Four Nightwood and Feminist Theory

Characteristics of feminist theatre As we have seen in previous chapters, at its inception Nightwood participated in a widespread English-language women's theatre movement that had already been well established in the United States and Britain. As Phyllis Mael points out in an article about American feminist theatre published in Chrysalis magazine in April 1980, over two hundred plays by women were published between 1960 and 1980, and many more unpublished works were produced by the dozens of active feminist theatres throughout the United States. Mael describes the wide variety of plays found within this movement, observing that " the voices of the resisting writers reflect — in both content and form — the broad spectrum of opinion and expression of women's culture. " She specifically highlights the difference between feminist theatres that wish to portray women in positions of strength and those that refuse to show only positive images because they want to spur their audience toward social change. She also categorizes the difference between women writers who embrace the feminist label and those who reject it; those who espouse the unique perceptions of women and those who deny the existence of a specifically female sensibility ; those who state that their goals are primarily aesthetic and those who insist that all aesthetic choices are also political; those who wish to depict the female condition and those who want to change it; and those who want to speak only to women and those who seek an audience of both men and women. 202 By 1980, scholars studying the phenomenon of feminist theatre were already well aware of the diversity within the genre, although perhaps reluctant to start labelling those divisions as such for fear of undermining what was still a new movement. The emphasis was instead on celebrating the quantity of plays being created by women and noting the emergence of common themes that had previously been ignored, such as the exploration of various kinds of relationships between women. In Part Two of the same Chrysalis article, Rosemary Curb focuses on some characteristics of the feminist theatre companies she surveyed , claiming that " all across this continent, there are probably forty or fifty theaters that call themselves 'feminist' rehearsing and performing right now. " 3 Like Mael, she points out that not all these companies necessarily use the feminist label publicly, some preferring " anti-sexist " or " humanist …