Rachel Crothers: Broadway Innovator, Feminist Pioneer

Bassett (William Faulkner), former president of Clark University, delivers a dry biography of queer playwright Rachel Crothers. Born in Bloomington, Ill., in 1870, Crothers moved to New York City in 1896 with hopes of becoming an actor. Though those dreams were dashed, they gave way to a fruitful writing and directing career. Crothers, who died in 1958, staged 24 plays on Broadway between 1906 and 1938, developing a style that employed “realistic everyday dialogue—or, more precisely, what is made to appear that to an audience,” complex female characters, and feminist themes. (The 1910 play A Man’s World, which stars a feminist writer who rejects a suitor’s proposal, critiques double standards that excuse male immorality, according to Bassett, though she notes that Crothers’s later plays highlight ways in which women must accommodate to patriarchal society.) Studies of Crothers have been confined to dissertations and scholarly publications, so this exploration of her life is welcome, but Bassett’s perfunctory prose and reliance on summaries of the plays (with few examples of Crothers’s actual writing) make the account feel like an extended encyclopedia entry. It adds up to a well-meaning but less-than-satisfying portrait of an overlooked pioneer of American theater. (Aug.)