Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
Boston Marriage is a 1999 play by American playwright David Mamet. The play concerns two women at the turn of the 20th century who are in a Boston marriage, a relationship between two women that may involve both physical and emotional intimacy. After widespread belief that Mamet could only write for men, the playwright released this play, which centers exclusively on women.
Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born as Meridel Wharton, she assumed the name of her mother's second husband, Arthur Le Sueur, the former Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota.
Honor Maria Ford-Smith is a Jamaican actress, playwright, scholar, and poet. The daughter of a brown Jamaican mother and an English father, Ford-Smith is sometimes described as "Jamaica white," signalling a person of mixed race who appears white.
María Irene Fornés was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Her plays range widely in subject-matter, but often depict characters with aspirations that belie their disadvantages. Fornés, who went by the name "Irene", received nine Obie Theatre Awards in various categories and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for 1990.
The Children's Theatre Company is a regional theater established in 1965 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, specializing in plays for families, young audiences and the very young. The theater is the largest theater for multigenerational audiences in the United States and is the recipient of 2003 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. The November 2, 2004, edition of Time magazine named the company as the top theater for children in the U.S.
Megan Terry is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist.
Roberta Sklar is an American activist, feminist and award-winning theatre director. She is currently a communications consultant and senior strategist for OutRight Action International and other LGBT Rights advocacy organizations. She formerly served as Director of Communications for The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Empire State Pride Agenda. Sklar has provided strategic communications consulting to social justice domestic and international organizations.
Young Jean Lee is an American playwright, director, and filmmaker. She was the Artistic Director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, a not-for-profit theater company dedicated to producing her work. She has written and directed ten shows for Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over thirty cities around the world. Lee was called "the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation" by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times and "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by David Cote in Time Out New York. With the 2018 production of Straight White Men at the Hayes Theater, Lee became the first Asian American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
Rachel is a play that was written in 1916 by African American teacher, playwright and poet Angelina Weld Grimké. Grimké submitted the play to the Drama Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For the first production of the play the program read: "This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of the millions of Colored citizens in this free republic."
Rebecca Rice (1947–2002) was a performer, teacher, playwright, anti-racism/anti-oppression activist, and community-based artist. For over 30 years, she created theatre that impacted directly on the lives of people who are often overlooked by mainstream theatre.
The Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective was a group of professional women playwrights in New York active from 1971 to 1975. They wrote and produced feminist plays and were one of the first feminist theatre groups in the United States to do so. The members' individual works had been produced at the Public Theater, La Mama, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, Caffe Cino, Circle Repertory Company, Mark Taper Forum, Lincoln Center, and New York Theater Ensemble.
Loyce Houlton was an American dancer, choreographer, dance pedagogue, and arts administrator centered for most of her adult life in Minneapolis. Founder of the Minnesota Dance Theatre, she maintained connections with many of the most prominent national and international dance figures and composers of her day. She was acknowledged to be one of the most significant American choreographers of the 20th century and one of the first American women to gain national and international recognition as a choreographer, teacher, and producer.
Spiderwoman Theater is an American, Indigenous women's performance troupe that blends traditional art forms with Western theater. Their mission was to present exceptional theater performance, and to provide theatrical training and education in an urban Indigenous performance practice. Spiderwoman theater was an early feminist theatre group that sprung out of the feminist movement in the 1970s. They questioned gender roles, cultural stereotypes, sexual and economic oppression. It was founded in 1976, the core of the group is formed by sisters Muriel Miguel, Gloria Miguel, and Lisa Mayo. It was the first Native American women's theater troupe and is named after the Spiderwoman deity from Hopi mythology.
Monique Mojica is a playwright, director, and actor based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was born in New York City, but came to Canada as founding member of Native Earth Performing Arts.
Laurie Dorothea Carlos was an American actress and avant-garde performance artist, playwright and theater director. She was also known for her work mentoring emerging artists in the theater.
Monet Hurst-Mendoza is an American playwright, director, and theatre producer. Her plays predominantly feature people of color, and often deal with heavier subject matters—such as morality, exploitation, and corruption. She explores themes of race, culture, and identity in her works, and constructs characters that develop unconventional relationships and overcome situations via unique escapist approaches.
At the Foot of the Mountain Theater (AFOM) was a Professional theater based in Minneapolis, Minnesota that created and produced works centered on women's lives. Founded in 1974 and re-dedicated as a feminist theatre in 1977, it produced unique works on wide-ranging topics both in local productions and also through touring and performances at theater festivals. At the Foot of the Mountain Theater closed in 1991.
Feminist theater grew out of the wider Political theater of the 1970s, and continues to the present. It can take on a variety of meanings, but the constant thread is the lived experience of women.
Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Review was a feminist journal edited by a volunteer group of academics, graduate students, university staff, and community members from 1983 to 1998. From its first issue in the spring of 1983 through the end of 1995, it was housed in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. The journal moved to Rhode Island College in 1996, where it continued publication until 1998. An outgrowth of second-wave feminism, Hurricane Alice sought to address local, regional, and national audiences by publishing a variety of feminist perspectives on matters of social, political, and cultural concern. It included original essays, reviews, interviews, and creative writing by established and emerging writers, such as Jewelle Gomez, Susan Griffin, Alice Walker,and Nellie Wong, as well as original graphics by area artists. The editors were committed to a feminist understanding that all oppressions are connected and that coalitions across divides of race, class, sexuality, and geography are the path to liberation. That commitment led to the journal’s consistent attention to those interconnections, including publishing the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars and writers of color as well as that of lesbian and working class women of all races.
