Rebels with a Cause in Contemporary Spanish Women Playwriting

This book examines a selection of plays from four innovative women playwrights of the first two decades of 21st century Spain. By foregrounding female characters as the subjects and protagonists of their plays, Mar Gómez Glez, Carolina África, Lucía Miranda, and Marta Buchaca reinscribe the stage as a space for the productive exploration of female autonomy and individuation. This book further investigates the use the platform of the theatre and the expressive possibilities therein to portray the realities of gendered oppression and efforts to define subjectivity within a social context where confining patriarchal and dominant cultural conditions place severe strictures on women’s open search and development of selfhood and identity. The diversity of genres deployed in their respective approaches, spanning the subversion of realist conventions, the framework of historical drama, the communal potentialities of forum theatre, and experiential site-specific production, point to important innovations in contemporary stagecraft and performance.