Books, Plays, Musicals, One-Acts, and One-Woman Shows By Carolyn Gage

www.carolyngage.com http://stores.lulu.com/carolyngage

i How to Order the Books and Plays:

All plays and books may be ordered from: http://stores.lulu.com/carolyngage as either hard copy or downloads.s

For customers outside the US, contact the author at [email protected].

Catalog is also online at www.carolyngage.com.

ii What Others Are Saying:

“… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…” —Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

“Gage is regularly hailed as one of the best lesbian playwrights in America, but I want to say—if she will allow this and I understand and accept if she won’t—simply one of our best playwrights.”—Sharon Doubiago, My Father’s Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl; Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems.

“… a whole women’s theatre tradition in one volume… wonderful to read—rich, original, deeply affirming—and must be phenomenal to see on stage. The culture of women we have never had is invented in Carolyn Gage’s brilliant and beautiful plays.” —Andrea Dworkin, feminist philosopher activist, and author.

“The work of an experienced and esteemed playwright like Carolyn Gage is the air that modern theatre needs.” — Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories, San Francisco Arts Commissioner.

“Carolyn Gage is a fabulous feminist playwright, and a major one too. This is great theatre. Gage’s dramatic and lesbian imagination is utterly original… daring, heartbreaking, principled, bitter, and often very funny… There is no rhetoric here: only one swift and pleasurable intake of breath after another… Women’s mental health would improve, instantly, were they able to read and see these plays performed.”—Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness.

“… the toughest, most lesbian/feminist-identified work for theatre I know… brilliant and daring scripts...” —John Stoltenberg, former Executive Editor, On the Issues, author of Refusing to Become A Man.

“Mahalo nui for your play. It is splendid, clever, and sets the characters in an imaginary world that is,nevertheless, quite believable. The mark of superb craftsmanship...! Ku’e, ku’e,ku’e! [Resist, resist, resist!]” —Haunani-Kay Trask, leader of the Hawai’ian Sovereignty Movement.

“I was more deeply moved and ‘sinspired’ by Carolyn Gage’s new book [Like There’s No Tomorrow] than by anything else I’ve read in years… It is a work of burning, uncompromising vision and daring…

iii a beacon of hope in these chilling times of compromise, timidity and apparent defeat. This book is Pure Fire. It is true and therefore extreme… a stunning manifestation of Radical Lesbian Feminist Courage and Genius.” —Mary Daly, Radical Feminist Elemental Philosopher and Author of Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust, and The Wickedary.

“Carolyn Gage's visit was transformative for my department. Students were able to have close contact with a world-class artist. In a brief Q&A, Carolyn firmly and respectfully challenged their assumptions about the boundaries of art, education, and culture. She responded with enthusiasm and generosity to their staged reading of one of her short works, which gave them a strong sense of connection with this renowned artist. And we all experienced her extraordinarily moving and enlightening Joan of Arc in our own small theatre, sharing a truly powerful, and for some students life- changing, evening of performance.”—Dr. Ellen Margolis, Chair of Theatre & Dance, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR.

“Carolyn Gage’s writing, acting, and teaching are explosive. She rips away the cultural camouflage that permits us to accept, to be blind to, the brutal context in which women are still required to live their lives. When my students remember this semester it will be because of her visit. She’s a treasure.” —Prof. George Wolf, Dept. of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

“Many feminists are brilliant, but how many are wise? Playwright Carolyn Gage is a radical lesbian feminist who is wise, as this book [Like There’s No Tomorrow] demonstrates. I read the book recently and realized that I had made a great mistake not reading and reviewing it when it came out, probably because I was biased against the word “meditations.” So often radical feminist books are depressing; I admire them but wish for some inspiration. This book is uncompromising and tough-minded, yet inspiring.” —Carol Anne Douglas, off our backs, Washington, DC.

