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Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers

Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre

Catherine Davy author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Michigan Press

Published:19th Jul '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers cover

"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin

"After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice

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, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.

The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the...

"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's longstanding association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin


"Davy uses first-person insights, interviews with WOW members, and archival records, however scant, to position WOW Cafe Theatre within an ever-shifting context of US cultural production. At the same time, she works to recoup the theater's reputation from the slippages of collective memory."
---Choice (Highly Recommended)


"...Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers fills an urgent need in theater history, gender studies, and lesbian history, and it does so with substance and style."
-- Robin Bernstein, Women's Review of Books


"Davy uses first-person insights, interviews with WOW members, and archival records, however scant, to position WOW Cafe Theatre within an ever-shifting context of US cultural production. At the same time, she works to recoup the theater's reputation from the slippages of collective memory."
Choice (Highly Recommended)

* Choice *

"...Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers fills an urgent need in theater history, gender studies, and lesbian history, and it does so with substance and style."
—Robin Bernstein, Women's Review of Books

* Women's Review of Books *

Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Book Award 2011, Honorable Mention

* all awards line *

"Davy does a remarkable job of recuperating for her readers a history of WOW that offers not only many details and dates (which are valuable because WOW's record-keeping has been minimal and sporadic), but also a sense of the energy and excitement that WOW generated."
Critical Quarterly

* Critical Quarterly *

"...is a remarkable scholarly achievement, one that addresses egregious omissions in the historical record and charts an alternative genealogy of feminism and its relationship to queer theory by tracing the impulses, desires, influences, and exigencies that conspired to make the WOW Cafe an artistic possibility and a material reality."
—Sara Warner, Theatre Survey

* Theatre Survey *

"From Hughes's The Lady Dick to the performances of The Five Lesbian Brothers, WOW Cafe Theatre has offered such a space, and Davy's impeccably researched and well-argued book is a testimony to the ongoing fascination of, and the important cultural contributions made by, feminist, lesbian, and queer performers in the United States."
—Dirk Gindt, Theatre Journal

* Theatre Journ

ISBN: 9780472051229

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

264 pages