Maya E. Roth. "The Philomela Myth & Post-Colonial Civic Theater: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ’The Love of the Nightingale’." Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Texts. Ed. Sharon Friedman. : McFarland Press, 2009.
This essay analyzes Wertenbaker's 1980 re-visioning of the ancient Greek Philomela myth— 'The Love of the Nightingale'— as postcolonial and feminist civic theater. Produced internationally the play meditates on the tyranny of silencing, gender violence as a form of human rights abuse, and the interconnections between local and global abuses. Using performance-sensitive play analysis and critical theory, I read 'Nightingale' against the ancient myth as well as against Naomi Iizuka's more recent 'Polaroid Stories' in order to discern Wertenbaker's political poetics. If Iizuka's dramaturgy relies on sensory collage and intertextuality in order to surface the dispossessed voiceless, endowing homeless youth with cultural legitimacy in part through alliance with classical figures, Wertenbaker's episodic theater interrogates political and social abuses directly, opening complex feminist inquiry refracted through culture, geography and class.
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