“We were so delighted with Carolyn’s powerful drama and her personable style of teaching that Carefree [retirement community] women asked her to return and be our first Artist-in-Residence… Participating in the readings and listening to the performances were powerful experiences for the women of our community. Carolyn’s dramatic works, her teaching methods, and her passionate belief in women inspired many of us to look at our lives and come to see ourselves as heroines and Amazons. Her ability to clothe her

iv meticulous research and knowledge of women’s and especially lesbian history in enthralling dramas helped many of us to realize our rich lesbian/feminist heritage… she’s personable, down-to- earth, and fun to be with. Her time with us was intense, fascinating, and a lot of fun. Who could ask for more?” —Dana G. Finnegan, PhD., Leader of Writers’ Workshop at Clubhouse for Resort on Carefree Boulevard, Ft. Myers.

“Ms. Gage’s visit to Washington College was inspiring. Her passion for what she does is so obvious and her intellect so impressive that students and faculty alike were immediately and permanently engaged by her presentation and presence.

Washington College is, in part, known for it’s writing program. We have regular visits by well known writers—everyone from Edward Albee and Israel Horovitz to Toni Morrison and John Barth in recent years. I can honestly say I have never seen students so enthusiastic about a guest. Another thing that is unusual and impressive is that she has kept in touch with several of our students since her visit.

One of the things I was most impressed with was the clarity of her aesthetics and politics. This is a person who does not apologize for her agenda or the militancy necessary to further that agenda. The amazing thing is she combines that unswerving commitment with compassion, understanding, warmth, and generosity. She is totally committed to her art in a way that is truly inspiring. Don’t let the lesbian/feminist moniker scare you, this is a formidable artist in every way.” —Dale Daigle, PhD., Theatre Department Chair, Washington College, Chesterton, MD.

“Recalling The Second Coming of Joan of Arc leaves me practically speechless, but boiling over on the inside with sadness and a hunger to “right all the wrongs” of the world. Never before have I attended an event at my University that evoked tears and heartache and feelings of invincibility and empowerment simultaneously. In Dorothy Allison’s book Skin, she encourages women to speak and write ourselves raw, until we are vulnerable and we produce captivating and personal art that evokes tears, laughter, and rage from the audience. Carolyn Gage epitomizes Allison’s vision. Her brilliant performance touches everyone deeply by providing an educational, cathartic, heartbreaking, and empowering experience. She speaks the unspeakable truths about women’s oppression that most of us are afraid to say…”—Kristina Armenakis, Women’s Resource Center, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR.

v “The night I saw Second Coming [of Joan of Arc], six years ago, I borrowed a copy of the play from a friend. Ever since then the book has lived in my book bag, purse, shoulder bag, carry on, reminding me that there are “two ways to destroy a woman”, reminding me not to get ripped apart. Gage has… has given us a hero that doesn’t run around in her underwear and taught us to take back the voices in our heads. Gage has changed so many lives she will never know about. and the only way I know how to thank her is to never stop fighting.” —Tamanya Garza, The University of the Sciences, Philadelphia.

“Carolyn Gage is to lesbian playwriting as Georgia O’Keefe is to women in American art: You can scarcely think of one without the other.”—off our backs, Washington, DC.

“Carolyn Gage is a living manifestation of the power of articulate anger. Her play is raw, uncompromising, in your face, and her politics are no different. In the flesh, however, her passion, humour and quicksilver insight shine through her rage against the patriarchal machine. An inspired spokeswoman for revolutionary radical feminism, I love to think of Carolyn out there now, urging women all over the world to access that submerged anger that, once released, will enable them to find hope, pleasure, selfhood.” —Women’s News, Belfast, Northern Ireland

“While it was probably the novelty of having a lesbian feminist in Hattiesburg, Mississippi that brought the people out, it was Carolyn’s intelligence, wit and charisma that motivated us to participate. Her complex mixture of righteous anger and compassion and her insight into the human psyche inspired those of us who live with the daily oppression of southern patriarchal culture to open our minds and hearts and speak our truths. When we left the theater that night, we had all been touched by Carolyn’s powerful politics.” —Dr. Kate Greene, University of Southern Mississippi.

“… powerful and moving, to the point of angry, as well as sorrowful tears… Your truthful and emotional performance should be mandatory for all students—especially women, who need to make decisions and choices in their lives often based on the same issues that Jeanne confronted in her own pilgrimage.” —Karla Alwes, PhD., Professor of English, State University of New York, Cortland.

vi “… Superb acting… Enjoyable first-rate theater performance, and a rich source for thoughtful analysis and evaluation of the representation of heroines by the patriarchal control institutions...” —Hilda Hidalgo, PhD.,Professor Emerita, Rutgers University.

