A Female Scene: Three Plays by Catalan Women

Description

The plays and their writers have been chosen because they encompass dramatically different writing styles and can be seen as representative of the type of work that women playwrights are undertaking in Catalonia today. The three plays which make up A Female Scene illustrate beautifully the new direction in Catalan drama where the more feminine values of fluidity, empathy and variety challenge the conventions of established drama. 'Magnolia Cafe' is a subversive re-working of the Comedy of Manners whilst 'An Absent Look' deconstructs tragedy, the bastion of theatrical dynamics. Similarly, in its divergent, empathetic idiom 'Re-call' – an evocation of the free-thinking nineteenth-century intellectual Lou Andreas Salome – underlines this dramatic challenge to the vision of previous Catalan theater.