Abstract
This work analyzes three contemporary plays about the Middle East by western playwrights in an effort to discover whether those plays operated from an Orientalist viewpoint, based on centuries-old notions about the Arab and/or Muslim world and its complex relationship with the West. Or rather, did the playwrights take a deconstructive stance by way of post-colonial ideology and post-modem theatrical technique in an effort to dislocate the illusion of a Euro-centric Master Narrative? The methods used to determine the playwright's sensibility are based on Edward W. Said's Orientalism and post-modem feminist appropriations of the work of Berolt Brecht. Chapter One deals primarily with an explanation of methodologies (Said's ideas about pure versus political knowledge, strategic location, and binary opposition and Brecht's theories on historicization, the alienation effect, and epic theatre; and an overview of feminist theatre scholars appropriation of Brechtian performance technique). Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted to analysis of the individual plays: Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies (1981), Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul (2001), and William Mastrosimone's The Afghan Women (2005). This work argues that the way these plays are constructed helps explain whether they succeed in "deconstructing" Orientalist stereotypes and prejudices. More specifically, that in order to evade stereotypes, feminist and post-colonial playwrights alike have migrated toward non-realistic forms of theatre that in many ways resemble the kind of theatre Bertolt Brecht proposed as a pre-post-modernist.