“Calamity Jane Delivers A Message to Her Daughter was one of the best acting performances of this [Dublin International Gay Theatre] Festival. Carolyn Gage was mesmeric as the aging infamous female cowboy recalling happier times. Both writing and performance were of the highest standards and it was a riveting piece of comic theatre… you could almost smell the booze!” —Gordon Farrell, Queer ID, Dublin.

“Ever since I first saw Carolyn Gage perform her work, I have been convinced that she is one of our greatest living artists… the value of Gage’s plays goes far beyond their ability to hold and entertain audiences. I know of no living playwright who is grappling with issues as controversial and as central to the survival of our people as Carolyn Gage. Possibly the most potentially transformative work of our time is the work on trauma conducted by psychologists and academics as well as within feminist and recovery movements. By joining her intellectual and political engagements with these movements to her considerable skills as a dramatist, Gage creates plays that bring the “magic” back to theatre. I have seen many of her plays performed – among them, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, Sappho in Love, Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist, and Artemisia and Hildegarde. The impact of these performances on audiences is profound and life-changing.

I can also attest to Carolyn Gage’s rapport with university students and faculty… I sponsored a lecture and performance by Carolyn Gage on our campus. These events were well-attended and enthusiastically received by the faculty, students, and community members who attended. Carolyn Gage was on my campus for four days and throughout that time she was most generous in making herself accessible to students. In the discussions with her audience and during small group meetings with students, Carolyn was lively, provocative, brilliant.”—Dr. Patricia Cramer, Dept. of English, University of Connecticut, Stamford.

“Although she has worked in other literary genres, Carolyn’s genius is best appreciated in her theatrical work as an author, performer, and director. Whatever the subject, her work focuses on the lives of women, situates them in their historical context, and illuminates their

vii thoughts and actions from a feminist and, yes, lesbian perspective. And although one might assume that her radical perspective would ensure permanent obscurity for Carolyn’s work, this has not been the case. Her plays continue to receive national and international attention. Carolyn will bring not only her incredibly prolific theatrical repertoire but also the richness of her intellect and astute political comprehension of women’s lives and the necessity of our struggle— of all people’s struggles—against the colonization of our minds and bodies. She has a great gift and the ability to synthesize the truths of women’s lives and to tell them without shrinking from their pain and complexity.”—Julia Penelope, co-editor of The Original Coming Out Stories, Lesbians Only, and Lesbian Culture: An Anthology.

“It was an excellent performance… I also wanted you to know that your performance drew one of the largest audiences for a Women’s Studies sponsored event. Many of us have continued to talk about your performance for long after your departure from Gettysburg. We especially enjoyed your warmth and your sense of humor.”—Joyce Sprague, Women’s Studies, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA.

“[Carolyn Gage’s] workshop, sponsored by the Alliance for Sexual Diversity, was both theatrical and theoretical. Her use of classical female archetypes to describe ongoing issues facing women was especially clear and powerful… She was entertaining and empowering to many young women on our campus who, a month later, are still talking about her.”—Naomi Paisley, Information and Referral Counselor, Women’s Center, University of Southern Maine.

“… a tremendous experience for the students. Ms. Gage made such a positive impact on the students that her ‘voice’ can still be heard echoing in the voices of the students who were fortunate enough to have spent time with her.” —Carolyn Lewis, Professor of Theatre, Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA.

“We invited Carolyn Gage to perform her play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc here at UVA—she was amazing. She really challenges women and men to rethink a whole range of issues, from popular historical accounts of Joan’s story to how rape figures into the oppression of women—and lesbians, specifically—throughout history. She is a completely lovely person and easy to work with.” —

viii Claire N. Kaplan, Coordinator, Sexual Assault Education, Univ. of Virginia.

“… The undisputed queen of startling one-acts.” —Victoria K. Brownworth, Pulitzer Prize nominee, author of Too Queer.

