The bad news, on the young women playwrights' front, is that the trend is toward yet another round of dysfunctional-family plays. That's so, at least, if three new plays by young women, arriving simultaneously, constitute a trend. But that bad news is both unimportant and outdated, the dysfunctional-family play having been with us since Clytemnestra first suggested that Agamemnon needed a bath. The much better and more recent news is that nowadays, when three young women offer dysfunctional-family plays, they're no longer cut from the same pattern: The plays, the families, and even the species of dysfunction come in gratifyingly wild variety. Consequently, no facile generalizations can be made about the writing: Each of these playwrights is demonstrably her own woman. More... More >>>