SOURCE: Keyssar, Helene. “The Dramas of Caryl Churchill: The Politics of Possibility.” Massachusetts Review 24, no. 1 (spring 1983): 198–216.

In the following essay, Keyssar analyzes the unconventional political and gender-based aspects of Churchill's plays and examines the influences and collaboration Churchill received during the writing of these works.

Tall, lithe Caryl Churchill moves through the world with the same brisk and graceful angularity that propels her plays. When I first met her, in the Spring of 1980 at Smith College, neither she nor her work were known to more than a handful of people in the United States. Within a year of this visit, Churchill's Cloud Nine would take many of the most coveted prizes given to off-Broadway theater productions and become one of the longest running plays by a woman ever presented in New York. By the winter of 1982, she had become the only playwright with two plays—Cloud Nine and...