In order to dissect the body politic, Naomi Wallace writes plays about the politics of the body. She emerged in the 1990s, first in England and later in the United States, as a poet-turned-playwright with a fierce commitment to examining identity--in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and sexual preference--as a social rather than a psychological construct. "I want to challenge the smug notion that there is political and non-political theater," Wallace has said. "One usually gets called a 'political' writer when one's politics do not coincide with the mainstream. When we think of political theater, we think of something dry about ideas. I love ideas, but I like trying to put issues of the heart onstage and seeing how those issues are affected by the world around us."

Wallace's plays are more poetic than rhetorical in structure, contrived to develop compound metaphors that are both tough and...