Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell presents critical introductions to two of the most significant American dramatists of the early twentieth century. Glaspell and Treadwell led American Theatre from outdated melodrama to the experimentation of great European playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw.

This is the first book to deal with Glaspell and Treadwell 's plays from a theatrical, rather than literary, perspective, and presents a comprehensive overview of their work from lesser known plays to seminal productions of Trifles and Machinal.

Although each woman pursued her own themes, subjects and manner of stage production, this shared volume underscores the theatrical and cultural conditions influencing female playwrights in modern America.

Theater has always been the site of visionary hopes for a reformed national future and a space for propagating ideas, both cultural and political, and such a conceptualization of the histrionic art is all the more valuable in the post-9/11 era. The essays in this volume address the concept of « Americanness and the perceptions of the « alien--as ethnic, class or gendered minorities--as dealt with in the work of American playwrights from Anna Cora Mowatt, through Rachel Crothers or Susan Glaspell, and on to Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Nilo Cruz or Wallace Shawn. The authors of the essays come from a multi-national university background that includes the United States, the United Arab Emirates and various countries of the European Community. In recognition of the multiple components of drama, the essays for the volume were selected in order to exemplify different aspects and theories of theater studies: the playwright, the play, the audience and the actor are all examined as part of the theatrical experience that serves to formulate American national identity.

During her lifetime, playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was regarded as highly as Eugene O'Neill and Edith Wharton. Winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama (for ""Alison's House""), she was cofounder of the Provincetown Players, the little theatre that ""discovered"" O'Neill. Later, Glaspell was instrumental in introducing American drama to English audiences when her play ""The Verge"" was produced in London. Yet despite her many accomplishments, Glaspell is often overlooked in the standard histories of American theatre. Ozieblo combines an narrative of Glaspell's life with an analysis of her creative work. Rebelling early against the expectations imposed on women of her era, Glaspell grappled with the conflict between Victorian mores and feminist aspirations throughout her life. In ""Trifles"", now recognised as a groundbreaking feminist drama, she explored the reasons for a woman's extreme response to her husband's demanding, authoritarian stance. Ozieblo also investigates Glaspell's relationship with dramatist George Cram Cook, exploring the scandal that surrounded their courtship and marriage as well as the life they led among the bohemians of Greenwich Village.

The conflict between the political and the personal, an opposition which pervades the whole of American Literature, informs the essays on twentieth-century American theater gathered in this volume. Prominent theater scholars from Europe and America address the cultural paradigm created by the clash of private needs with public expectations. The difficulty of reconciling the two has led many dramatists to turn to the complexities of intertextuality in order to express their rebellions and rejections of inherited cultural values and myths. Essays on Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Susan Glaspell, H.M. Koutoukas, Dolores Prida, or Suzan Lori-Parks (to name but a few of the dramatists discussed here) reflect the vibrancy of American drama and the depth of the interaction of the political with the personal. Contents: Barbara Ozieblo: Introduction: The Political and the Personal in American Drama - Brenda Murphy: Tennessee Williams and Cold-War Politics - Ana Anton-Pacheco: Coping with the Personal: Tennessee Williams's Minimalist Plays - Gary Harrington: The Smashed Mirror: Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire - Stuart Marlow: Interrogating The Crucible: Revisiting the Biographical, Historical and Political Sources of Arthur Miller's Play - Russell DiNapoli: Maxwell Anderson's Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset - Johan Callens: Going Public, Performing Stein - Cheryl Black/Robert K. Sarlos: On the Threshold of Sexual Politics in American Theater and Drama: The Provincetown Players - Marcia Noe: The New Woman in the Plays of Susan Glaspell - Marta Fernandez-Morales: The Two Spheres in Susan Glaspell's Trifles and The Verge - Karin Ikas: The Promise and the Reality of the American Dream inMexican-American Plays - Maria Luisa Ochoa-Fernandez: Weaving the Personal and the Political in Dolores Prida's Beautiful Senoritas, Coser y Cantar and Botanica - Mar Gallego: Redefining African-American Female Space: Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun and Ntozake Shange's for colored girls - Araceli Gonzalez-Crespan: Against « Ruby Lip and Saucy Curl: Breaking the Great Divide among Women in Beah Richards's A Black Woman Speaks - Stephen J. Bottoms: Untidying Her Passions: The Medea of H.M. Koutoukas - Antonia Rodriguez-Gago: Re-Creating Herstory: Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus - Claudia Barnett: « In Your Dreams!: Deb Margolin's Fantasy/Drama - Felix Martin-Gutierrez: Fragments from the Political Unconscious in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays - La Vinia Delois Jennings: Reflection of Self as Other: Mimetic Parallels between Minstrelsy and Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities - Katherine Weiss: Sam Shepard's Family Trilogy: Breaking Down Mythical Prisons - Ines Cuenca-Aguilar: Representations of Women in Sam Shepard's Theater - N.J. Stanley: Screamingly Funny and Terrifyingly Shocking: Paula Vogel as Domestic Detective.