The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. 

The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652.  

Editors Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, along with their contributors, collect eighty-nine women’s voices in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Spanning works between third century BCE and 2020, the anthology introduces readers to a wide variety of cultural and historical backgrounds. The anthology came out of a working group session at the American Society of Theatre Research conference in 2018 and responds to questions concerning the effect of women’s writing on conceptions of drama and performance broadly; the ways the selected materials converse with or reframe scholars’ understanding of settled dramatic theory and criticism; and how these works “contribute to, or help us to revise, extant understandings of drama and performance in relationship to history and culture” (3). With materials including letters, scrapbooks, manifestos, interviews, speeches, plays, essays, and testimonies, the anthology successfully reshapes traditional understandings of what constitutes criticism and theory and highlights voices previously absent from the conversation.  

Burroughs and Gainor follow a familiar structure in the anthology. After the introduction, the selected materials are organized in a generally chronological order, beginning with St. Perpetua’s visions circa 203 CE and ending with excerpts from Indigenous Canadian playwright Émilie Monnet’s 2020 play Okinum. Every primary source material is paired with a short introductory essay by a contributing scholar, situating the source author in the dramatic criticism spectrum. The editors avoid grouping by country, nationality, genre, or historical period; rather, the excerpts flow into each other without labels imposed with academic hindsight. This is a strength of the anthology, as it brings women across different eras and countries into conversation with each other.  

Source authors are named where possible, but some are known only by “Anonymous.” Pseudonyms are also prevalent, particularly in the entries prior to 1900, which reminds us of how often women masked their creative and vivid interrogations of theatre and performance in maleness. One such case is Michael Field, the pseudonym of aunt and niece collaborators Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper better known for their poetry. Contributor Jill R. Ehnenn positions them within the closet drama tradition, with their perspective focused entirely on expressions of feeling. Ehnenn frames the selected prefaces as not just theatrical exercises for the mind but a “dedication to Dionysian passion” (148), with feeling and emotion resonating throughout the excerpted materials. The preface to The Tragic Mary draws attention to the known emotional qualities of Mary Queen of Scots, laying the groundwork for Field’s closet drama: “The wife of Darnley and of Bothwell will be various to various natures throughout the ages: for like Helen she never grows old; . . . It is therefore possible for a dramatist to … justify the version of her as it has come to himself” (151). In this, Field teases out a string of commonality across the anthology. Whether writing under pseudonyms, as anonymous authors, or under their own names, those included in the anthology strive to understand the hows and whys of theatre and performance’s impact in our lives.  

A significant highlight of the anthology is the presence of artists such as Rose Yuen Ow, a Chinese-American vaudeville performer, and Alice Childress, a Black American playwright and actress often in the shadows of Lorraine Hansberry and Adrienne Kennedy. Their voices, excerpted her in interviews and essays, bring attention to the multiplicity of experiences for women in twentieth-century American theatre. As introduced by Krystyn Moon, Ow was part of a performance tradition that normalized Chinese racial and gender stereotypes on stage, sometimes alienating the performers’ friends and family but also subverting their typecasting “with their use of contemporary dress, perfect English, modern dance moves, and witty repartee” (313). Having Rose Yuen Ow’s voice in interview form demonstrates the impact of the everyday working performer in the field and how the performer embodies theory without formal language or knowledge.  

While Ow made her career in vaudeville work despite the barriers and stereotypes working against her, Alice Childress pushed for a theatre and culture that broke down those barriers, particularly for the Black community. Childress, as contributing scholar Meenakshi Ponnuswami writes, emphasized “the artist’s responsibility to the community” and the need for a national Black theatre (287). Her selected writings voice the conflict many artists from marginalized communities face when working in the United States: a desire to create authentically, balanced with the economic realities of needing to live. In “But I Do My Thing,” Childress argues that “a black theater here and there does not signify ‘turning away’ from commercial television, motion picture, and theater markets of the U.S.A. It is one reaction to being turned away” (294). Later, she states plainly that “a culture can be no better than the people from whom it springs,” which reflects struggles for equity in representation across all aspects of theatre in the U.S. (294). In Childress’s writing on entertainment, capital, and culture, Ow’s words reverberate: “Because Chinese were performing, so they came to support us. In Vancouver, even the Chinese consulate came. I got mad when they won’t sell me a ticket for them to sit downstairs” (317). Over sixty years on from Childress and Ow, theatre academia and practice alike still struggle with representation, inclusion, and who merits inclusion. Although the field has made moves to correct these imbalances, these efforts are still in nascent stages.  

In light of such imbalances, it is incredibly valuable to have the presence of theorists such as Amal Allana, Mojisola Adebayo, Spiderwomen Theatre, and Velina Hasu Houston, who engage readers in different theatrical traditions and the ways that colonialism and imperialism intersect with gender, sexuality, and performance. The paired essays highlight how Western views on dramatic theory and criticism often leave little room for Indigenous or intercultural perspectives. As Lindsay Lachance notes in her essay on Émilie Monnet, works from these thinkers help us “see how embodied knowledge, lived experiences, land-based work, and language revitalization influence both the structure and the content of a piece” (589). The included authors construct theories based not just on gender and sexuality but as opportunities to disentangle Western patriarchal thought and develop their own praxis. In the excerpts from matchabook, Velina Hasu Houston says “I have never sought to impose it upon the Western canon… Whether or not [it] is considered to be in any Western canon … it addresses aspects of history and identity to which an inquiring mind would want to be exposed” (564). Lachance’s and Houston’s remarks gesture at the overarching theme of the anthology: membership in the canon is perhaps not the issue. Reinserting these works back into the conversation exposes the field to perspectives that heighten the understanding of dramatic theory and criticism overall.  

As expansive and inclusive as it is, the collection favors Anglo-American perspectives. This is particularly evident in pre-nineteenth century pieces, though Burroughs and Gainor do note this limitation in their introduction. They understand that it would be impossible to have any sort of wide-ranging anthology that covered every iteration and voice in women’s theatre theory and criticism. In acknowledging this imperfection, they state that they “profoundly hope that [it] will prompt new or renewed attention to an even more expansive body of works by women and woman-identified authors worldwide” (3). While this is a promising invitation for scholars to engage further, it is an all-too-familiar sentiment which feels behind the times for 2024 and today. This does not take away from the anthology’s accomplishments, nor does it erase the diversity of scholars included as contributors. It is, however, a reminder of how far the field of theatre theory and criticism must go in how it defines theory and criticism and who they include in the conversation.  

The sheer amount of material in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is worth the investment. Burroughs and Gainor worked diligently to curate a collection reflective of women’s impact in theory and criticism, with a concerted effort towards recovered or underrepresented voices. Even with its limitations, the anthology should become a cornerstone for new visions of theatre theory and dramatic criticism.