Jill Dolan

Feminist Theatre Criticism and the Popular: The Case of Wendy Wasserstein

Jill Dolan

Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 4:30 p.m. Giant Eagle Auditorium, Baker Hall Carnegie Mellon University

Presented by the CMU Departments of English and Drama

Abstract: This lecture addresses the status of American feminist theatre criticism, and its tendency to denigrate at best, or ignore, at worst, women playwrights working in popular forums like Broadway or regional theatres. While much feminist theatre criticism of the 1980s and 90s privileged experimental, avant-garde forms produced by artists marginalized by gender, sexuality, race, and class, it paid little attention to women trying to make their way through more conventional, mainstream theatre and performance venues. This lecture argues that the next wave of feminist theatre and performance criticism should take the popular more seriously, by rethinking the achievements, vexations, and public intellectual work of women working in artistic venues under the auspices of what might be called 'neo-liberal' culture.

Bio: Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and heads the MA/PhD program in performance as public practice at the University of Texas at Austin where she is a member of the Distinguished Teaching Academy. Her most recent book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, is available from University of Michigan Press (2005). She is a past president of both the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and its Women and Theatre Program. She is the author of Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press); Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Michigan); and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan). Samples of her essays include "Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto," in Staging International Feminisms, eds. Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (Palgrave, 2007, forthcoming) and the "Foreword" to Cast Out: Queer Lives in the Theater, ed. Robin Bernstein, Triangulations Series (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her book on performance and utopia allows her to pose such questions as, "Does live performance remain a site at which utopia can be imagined and perhaps even experienced, affectively, through fantasy and "communitas?" Prof. Dolan's blog, "The Feminist Spectator," can be accessed at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com. Her online essay on The L Word can be accessed at http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=744.