In her plays, as well as in her work as a scholar, teacher, and activist, Karen Malpede challenges theater traditions that glorify violence. Influenced strongly by the political avant-garde of the 1960s and by a feminist imperative to connect deeply personal themes with larger historical moments, Malpede has persistently steered audiences and her students away from fascination with tragic conflict toward images of recovery, reconciliation, and healing. Her dramatic terrain has included ancient Greece, a medieval Celtic island, modern Algeria, and the interior realm of personal trauma, but the heart of Malpede's dramaturgy is a poetic language shaped into rituals that displace egocentric notions of destiny with feminist-inspired images of a "collective self." Her plays do not avoid brutality; indeed, she directly or indirectly confronts such wars as the Russian Revolution, the Gulf War of 1991, and the Bosnia conflict in the early 1990s. But her aim has always...