ABSTRACT

Ten years ago feminist theatre and performance criticism was something of an oxymoron. Like most avowedly political criticism, feminist work in the late 1970s and early 1980s seemed caught in conflicting demands of aesthetics and ideology. Feminist critics of feminist work teetered uneasily among the desires to support women’s production efforts, to investigate the ramifications of an unprecedented switch in gender perspective, and to compare women’s theatre and performance with an aesthetic standard that had not yet been formulated. Critics writing for feminist presses usually chose to validate what they saw; those writing in academic venues generally took a sociological approach to theatre’s reflection of women’s social roles. The bulk of the critical effort was aimed toward redressing the historical invisibility of women in the field.1