The interaction of the arts in public discourse features in all the interviews in the book, and they provide practicable models to theatre workers interested in applying their art toward a notion of the common good, and to those in political life interested in enlisting the theatre's close collaboration in the challenge of governing. Through the models of experience they advance, the interviewees emerge as independent and creative practitioners of feminism, both inside and outside the theatre.
"Public Selves, Political Stages" consists of 19 interviews with Icelandic women in theatre, politics, or both. In Iceland, there is a greater overlapping between politics and the arts than is typical of larger nations, giving theatre considerable prominence, while lending political life much of the immediacy of the theatre, even in the age of video.