Out of a small, hand-to-mouth women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance ...artists of the 1980s and 1990s. Appearing on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, WOW put a witty, hilarious, gender-bending, and erotically charged aesthetic on stage for women in general and lesbians in particular. Featured performers included the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. For three decades the WOW Café Theatre has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work. Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers offers the first critical history of the WOW Café, based on dozens of interviews with WOW performers and other participants, newspaper reviews of the earliest productions, and unpublished photographs, and suggests why the collective has had such amazing longevity and an enduring legacy.
Photograph of Orla Egan with members of the LINC Drama Group following their performance of her play Leeside Lezzies at the launch of OUTing The Past LGBTQ+ History Festival in the Gay Project Cork
...Photograph of Orla Egan with members of the LINC Drama Group following their performance of her play Leeside Lezzies at the launch of OUTing The Past LGBTQ+ History Festival in the Gay Project Cork
With limited anthologizing of southern United States lesbian theater, the purpose of this article is twofold: to anthologize the work of Gwen Flager, self-identified southern lesbian playwright and ...to interpret Flager's work as intentionally disruptive to gender and sexual norms through humor and a centering of southern lesbian identity. Flager is an award-winning playwright with U.S. southern roots. Born in Oklahoma in 1950, she spent many years in Louisiana and Alabama before relocating to Houston, Texas. Member of the Scriptwriters Houston, Dramatists Guild of America, and New Play Exchange, she won the 2017 Queensbury Theater's New Works playwriting competition for her original script, Shakin' the Blue Flamingo, which premiered in 2018 after a 12-month development process. By offering a series of untold stories about and from various perspectives of U.S. southern lesbian characters who navigate southern cuisine, history, identity, race, class, nationalism, and self-realization throughout the late twentieth century, Flager positions her characters and the plays themselves as owners of the best version of southern culture, shifting the center to an oft-marginalized southern lesbian identity.
Christopher Shinn is one of the leading American playwrights of his generation. Yet his work has been more consistently supported in the UK than in the US. His most recent play, Teddy Ferrara, was ...greeted with hostility by the American press when it premiered in Chicago in the spring of 2013. In this interview with critic Stephen Bottoms, Shinn discusses his work, its reception, and what he perceives as a censorious cultural climate in the United States. He also considers the status of dramatic realism in a postmodern context, and assesses his own relationship to the American dramatic canon.
Toneelgroep Amsterdam's (TGA) production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-92) was first performed in 2008 and has been a regular part of their repertory ...ever since. Directed by Ivo van Hove, this is also a production for which every note of music and every recorded sound is taken from David Bowie's work. Using interviews with Ivo van Hove and other members of TGA, this article explores the relationships of support, mutual excavation and surprise between this production of Kushner's plays by Holland's leading theatre company and David Bowie's music. It does so with an emphasis on floating as a lyrical, scenographic and ontological state. And in the process it covers topics such as the relationships of Bowie's lyrics to Kushner's text, autobiography's presence in theatre, the impact of white light, and vinyl LPs.
Drawing on Avery Gordon's framework of ghostly matters, haunting, and race, I address the queer autobiographical performance by Julie Tolentino, Mestiza - Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes (1998), as an act of ...unsettling the boundaries of white western subjectivity and belonging. I argue that the artist mobilizes haunting by turning to autobiography, memory and the site of the body. Drawing on Anzaldúa's 'mestiza' vision, on Mestiza performance scenes, on correspondence with Tolentino about the work, and on Muñoz's work, I argue that the performance stages a lesbian of colour, mestiza subjectivity and imaginary located at the crossroads between worlds, and this act questions the racialised boundaries of social belonging. I discuss the melancholic atmospheres of the performance as structures of feeling and signs of this subjectivity.
Before the revolutions in North Africa in 2011, Zimbabwean authorities seemed more willing to turn a blind eye to critical theatre, seeing it as non-threatening (perhaps due to its relative ...exclusivity). In Mandisi Gobodi's "Kookaburra -- Birds of the Same Feather," a play that premiered on 27 Mar 2013, the main characters Mike and Richey are incarcerated for a love that dares to speak its name. Kookaburra is not a political play but it daringly confronts the subject of homosexuality, presenting a platform for education and debate.
Two productions with themes related to gay liberation and AIDS presented in 2011 are reviewed: Jake Shears, John Garden, and Jeff Whitty's "Tales of the City: A New Musical," directed by Jason Moore ...and presented at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California, on July 16, 2011; and Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe and presented at the Golden Theatre in New York City on May 21.
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