“Gage’s particular brilliance lies in her skill at juxtaposing lesbian reality with our collective herstoric imagination as a people... Lesbian writers, theorists, and professors—in large numbers at ECLF [East Coast Lesbian Festival]—were absolutely transported by the academic significance of Gage’s work.” —Bonnie Morris, Senior Associate at the Center for Women and Policy Studies and 5-year staff member Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

“I am constantly amazed at Carolyn’s ability to make complex social issues not only accessible but also irresistibly fascinating.” —R.J. McComish, Literary Manager of the Portland Stage Company, Portland, Maine.

“Gage’s The Second Coming of Joan of Arc really is that—an entirely fresh look at Joan. Who knew she had a lesbian lover, and her cross dressing is what really got her in trouble?! Gage presents her as a queer role model and hero for all ages—a fantastic and surprising believable re-visioning of lesbian history.” —Marie Cartier, performance artist and author, Baby, You Are My Religion and founder, Dandelion Warrior Movement.

“No playwright has created as amazing a pantheon of historical lesbian characters as Carolyn Gage. Her book, Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, provides a sumptuous feast of possibilities for both seasoned and budding lesbian performers to use portraying a full range of emotion and political perspectives. Carolyn Gage is a national lesbian treasure.” —Rosemary Keefe Curb, editor of Amazon All Stars : 13 Lesbian Plays.

“I’ve long been intrigued and entertained by the originality of Carolyn Gage’s work. Simply no one is writing about these subjects with such insight and humor.” —Mariah Burton Nelson, author, We Are All Athletes, international women’s sports authority.

“Rarely in my life have I left a play, or any work of art, feeling like my life was truly better for it… The plays were hilarious, harrowing, exhilarating, and affirming.” —The Spectrum, Buffalo, NY.

ix “Taking in a Gage play is like getting a combined dose of Karl Marx, Betty Friedan and triple espresso. She broadcasts insight on power and powerlessness with energetic zip, laying good groundwork for directors and actors who would attempt production of them.” — WNYQ News, Buffalo, NY.

“… strong-minded, bighearted storytelling...” —Chicago Review, Chicago. BIOGRAPHY

Carolyn Gage is a lesbian-feminist playwright, performer, director, and activist. The author of seven books on lesbian theatre and fifty-five plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history. Her collection of plays The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award in Drama, the top LGBT book award in the US. Portland Magazine named Gage one the “Ten Most Intriguing People in Maine” in 2009, and in 2010, she was named one of Portland’s “Most Influential” by the Portland Phoenix.

Gage tours internationally in her award-winning, one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, offering workshops and lectures on lesbian theatre. In 2008, her new musical about Babe Didrikson was given concert readings in both Phoenix and Minneapolis, and her play The Countess and the Lesbians premiered at the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, where it was reviewed by The Irish Times and sold out the run. In 2008, two collections of her plays were published: Nine Short Plays and The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays. In 2009, a revised and expanded version of her collection of Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors was published, along with her anthology The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales.

In 2004, her play Ugly Ducklings was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for the prestigious ATCA/ Steinberg New Play Award, an award with given annually for the best new play produced outside New York. It won the Lesbian Theatre Award from Curve Magazine, and a $150,000 documentary on the play premiered at the

x Frameline International Film Festival in San Francisco. The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women was named national finalist for the Jane Chambers Award given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Receiving top reviews in Miami and in Washington, DC, it was the subject of a feature article in The Washington Post. Her one-act, Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist, was presented at Actors Theatre of Louisville in the Juneteenth Festival of African American plays. It was a national winner of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, and is included in Random House's anthology Under 30: Plays for a New Generation.

Gage's musical, The Amazon All-Stars is the first lesbian full-book musical ever published by a mainstream play publisher. Published by Applause Books, it is the title work of an anthology of lesbian plays that was a national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her manual on lesbian theatre production, Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play was published by Scarecrow Press. The University of Oregon has acquired her personal papers for their Special Collections Archive.

In 2008, Gage lectured at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and she has been a Guest Lecturer at Bates College in Maine. She has won the Oregon Playwrights Award from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts. She has also been awarded grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the Maine Women Writers’ Collection at the University of New England, the Walden Writer's Fellowship from Lewis and Clark College, the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts Writer's Grant, and the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. In 2005, she won the national Lynda Hart Memorial Grant from the Astraea Foundation. In 2010, she spent three months as a Artist-in-Residence at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.

