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Over a remarkable playwriting career of more than 20 years, Naomi Wallace has demonstrated a sustained and fierce commitment to the examination of identity and power—in terms of race, class, gender, age, nationality, and sexual preference. Nevertheless, her plays are more poetic than rhetorical in structure. They develop searing images and compound metaphors—linguistic, gestural, and theatrical—that avoid didacticism as they focus an audience's attention on the power dynamics at work in social and economic relations. While her sympathies are clear, her plays do not argue for a political orthodoxy so much as they evoke the forces of history that leave a mark on the individual. As the Vietnamese woman Lue Ming says in In the Heart of America, "The past is never over" (Wallace 2001, 125). The past penetrates the present again and again in Wallace's plays, in the form of a historically significant setting or event, a mysterious figure who travels magically through time, a theatrical reenactment of an earlier event, a ghost girl who is dead and gone yet walks among the living, or the permanent scars that experience has left on the bodies of her characters.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137017925_3

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