The work focuses on eight women and choices they made in specific productions: Jayme Koszyn’s and Lisa Wolpe’s Romeo and Juliet; Tina Packer’s and Ellen O’Brien’s Measure for Measure; Abigail Adams’s and Melia Bensussen’s Twelfth Night; Barbara Gaines’s and JoAnne Akalaitis’s Cymbeline.

Taylor interviewed all of the directors, and the first section of the book includes a brief biography of each, institutional opportunities and limitations, and the director’s views about Shakespeare’s depiction of women in general as well as future goals for her work. Subsequent chapters on the productions include a survey of feminist literary criticism of the play, recent stage history, the director’s vision, production narratives of significant scenes, reviews, and an analysis of the kinds of cultural work the productions potentially perform.

The women directors studied have often employed avant-garde techniques in ways that feminist performance critics have adapted to their own purposes. The frequently use direct address, use characters as stagehands performing set changes in full view of the audience, call attention to various theatrical conventions, resist interpretive traditions accumulated through decades of the play’s performance history, reveal the constructedness of gender, cast against type, gender, or race, or use a stage image to subvert the apparent meaning of the text. Although it is impossible to characterize American women directors monolithically, comparison between the directors in this study and other directors of Shakespeare both here and abroad occasionally yield discernible trends.