A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre

Abstract

Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.