic territory in the lives of sister and brother writers Mary and Charles Lamb and their circle, she succumbing to terrifying bouts of madness in one of which she had murdered her mother; he, devoted to her, taking refuge in drink from the realization of what his devotion will cost him: his lover and happiness. Parker also wrote lyrics for three revues, one, After Such Pleasures, adapted from her own writings.

Plays include: Mr Skeffington (1944); Saboteur (1942); Trade Winds (1938); A Star is Born (1937) (all screen); The Ice Age (MS, n.d.); Close Harmony or The Lady Next Door (with Elmer Rice, 5f,4m, 1924); The Ladies Of the Corridor (with Arnaud d'Usseau,9f,7m, 1953) both: NY: French; Here We Are (1f,1m, 1931) in 24 Favourite One Act Plays, ed. Bennett Cerf, NY: Doubleday/Dolphin, 1958; The Coast of Illyria (with Ross Evans, 6f,7m, 1949) Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1990.

See also: Dorothy Parker by Arthur F. Kenney, Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Sylvia Plath

American, 1932 - 63

Plath's tragic life and harshly brilliant work has inspired a number of dramatic pieces (e.g. Goldemberg). Three Women, written for BBC radio in 1962, is a moving exploration of the wonder, anguish and ambivalence of pregnancy and childbirth, set in a maternity ward where one woman gives birth to a son, another to an unwanted daughter who she leaves at the hospital, while a third miscarries. In Plath's little-known Dialogue Over a Ouija Board a husband and wife argue over whether the spirit that appears to speak to them, spelling out strange words and phrases, is a revelation from beyond or an unconscious expression of their united poetic voices, but realize it will remain uncertain, an 'equivocal thicket of words'.

Play: Three Women (3f) in Winter Trees, (1971) and with Dialogue Over a Ouija Board (1f,1m) in Collected Poems (1981). Both Faber.

See also App. 2: Devlin in Chinoy and Jenkins.

Mae West

American, 1892 -1980

Actress, novelist and screenwriter, sex symbol and mistress of innuendo, West's career as a playwright has remained little known until recently and her plays only available in manuscript. Despite being melodramatic, raggedly plotted and sensationalist, West's plays are nevertheless fascinating both in their spirited defence of socially unacceptable and deviant sexualities and their picture of gay sub-cultures in the 1920s. Margy, her prostitute heroine in Sex, is not only allowed to win love and marriage (with her loyal lieutenant, if not her young millionaire lover) but to castigate the latter's mother for hypocrisy, condemning her for choosing to engage in sordid sex where Margy and her like are forced into it for economic reasons. The judge in The Drag condemns homosexuality as degenerate until forced to realize that his son was killed by his gay lover. Both it and The Pleasure Man present a world of camp drag queens, preening, bitchy and very funny, while not shying away from the dangers and persecution of a homophobic world. West exploited audience voyeurism, offering the frisson of a peek into underworlds usually hidden from mainstream spectators. She also conducted spirited defence of her work against a legal system determined to censor her for presenting 'obscene, indecent, immoral and impure' performances, gaining fines but also increased notoriety and box-office takings in the process.

Plays include: Sex (6f, 15m, 1926); The Drag (4f, 13m+, 1927); The Pleasure Man (17f,28m, 1928) ed. Lillian Schlissel, NHB, 1997; The Hussy (MS, 1922); Diamond Lil (MS, 1928); The Constant Sinner (MS, 1931).

See also: The Queen of Camp by Marybeth Hamilton London/NY: HarperCollins, 1996; App. 2: Curtin.