| This study examines how contemporary female playwrights---Caryl Churchill, Sharon Pollock, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks---manipulate the past in order to comment on the present. These five playwrights, whose writing spans twenty years and who hail from three Anglophone countries, all question the means to attaining and the uses of power; they also, coincidentally, provide "women's" and "Black" voices in theatre, examine history in correlation with the present, and in some cases, use theatre as a tool to open up dialogue and educate about difference. In each chapter, I concentrate on two plays; within each play, I compare two time registers---the historical periods in which they are set and the years surrounding composition---by looking at power, representation and violence.;Chapter two centers on Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations and Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play by exploring the motivations and mechanisms behind how individuals, victims of hegemonic constructions of gender and race, attempt to assert some sort of control through violence and resist gender and racial representation. For Parks and Pollock, the "what if" and the reasons for action are more important than the result, while the historical setting helps both playwrights re-present the past and make a point about their contemporary times without having to conform completely to either setting.;Chapter three combines a discussion of Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom with an exploration of Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror to shed light on the power of group identity and representation, the dangers of which are made explicit by their plays. Both plays present the two primary results---the speaker is disempowered by accepting the representation imposed by the other side or the speaker is negatively empowered by demonizing others---of a range of characters (ab)using representation, representation of self, of other, and of context.;Finally, the last chapter associates Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire with Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse to investigate identity politics, image control, and representation, as individuals attempt and fail to create more social and legislative equality through revolution or riot. Identity, as well as representation, becomes a means of attaining or being denied power, and identity in the twentieth century, no less than in the seventeenth, is constructed by society, gender norms, and politics. By combining identity politics with a recovery of previously silenced history, both playwrights endeavor to change our views of the millennial movement, women's roles in society, women's identity, and various complaints of capitalism. |
