Lauren Gunderson and Feminist Theatre in the Twenty-First Century

This Element is the first scholarly study of the theatre of Lauren Gunderson, one of the most produced US playwrights and a self-declared feminist playwright. It 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.

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.