Top Girls is a 1982 play by Caryl Churchill. It centres on Marlene, a career-driven woman who is heavily invested in women's success in business. The play examines the roles available to women in old society, and what it means or takes for a woman to succeed. It also dwells heavily on the cost of ambition and the influence of Thatcherite politics on feminism.
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.
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.
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.
Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the artistic director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.
The Children's Theatre Company (CTC) 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.
Nightwood Theatre is Canada's oldest professional women's theatre and is based in Toronto. It was founded in 1979 by Cynthia Grant, Kim Renders, Mary Vingoe, and Maureen White and was originally a collective. Though it was not the founders' original intention, Nightwood Theatre has become known for producing feminist works. Some of Nightwood's most famous productions include This is For You, Anna (1983) and Good Night Desdemona (1988). Nightwood hosts several annual events including FemCab, the Hysteria Festival, and Groundswell Festival which features readings from participants of Nightwood's Write from the Hip playwright development program.
Marguerite Duffy, known professionally as Megan Terry, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist.
Renée Gertrude Taylor, known professionally as Renée, was a New Zealand feminist writer, playwright, novelist and short story writer. She started writing plays in her 50s, with her first play, Setting the Table, written in 1981, and with her most well-known works being the trilogy of plays beginning with Wednesday to Come (1984). Renée described herself as a "lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals", and her plays feature strong female characters who are often working class.
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.
Eugene Lion was an American theater director, writer, and performance coach.
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 Indigenous women's performance troupe that blends traditional art forms with Western theater. Named after Spider Grandmother from Hopi mythology, it is the longest running Indigenous theatre company in the United States.
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.
Half the Sky Feminist Theatre is a community-based women's theatre group in Hamilton, Ontario. The theatre company is one of a number of women-supportive and women's theatre companies in Canada that work to remedy and redress the scarcity of women as playwrights and leading actors in the Canadian theatre industry.
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.
The Women's Interart Center was a New York City-based multidisciplinary arts organization conceived as an artists' collective in 1969 and formally delineated in 1970 under the auspices of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Feminists in the Arts. In 1971, it found a permanent home on Manhattan's far West Side.
