Banuta Rubess is a Canadian-Latvian playwright and director of theatre, opera, radio, and film. She gives lectures and seminars at universities in North America and Europe, and as co-founder of The 1982 Theater Company, she toured Europe and North America. Her play "Pope Joan" is published in "New Canadian Drama," Volume 6, "Feminist Drama" (1993 Borealis). Some of her other theatre works include "Head in a Bag" (1996), "Bonnie and Clyde are Dead" (1990), and "Thin Ice" (1986).

New Canadian Drama - Volume 6, Feminist Drama, edited by Rita Much. The two plays selected for this anthology represent some of the chief formal and thematic concerns of feminist drama produced by Canada´s foremost feminist theatre, Nightwood, in the 1980s. By nurturing an entire generation of women theatre artists for the past thirteen years - writers, designers, directors, actors - and by emphasizing a non-naturalistic style, Nightwood Theatre has made a permanent impression on the nature and scope of contemporary Canadian theatre, its politics and its aesthetic, as well as the conditions in which this theatre is created. The inspiration for Jan Kudelka and Mary Vingoe´s Hooligans produced in 1982, was the extraordinary life of American dancer Isadora Duncan, whose lyrical abstract movement was hailed by the artistic community of Europe and Russia as the pure and free expression of the creative spirit. Rather than simply tell Duncan´s story the playwrights opted to place her work and the passions that fueled it in the context of ideas, the people and the prejudices of her era. In Nightwood´s 1984 production of Banuta Rubess´s Pope Joan the outside is an intelligent, learned girl of great faith who aspires to become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Joan is another example of Rubess´s continuing interest in both creating good stage roles for women and re-visioning history, recovering and reclaiming lost heroines from whose point of view the story is told.