Lauren Gunderson and Feminist Theatre in the Twenty-First Century

This Element is the first scholarly study of the theatre of Lauren Gunderson (b. 1982), one of the most produced US playwrights and a self-declared feminist playwright. Her feminist claims and theatrical interventions are assessed through four key strands of her theatre making: parodies of Shakespeare's canon; women-centred revisions to history; women and illness; and 'entertaining' feminism through popular theatre forms. Moving between the mainstream and the experimental, her theatre ranges from realism and quasi well-made plays to the experimental in a postmodern/Brechtian fashion, inviting consideration of the form(s) deployed for staging feminism in the twenty-first century. The Element discusses how Gunderson adapts the legacies of second-wave feminist theatre in the US to provide accessible experimental theatre and how she adopts popular genres in the interest of popular feminisms, giving way to an 'in-between' feminist practice: a feminist-theatre pathway that lies somewhere 'in between' the second-wave past and new directions.

Author: Noelia Hernando-Real
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/11/2025
Series: Elements in Women Theatre Makers
Pages: 75
Weight: 0.28lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.18d
ISBN: 9781009487405