Includes bibliographical references and index.

Revolution and after: heroism and violence in early national plays about the American Revolution / Amelia Howe Kritzer -- Violence averted only to return: visiting the archive of "Pocahontas Plays" / Tamara Underiner -- The thrust for freedom from systems of oppression: a century of suicide, prolicide and viricide in plays by American women / Cheryl Black -- Sane enough to kill: on women, madness and the theatricality of violence in Susan Glaspell's The verge / Noelia Hernando-Real -- New critical approaches to machinal: Sophie Treadwell's response to structural violence / Miriam Lopez Rodriguez -- Working women and violence in Jazz Era American drama / Jerry Dickey -- The guns sing in harmony: Johnny Johnson and the musical war / Anne Beggs -- The violence at the top of the stairs: domestic dystopia in Inge's Heartland / Dorothy Chansky -- Psychodrama strategies that protect Tennessee Williams' late-play characters from a violent world / Dana Rufolo."Actual explosions and actual brutality": Baraka, violence and the Black arts stage / Diana Rosenhagen -- Invisibility's contusions: violence in Cherrie Moraga's Heroes and saints and The hungry woman and Luis Valdez's Zoot suit / Irma Mayorga -- Threats, bad language and imperatives: verbal violence in politically (in)correct institutional speech in American drama at the end of the millennium / Yiyi Lopez Gondara -- "Arms in women's hands": the subversion of the victim role of women in Heather McDonald's Dream of a common language / Maria Dolores Narbona Carrion -- Rebecca Gilman's exploration of gender conditioning as a factor in violence against women / Michael Solomonson -- Neil Labute, vigilante of violence: an examination of his trilogy The shape of things, Fat pig and Reasons to Be pretty / N. J. Stanley -- Challenging the American dream: U.S. theater and the continuum of state violence / Marta Fernandez Morales.Terrorist violence and its (dis)figurations in three American post-9/11 plays / Markus Wessendorf -- The cancer body (politic) of American violence: John Guare's A few stout individuals / Virginia Dakari -- Affecting the audience: Gina Gionfriddo's After Ashley / Barbara Ozieblo.