In the decade or more since the women's movement began, a number of books on the female experience in literature, art and architecture, film and dance have been published, but no comparable attempts have been made to identify a women's tradition in the complex art of theatre. Some excellent volumes of plays by women and some about women, some interesting articles on individuals and on the new feminist theatres, a symposium or an interview here or there have appeared. With the exception of the reissue of Rosamund Gilder's classic, Enter the Actress, however, no overall study has tried to see how women have used and have been used in theatre.

Yet questions about women's participation in all aspects of theatre have become more insistent.

The traditional or so-called conventional play has never interested me. It's not because of any great esthetic reason, it is simply that in our house we didn't have a room to ourselves. We slept in the dining room. My mother had radios that she turned on to the soaps, and we had to listen to them whether we wanted to or not. Subsequently, anything that even resembled a soap opera I would try my damnedest not to do. It's something that's lodged in me.

Roberta Sklar is one of the three artistic directors of The Women's Experimental Theatre and a co-author with Clare Coss and Sondra Segal of The Daughters Cycle Trilogy: Daughters, Sister/Sister, and Electra Speaks.

Sklar began her work as a student-director at Hunter College in 1960. She was active in the off-Off-Broadway theatre movement at its inception in the early sixties and frequently directed new plays at the Caffe Cino. In the mid-1960s she joined The Open Theatre and was the co-director of the major ensemble works The Serpent, Terminal and The Mutation Show and directed Beckett's Endgame. These works toured both the United States and Europe and have been widely acclaimed. Throughout the sixties she worked extensively with playwrights and actors in the creation of new works and new work methods.

In the 1970s she began an ongoing research into the development of a feminist esthetic for the theatre.

At 10:00 a.m. a red metrovan truck rolls up to a Bay Area park. Along its side white letters blare “San Francisco Mime Troupe.” Within a few minutes two old cars park near the truck, and 10 people alight from the vehicles. They confer swiftly before unburdening the truck of collapsible platform, costume rack and prop boxes on wheels. One of the people points to the sky, designating the path of the afternoon sun; the stage must be positioned with the sun behind the audience. Practiced hands then set the small platform on jacks, elevate the stage frame with its narrow curtain, and underpin the whole. Casual conversation punctuates the hard physical labor. By noon the small performance space is ready, and the Mime Troupe actors select their several costumes for the afternoon's play.

Since her first performance work in 1974, Laurie Anderson has found herself concerned with a basic esthetic dilemma that has troubled a number of other performance artists: how to create an intensely personal art that is not just simple autobiography. How can the performer/author bring raw, unmediated materials from his/her life and structure them to strike a balance between his/her own needs and those of the audience? For Anderson, the resolution is not only intellectual but technical; it is one that leads to a new performance style.

For the last 15 years Vanessa James has been creating her sumptuous stage environments out of materials such as garbage bags, plastic wrap, scrapped plastics, synthetic fabric, foam rubber, mirrors, corrugated cardboard and acrylic paint. She culls her “stuffs” from corporations like Mobile Oil and International Paper, as well as the waste bins of commercial studios where she works during the day. By night she creates her art works for the stage. They have been part of more than 50 productions in the United States and England, and have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Cambridge, Salt Lake City and Bristol, as well as Studio 54, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the George Washington Bridge. Her creations combine the remote, formal beauty of previous centuries with the products of contemporary industry.

From the moment a Linda Mussman performance begins, it is apparent that she and her actors intend to use the theatre's basic tools—language and movement—in highly unconventional ways. Sentences begin, but splinter or dissolve into fragments before they are finished. Words are stretched and distorted and twisted out of shape. Phrases drone like incantations till their meanings dissolve. The actors move in quick athletic bursts, or haltingly like wind-up toys, or in formal patterns like dancers. They freeze unexpectedly with a face or hand or foot isolated in a pool of light. Whether it is Mussman's own playfully abstract poetry as in her “triptych” Room/Raum, Door and Window (1978-79), the flowing rhetoric of Georg Buchner's Danton's Death (1980), or the delicate narrative of a Japanese fantasy play, The Bandit Princess (1978), the language of the piece is fragmented, its delivery restructured, and it is associated with oddly stylized movement.

Anne Bogart creates and directs experimental theatre pieces. She combines her regard for the individual esthetics of the actors with her own strong structural vision to produce eclectic and unique plays. Her most recent works include Out of Sync, performed in March of this year; Hauptstadt, in May of 1979; and Inhabitat, a play in a house (February 1979 production).

Bogart was born in 1951 into a Navy family. As a child brought up in the military, the longest she stayed in one place was two and a half years in Tokyo between the ages of about six and eight. The frequent moves “from coast to coast and country to country” produced a stream of different schools—private, public, military and boarding. At 14, Bogart got involved in the backstage work of a school play.

Before 1970 Yvonne Rainer's career conformed to the general outlines of the other dancers of the Judson Church group (T30). The dance sections of her multimedia events combined formal dance steps with everyday movements in a nonhierarchical order. In 1970 she traveled to India with the Grand Union. There she became fascinated with the classical theatre of India and for a time followed the touring Kathakali, whose performances lasted all night (T50). This experience with the impact of a storytelling form caused her to focus on narrative and on film. Both had previously been in her work, but they were now given greater prominence. By the mid-1970s she had stopped performing entirely and devoted herself exclusively to film. In a 1971 essay she wrote,