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Amazon All Stars: Thirteen Lesbian Plays Rosemary Keefe Curb, ed. New York: Applause, 1996. pp xiii+482 $18.95
In 1992, when I taught the course "Behind the Lavender Curtain: Problems in Twentieth-Century Lesbian and Gay American Drama" at Brown University, there was very little available in the way of anthologies to assign to my students. One anthology I did assign, Don Shewey's Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, was a strong collection but had few selections by women, despite its title. I also assigned Kate McDermott's Places, Please! The First Anthology of Lesbian Plays, but in general, my students found the selections in the volume too uniformly realist to represent adequately a genre whose most celebrated practitioners (such as Holly Hughes and Split Britches) had abandoned realism for more experimental forms.
Today, there is considerably more choice for teachers looking for classroom materials or for readers seeking a single book that can provide an in-depth look at lesbian drama. Amazon All Stars: Thirteen Lesbian Plays, a collection of plays and commentary edited by Rosemary Keefe Curb, is a recent and welcome addition to the genre.
While Amazon All Stars is in general a very strong collection, Curb's introduction provides a disappointing start. Introductions to these kinds of collections can rise to the occasion and raise important historical and theoretical questions, or they can talk in generalities about the "power of art." Unfortunately, Curb's introduction falls more into the second category. Curb tends to undermine the significance of these plays by overemphasizing the work they (or...