One of the most prolific feminist playwrights in the world, Carolyn Gage is a dynamic speaker and a powerful role model.

xi xii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE-WOMAN SHOWS THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC...... 1

THE LAST READING OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN...... 4

AMY LOWELL: IN HER OWN WORDS...... 7

EXTRAVAGANT LOVE: THE LIFE OF VIOLETTE LEDUC...... 9

THE AMAZON ALL-STARS...... 13

LEADING LADIES...... 15

BABE: AN OLYMPIAN MUSICAL...... 17

WOMEN ON THE LAND...... 19

HOW TO WRITE A COUNTRY-WESTERN SONG...... 20

SAPPHO IN LOVE...... 22

THE ANASTASIA TRIALS IN THE COURT OF WOMEN...... 24

THE SPINDLE...... 26

UGLY DUCKLINGS...... 29

THANATRON...... 31

ESTHER AND VASHTI...... 32

STIGMATA...... 34

COMING ABOUT...... 35

THE GODDESS TOUR...... 36

MASON-DIXON...... 38

JANE ADDAMS AND THE DEVIL BABY...... 39

xiii LOUISA MAY INCEST...... 40

BATTERED ON BROADWAY...... 41

CALAMITY JANE SENDS A MESSAGE TO HER DAUGHTER....43

COOKIN’ WITH TYPHOID MARY...... 44

ARTEMISIA AND HILDEGARD...... 45

HARRIET TUBMAN VISITS A THERAPIST...... 47

ENTR’ACTE...... 50

THE PARMACHENE BELLE...... 51

THE PELE CHANT...... 53

THE DRUM LESSON...... 54

THE RULES OF THE PLAYGROUND...... 55

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO: THE STORY OF THALIDOMIDE.....57

A LABOR PLAY...... 58

HETEROSEXUALS ANONYMOUS...... 59

RADICALS...... 60

THE BOUNDARY TRIAL OF JOHN PROCTOR...... 60

THE LADIES’ ROOM...... 61

PATRICIDE...... 62

THE P.E. TEACHER...... 62

BITE MY THUMB...... 63

THE POORLY-WRITTEN PLAY FESTIVAL...... 65

THE OBLIGATORY SCENE...... 66

xiv THE GAGE AND MR. COMSTOCK...... 67

‘TIL THE FAT LADY SINGS...... 69

THE A-MAZING YAMASHITA AND THE GOLDDIGGERS OF 2008...... 70

THE COUNTESS AND THE LESBIANS...... 71

SOUVENIRS FROM EDEN...... 73

BLACK EYE...... 74

HERMENEUTIC CIRCLEJERK...... 75

LACE CURTAIN IRISH...... 76

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND SELECTED PLAYS [2009]...... 77

NINE SHORT PLAYS...... 78

THREE COMEDIES...... 79

THE TRIPLE GODDESS...... 80

BLACK EYE AND OTHER SHORT PLAYS...... 80

TAKE STAGE!...... 82

SCENES AND MONOLOGUES FOR LESBIAN ACTORS: REVISED AND EXPANDED...... 84

THE SPINDLE AND OTHER LESBIAN FAIRY TALES...... 86

STARTING FROM ZERO...... 87

ONE-ACT PLAYS ABOUT LESBIANS IN LOVE...... 87

LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW...... 89

THE GAIA PAPERS...... 90

xv THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND OTHER PLAYS [1994]...... 91

SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL...... 92

SUPPLEMENTAL SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL94

BIRTH OF A LESBIAN [OUT OF PRINT]...... 94

A WOMAN’S BOOK OF HEALING...... 95

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC...... 96

UGLY DUCKLINGS: THE DOCUMENTARY...... 96

SUPPLEMENTAL SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL94 Thirteen of “Sister Carolyn’s” most popular sermons from her notoriously funny

BIRTH OF A LESBIAN...... 94 A “science fiction autobiography” in which the author creates a parable for understanding her childhood experiences.

ADAPTATIONS

A WOMAN’S BOOK OF HEALING...... 95 An adaption of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, for use by those who are seeking a metaphysical system of healing with an emphasis on right relation and connection with the natural world, where a higher power is metaphorically referenced as female.

