PrintMay 22, 2010
Can Women Return Us to Beauty?
If anyone wants to know why theater is dead in the United States, the reason is simple. It is trapped in a time warp of liberal pieties. When the Oregon Shakespeare Festival sent out a call for plays celebrating "American Revolutions," it didn't get one play written from a conservative perspective. Not one.But there is hope. And it is coming from women -- not from the usual feminist robots, but from playwrights like Mary Zimmerman who write from an unashamedly feminine perspective. It's part of the Girls Gone Mild movement, which celebrates a woman's life in its own terms rather than the women-can-do-anything-a-man-can-do madness of liberal women's studies, diversity, and Title IX.Now, of all things, a woman has written the libretto for an opera from a story by Stephen Wadsworth, and it is good. Premiering at Seattle Opera earlier this month under its indefatigable general director Speight Jenkins, Amelia is the story of a woman whose naval aviator father was killed in...(Read Full Article)
