Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Book

	Introduction : women writing plays	1
1	Social change, artistic ferment	17
	The U.S.A.	17
	The U.K.	28
2	Entering the mainstream : the plays of Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein	45
3	A conversation : Timberlake Wertenbaker, Max Stafford-Clark, and Michael Billington	54
4	The female gaze	75
5	Women and war : the plays of Emil Mann, Lavonne Mueller, Shirley Lauro, Naomi Wallace, Shirley Gee, and Anne Devlin	82
6	Our bodies, oversales	93
	Memoir of a sexual women	93
	An excerpt from the play Sweeping the nation	97
	Standing at the crossroads	100
7	Engaging social issues, expressing a political outlook	104
8	Crossing borders : a conversation with Bridget Carpenter, Lynn Nottage, Dael Orlandersmith, and Diana Son	115
9	Whose voices are these? : the arts of language in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, and Diana Son	143
10	First-person singular : female writers embrace the one-person play	158
11	Women's imaginations : experimenting with theatrical form	170
12	Joking aside : a conversation about comedy with Christopher Durang, Gina Gionfrido, Sarah Ruhl, and Wendy Wasserstein	181
13	The freedom to create	197
14	Beyond the U.S.A., beyond the U.K.	199
	A view from South Africa	199
	A view from Australia	203
	A view from New Zealand	208
	A view from Canada	212
15	New voices : Moria Buffini, Sarah Ruhl, and Rukhsana Ahmad	219
16	Prescriptions for a playwriting life	241
	Dear Emily : on being a playwright	241