Marginalized

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. This book addresses these gaps in its examination of the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Success in American drama is defined as having a play staged in the capital of theatre culture, New York City, the city that might be viewed as most antithetical to the South in terms of geography and ideology. Further, women playwrights, women playwrights of color, and those who express queer identities have been vocal about persistent inequities in American theatre which have created obstacles to their success. Drama creates unique problems for playwrights through its concentrated focus on place, dialect, and character; the multiple layers of authorship; the collective reception format; and the demand for exaggeration within production. These issues, as they interact with regional conditions and perceptions, pose problems for southern women playwrights in navigating how to represent a marginalized region on the stage. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and its productions, this book delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights confront obstacles through various conscious strategies. These approaches lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and ultimately, they create new visions of the South.