If it is true that the percentage of women working in midsize Canadian theatres (as fully paid directors, playwrights and artistic directors) has gone up from 10 per cent in 1981 to only the current 14 to 16 per cent, according to one study, then Hysteria: A Festival of Women is surely a long overdue corrective. What better way to address the issue of under-representation than staging a festival where women are the sole representation, right? Not quite. Hysteria is no theatrical affirmative-action alternative.

For Moynan King, co-director (with Kelly Thornton) of the 10-day festival now in its second year at Buddies in Bad Times, Hysteria doesn't solve the problem of women's visibility or marginalization in theatre but still comes up with a solution. King has noticed that it's not a question of the number of works by women but the nature of that work that keeps it from "being upheld in the mainstream." Working outside the traditional, linear play structure and within an indefinable multidisciplinary, performance-art pool, many women may not see the mainstream as a place to have been left out of, but one where "they don't want to go anyway."

"Instead of Hysteria being a statement about what's not being done," King continues, "it's actually a celebration of what's being done and how women are engaging themselves in theatre."

Although there are some film and visual-art components in the mix, Hysteria is primarily a performance festival with a wide geographic range, attracting artists from North America and Europe. In addition to New York's Elizabeth Hess, who will perform her critically lauded one-woman show Birth Rite, the festival welcomes Wisconsin's Elizabeth Whitney as host of the 18th lesbian cabaret night, Strange Sisters; Montreal's break-dancing talent K8 Alsterlund; Nova Scotia playwrights Natalie Meisener and Lee-Anne Poole; and Sweden's drag-king act, the Lion Kings. A festival highlight is a truncated version of Edgy Women, Montreal's influential performance-art festival, curated by Miriam Ginestier.

In a festival called Hysteria -- which in itself reclaims a late-19th century, particularly Freudian, psychiatric diagnosis of women's imaginative powers -- the way to madness lies in trying to tie in the various works thematically. Still, a certain sensibility connects the various women. "There are no victims in Hysteria, no 'woe is me,' " King says. "As a feminist, I'm not interested in the victim role for women. . . . Women may be underproduced, but there's still all that great work. It gives us hope."

Local artists see Hysteria as a safe space to try out plays, dance and performance pieces that may or may not have a future life. Evalyn Parry and Anna Chatterton -- the two women behind the hit Clean Irene and Dirty Maxine, an alphabetically organized, told-in-rhyme series of cautionary tales -- are developing a short performance piece for the Infra-Psychic Proclivities program. It's a send-up of the Sweet Valley High stories both women read as adolescents, picking apart the original's class, race and body images.

"We have a good idea it's going to be a very sympathetic audience in terms of the kind of takes on politics and feminism that infuses our work that is not directly about these issues," Parry says, "but we know we're going to find an appreciative audience." How appreciative? Recently the two women performed Clean Irene for audiences in a theatre in Rochester, N.Y., where the previous show was I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. It's an experience Parry describes as demoralizing. "They didn't dislike it; they didn't really get it. And that show is quite an accessible one."

It makes me wonder what our friends and neighbours in Rochester (alas, it will take more than a ill-fated ferry service to bridge our cities) will make of the dub poet, actor and story teller d'bi.young. She will be performing organ-ized crime, the second part of a trilogy in which a young black woman examines her "queerness and homophobia," explains young, moments before catching a plane to perform in a hip-hop festival in Havana. Although this will be the "first glimpse" of organ-ized crime, the rawness of the performance is consistent with young's wired style.

Finally, if you're a man, please don't automatically assume you're not invited. "We're not exclusive in that way," insists King, who has been asked by some women if they can bring their boyfriends to the festival. "Please come. We so want you to come. We don't want to preach to the converted."

Hysteria continues to Nov. 13. $10 to 18; day pass, $15, and festival pass, $50. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St., 416-975-8555.