SOURCE: Schroeder, Patricia R. “Locked behind the Proscenium: Feminist Strategies in Getting Out and My Sister in This House.” Modern Drama 32, no. 1 (March 1989): 104-14.

In the following essay, Schroeder argues that both Getting Out and Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House utilize an imaginative combination of realist and experimental theatrical techniques as a vehicle for staging feminist issues.

During the 1970s feminist drama emerged as a potent force in the theatre world. In 1978, Patti Gillespie counted some forty feminist theatres in the United States alone, a large enough group for her to proclaim feminist theatre “an example of a grassroots movement seldom witnessed in the American theatre”.¹ Just three years later, in 1981, Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins listed 112 American feminist theatres.²

Defining exactly what feminist drama is, however, has become an increasingly difficult problem, despite some recent landmark studies of the plays, playwrights, theatres, and...