Bitter Bitches: Feminism, Theater, and Dark Comedy

Abstract

This project explores dark comedy, specifically plays by and/or about women. I investigate the questions, “How can dark comedy convey feminist content? What are the risks inherent in darkly comic creative work? What is the relationship between dark comedy, feminism, and alienation? How do we define dark comedy?” My project culminates in an extensive annotated bibliography of my responses to all of the texts I have read or viewed for the Summer Fellowship, a draft of my own full-length darkly comic feminist play, and a response paper that considers my research, creative work, and the questions I am investigating. The project is part traditional research (reading, synthesizing, annotating), part creative scholarship (writing plays), and part personal reflection