Introduction

A fascination with history and retelling historical stories has marked American media and culture in the twenty-first century. In the world of television, shows like Bridgerton (Van Dusen, 2020-) and The Gilded Age (Fellowes, 2022-) reimagined the regency period and the titular Gilded Age in the United States, respectively, whilst the film world has seen all sorts of historical reconfigurations, some notable examples including Sofia Coppola&s;s Marie Antoinette (2006), Ava DuVernay&s;s Selma (2014) and, more recently, Martin Scorsese&s;s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). This obsession with retelling historical stories has bled into the theatrical world, with musicals like the enduring smash hit, Hamilton (2015), and the now-global sensation, Six (2017), cementing historical theatre as a mainstay of the twenty-first century. In the American theatre context, two young writers have emerged within the genre of feminist historiographic metadrama, where metadramatic techniques are used to reconfigure historical narratives and draw audience attention to the constructiveness of both the play and the history it tells: these two writers are Jaclyn Backhaus and Lauren Gunderson.