CD’s AND DVD’S

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC [CD]...... 96 An audio recording of Gage’s performance in her lesbian classic, at the Institute of Musical Arts in Bodega, California.

xvi UGLY DUCKLINGS: THE DOCUMENTARY [DVD]...... 96 Documentary film produced by Hardy Girls Healthy Women, based on Gage’s play Ugly Ducklings. Film contains excerpts from the play, with interviews by members of the cast. Project designed to prevent LGBT youth suicide and bullying.

xvii xviii ONE-WOMAN PLAYS

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC A One-Woman Play

• 2009, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays) • 2009, translated into French, publication pending. • Featured interview for “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” Public Radio International. • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • 2009, Gozo Creative Club, Malta. • 2007, Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival. • 2007, Excerpts performed at the European Union Festival in Berlin, sponsored by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts with the Embassy of Malta. • First-class production in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janiero, Brazil, featuring Christiane Torloni (Portuguese language translation). Teatro FAAP. • Featured in Girlfriends Magazine, San Francisco. • Featured performance at Lesbian/Gay Pre- Conference, Assoc. for Theatre in Higher Education, Wash., DC. • Featured performance at U.K. Women’s Studies Conference, Belfast, N. Ireland. • Invited to the World Summit for Economic Sustainability, Johannesburg. • National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Santa Cruz, CA,) • Oregon Playwrights Award, Oregon Institute of Literary Arts.

1 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• Featured on the cover of national feminist magazine, On the Issues, New York. • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books and Feminist Bookstore News. • Performed in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Madison, San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, Toronto, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Northampton, Malta, Cork, Listowel, Rochester. West Coast Womyn’s Music Festival, East Coast Lesbian Festival, National Lesbian Conference, Women’s Ordination Conference, National Women’s Studies Conference, National Women’s Music Festival, Women’s Week in Provincetown. • Performed at University of Oregon at Eugene, University of Virginia, University of New England, University of Connecticut at Stamford and at Storrs, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Utah, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Hollins University, Gettysburg College, Colorado College, Bloomsberg University, St. Cloud University, SUNY Cortland, Kalamazoo College, Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA, Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst, Univ. of Maine, Farmington. Stetson Univ., Pacific University, University of Southern Mississippi. • Recording nationally distributed by Goldenrod Music. • Written up in Washington Blade (DC), Windy City Times (Chicago), off our backs (Washington, DC).

“… unparalleled, far superior to George Bernard Shaw’s... The Second Coming of Joan of Arc is high art and revolutionary theatre combined.”—Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness and Mothers on Trial.

“Joan of Arc has never been made more real to me, not in the movies, not on stage. This is the woman, not the myth… Brava!”—Z. Budapest, author of The Grandmother of Time.

2 ONE-WOMAN PLAYS

“… passion, humor, rage, insight, regret… This play works on many levels - layers and layers and layers… a highly intelligent piece of work which always remains accessible… an emotional, moving, exciting experience...” —From the Flames, Nottingham, England.

“… passionate, witty. Let this Joan be one of your voices.” — Feminist Bookstore News, San Francisco.

“… gripping re-exploration of a legendary figure…” —Sing Out!

“… a tour de force performance by US writer/actor Carolyn Gage. Here the true story of Jeanne Romée, the young peasant girl who liberated France, is brought to us in a contemporary setting, to explore how 500 years later things have changed for women in society. It is a flawless performance, delivered with passion, indignation, some humour, connection, opinion and power...” —Gay Community News, Ireland.

“Carolyn Gage is a powerful writer who comprehends her character… exhilarating… held my attention fully.” —We the People, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… wickedly funny and devastatingly on target...” —Women’s Voices, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… a girl-power epic… Gage is at her best here, as almost every line is scorchingly insightful.” —The Spectrum, Buffalo, NY.

Joan of Arc led an army to victory at seventeen. At eighteen, she arranged the coronation of a king. At nineteen, she went up against the entire Catholic church… and lost. Her trial lasted five months, and the testimony by witnesses was carefully transcribed by notaries. Twenty years after her death, a new trial was authorized, and again detailed records were kept. There was testimony by her childhood playmates, by her parents, by the women who slept with her, by the soldiers who served under her, by the priests who confessed her, by those who witnessed and administered her torture. She is the most thoroughly documented figure of the fifteenth century. So why do the myths about the simpleminded peasant girl, the pious virgin, still pervade the history books?

