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The essay examines several texts, most closely Joan Schenkar's The Universal Wolf, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale, and argues that the proliferation of parodic narratives on the feminist stage over the last several decades is as much about a critical mode of spectatorship as they are about the literary theatrical and cultural texts they reimagine, seeking to teach their audiences a critical stance in relation to any number of cultural texts.
Over coffee one winter afternoon early in rehearsals for her play Perfect Women, playwright Barbara B. Goldman told me about her first college writing workshop, a breakthrough in finding her voice as a woman: "My final project was this really groundbreaking thing: I re-wrote the Book of Genesis from Eve's perspective. And then I realized that every woman writer in the last twenty years had re-written the Book of Genesis from Eve's perspective" (conversation, Jan. 1999). Indeed, retellings of canonical masterworks occupy a huge body of twentieth-century literature, and the list of women, minorities, and post-colonial subjects who engage their literary and symbolic pasts reads as a veritable "who's who" in twentieth century letters, from Angela Carter and Kathy Acker to Salman Rushdie and Derek Walcott. Entire undergraduate seminars are devoted to transformations of Shakespeare, while texts from Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea to Aime Cesaire's A Tempest to Alice Randall's headline-grabbing "unauthorized parody," The Wind Done Gone, are writing marginal identities out of the shadows of the masterworks and into the centers of the narratives that have silenced them.
Parodic retellings similarly populate the contemporary feminist stage. Shakespeare alone has engendered multiple retellings of his plays from the perspective of the female characters that inhabit them: Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, Heather MacDonald's Good Night, Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, Elaine Feinstein and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear 's Daughters, and Normand Chaurette's The Queens parody Othello, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Richard III, respectively. And other parodies abound, tackling fairy tales (Joan Schenkar's The Universal Wolf), Greek drama (Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale), and American fiction (Suzan-Lori Parks's Fucking A and In the Blood). By disrupting the discursive authority of the literary and theatrical canon by deconstructing it from within, staged feminist...