FIRST 100 YEARS:
The Professional
Female Playwright

SYMPOSIUM PANELISTS

Susan Bennett is University Professor and Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. She is the author of Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, published in a second edition (London: Routledge), 1997 and Performing Nostalgia Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporay Past (London: Routledge), published in 1996 as well as many essays on different playwrights and periods in theatre history. She served as editor of the Johns Hopkins University Press publication Theatre Journal from 1998- 2001 and prepared special issues on "Shakespeare and Theatrical Moderisms," "Theatre and Technology," "Women/History," and "Theatre and the City." Her most recent work concerns women's dramatic writing and revisionist theatre history and she is completing a book provisionally titled The Failure of Theatre History.

Catherine Burroughs is Associate Professor of English at Wells College and visiting lecturer in English at Cornell University. Her publications include: Reading the Social Body (Co-Ed., Iowa, 1993); Closet Stages:Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Pennsylvania, 1997), and Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840 (Ed., Cambridge University Press, 2000). She is currently editing Vol. I and II of Between Performance and Text: An Anthology of British Closet Drama (1550-1900) for the Oxford University Press. In addition, she is a member of Actors' Equity Association.

Thomas C. Crochunis is an independent scholar whose work focuses on drama, theatre, and performance in Britain in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries but also addresses theoretical issues in cultural performance, historiography, and media studies. He is co-editor (with Michael Eberle-Sinatra) of the British Women Playwrights around 1800 Web project. He is also co-editor (with Eberle-Sinatra) of the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1776-1843, and editor of the forthcoming Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays for Routledge. He has published essays on British women playwrights of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, on gothic drama, and on the uses of space in dramatic, theatrical, and environmental discourse. He works as a research and evaluation specialist at the LAB at Brown University.

• Introduction
• The Symposium: Saturday, October 26, 2002
• The Readings: November 2002 – October 2003
• Featured Playwrights
• General Bibliography

Laura J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Northwestern (1990), specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Publications include: Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). (nominated for the 1997 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book; the Bernard Hewitt Award for Theatre Research, and the Gotschalk Prize give by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies); "The Sublime, The Beautiful, The Siddons," The Clothes that Wear Us: Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards; "The Author as Ghost in the Eighteenth Century," 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries into the Early Modern Era, volume 3 (New York: AMS Press, 1997); "'Counterfeit Scrubaddo': Women Actors in the Restoration," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 34 (1993); "Owning Oroonoko: Behn, Southerne, and the Contingencies of Property," Renaissance Drama, New Series XXIII (1992).

Most recently, Elizabeth Swain directed Susanna Centlivre's The Wonder at the T. Schreiber Studio in Manhattan. She also directed Aphra Behn's The Rover at Barnard College and The Lucky Chance at Marymount Manhattan College. Other directing includes an all-female Hamlet, Feydeau's The Ribadier System,Wendy Kesselman's The Executioner's Daughter, Mishima's Hanjo and two plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker: The Love of the Nightingale and Our Country's Good. She has also created and staged several pastiches of Shakespearean scenes and monologues. She studied directing with the late Herman Shumlin. As an actor Elizabeth Swain's Broadway credits include Charley's Aunt, Crown Matrimonial and Sherlock Holmes (with the RSC). She has also appeared Off and Off Off Broadway, in regional theatres across the country and in many tours. Her many television credits include five years on Guiding Light and six months on As the World Turns. She has recorded innumerable books on tape and continues a voice-over career. Dr. Swain received her doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center and taught at NYU, Hunter, CCNY and Barnard before joining the faculty of Marymount Manhattan College. She has also taught at the Riverside Shakespeare Co., T. Schreiber Studio and at the Michael Howard Studios. In the spring of 1998 she was the recipient of the Brown Fellowship at the University of the South in Sewanee TN. She has published innumerable articles and reviews and is the author of the book, David Edgar: Playwright and Politician.

The Symposium is Funded in part by New York Council for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York State Council on the Arts Theatre Program Technical Assistance Fund

Mallory Catlett / Gwynn MacDonald, Co-Directors,  THE FIRST 100 YEARS
Organized by The Juggernaut Theatre Company
For more information, www.juggernaut-theatre.org