(Alexis Soloski's article appeared in The Village Voice, 9/8.)
Theater
Fall Guide: Female Playwrights Look to Big Fall Season
Aphra Behn, the Restoration dramatist, appears frequently on syllabi, but rarely onstage. The first professional female playwright, she led Virginia Woolf to declaim, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn."
Whether or not her grave is garlanded, Behn's legacy has flourished: Today, female playwrights swell the ranks of professional organizations, rival men in graduate programs, and win Pulitzers. And yet a study released earlier this year by Princeton undergraduate Emily Glassberg Sands, entitled "Opening the Curtain of Playwright Gender," concluded that plays by and about women receive fewer productions than they statistically warrant.
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