SOURCE: “Making Magic Public: Megan Terry's Traveling Family Circus,” in Making A Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre, edited by Lynda Hart, The University of Michigan Press, 1989, pp. 169-80.

In the following essay, Breslauer and Keyssar examine Terry's Mollie Bailey's Traveling Family Circus, a play that shows people how to make a difference in their world.

When Megan Terry moved to the Omaha Magic Theater in 1974, she began a new phase of the feminist discourse she had begun to shape in the experimental theatre of the 1960s. The energy that she had directed for more than a decade toward collaborative production endeavors, primarily in New York City with the Open Theater, now became more precisely focused on joint endeavors with her colleague, Jo Ann Schmidman, and on efforts to engage and address the local community in Omaha. While Terry was one of the few feminist playwrights to...