an emotional tampon

I’m no academic but I am a nerd for theater. I tend to look at the same couple of questions at the beginning:

Who wrote it?- Young Jean Lee, a Korean woman, wrote a play called Straight White Men. That same play means something different coming from her than if, for example, an actual straight white man wrote it. What’s the difference of context when Branden Jacobs Jenkins, a black man, writes blackface into his show than if a white person did? A lot. 

When was it written?- Historical context matters. Vinegar Tom is dealing with the Salem witch trials but was written by a woman in the mid-70s. Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People as a criticism of hypocrisy and puritanism in 1882, but there’s a reason we get modern revivals of it. 

What’s XYZ doing there? Why is Johnna in August Osage County? Why is John set in Gettysburg? I also like to look at what gets repeated in the show- butterflies in Mercury Fur, The Crucible references in Speech and Debate, and think about why. Plays (or at least good plays) don’t do this accidentally. 

These lead into my constant focus on what the women or POC in the show are doing. Are they carrying the plot, or are they serving someone else’s story? Do they show up as set dressing? Are they active or passive?