3 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Joan was anorectic. She was a teenage runaway. She had an incestuous, alcoholic father. She loved women. She died for her right to wear men’s clothing. She was defiant, irreverent, more clever than her judges, unrepentant, and unfailingly true to her own visions.

In The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, Joan returns to share her story with contemporary women. She tells her experiences with the highest levels of church, state, and military, and unmasks the brutal misogyny behind male institutions.

One woman 70 minutes (90 w/intermission) Single set

LA RÉSURRECTION DE JEANNE D’ARC

A French Translation

• 2010, Village Scene Productions, Montreal, Canada. Orleans

A lively and contemporary translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc by bilingual actress Stephanie Sullivan.

ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ HА ЖАНА Д’АРК

Bulgarian translation by Victoria Koleva of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc.

THE LAST READING OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN A One-Woman Show

4 ONE-WOMAN PLAYS

• 2010, Break the Mold Productions, Marigny Theatre, New Orleans. • 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays) • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays,Outskirts Press, CO. • Bakehouse Theatre production in Adelaide, Australia, starring Jacqy Phillips. • Published in Performing Autobiography, ed. Lynn Miller, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. • Featured in Girlfriends Magazine, San Francisco. • Excerpted, Alleyway Theatre, Buffalo, NY. • Featured performance, Women’s Theatre Festival, Eugene, OR. • Featured performance, QueerFest, Los Angeles. • Featured performance, Nat’l Women’s Music Festival, Bloomington. • National Winner of $3000 Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Grant. • Excerpts featured at the Sisters on Stage Lesbian Theatre Conference, NYC. • Broadcast on QTV, Santa Cruz, CA.

“A tour de force… Magnificent… beautifully crafted script...”— Advertiser, Adelaide, Australia.

“Electrifying… enormously entertaining, absorbing, and brutally honest… Anger, pride, frustration, flair, narcissism, nastiness, grandeur, passion, indomitable skill, jealousy, razor- edged revenge and ultimately heart...” —Sunday Mail, Adelaide, Australia.

“I almost never review something that a viewer can't see – such a show that's played only a few performances and closed.

5 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

There are exceptions, however. Last week, at the Marigny Theater, I saw a one-woman show, The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman, that is simply extraordinary… moving, poignant, terribly theatrical and funny as hell… superbly structured… a showcase for a strong, dynamic actress…”— David Cuthbert, WYES-TV, PBS affiliate station, New Orleans.

“Never have I heard such raves from so many of our festi- goers… clearly the highlight of the… National Women’s Music Festival!”—-Mary Byrne, producer National Women’s Music Festival, Bloomington.

“… nearly flawless in its appeal and execution… [Gage’s] Charlotte brought an appetite to the audience they didn’t even know they had… the audience reluctantly left the theatre...” — The Slant, Marin County, CA.

“… flawless… a smashing performance...”—We the People, Sonoma County, CA.

“… unabashedly lesbian, unabashedly theatrical...”—The Maui News, HI.

The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman is a moving one-woman show about the greatest American actress of the nineteenth century. Charlotte Cushman, a large butch woman, was very “out” about her lesbianism, cross-dressing to play men’s roles and referring to her partner as “my wife.”

The play opens with an announcement that the performance will be canceled, but Charlotte, outraged that such a decision has been made without consulting her, charges on to countermand the order. Cushman, struggling desperately against breast cancer, insists on performing—and, taking up the challenge of her condition, devotes the evening to the subject of death in the theatre. Having played many roles which require dying, Charlotte regales the audience with moving—and sometimes hilarious—scenes from Macbeth, Hamlet, Oliver Twist, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VIII, and the notoriously bad melodrama, Guy Mannering.

Interspersed with her monologues are anecdotes about other actors, her family, and about the romantic intrigues of the lesbian community of American emigrees who were living in Rome in the

6 ONE-WOMAN PLAYS mid-1800’s. This community included Harriet Hosmer and Emma Stebbins, both sculptors of international reputation.

At the opening of the second act, Charlotte shares with us an unusual bet she has made with her lover, who is watching from the wings. Later, as she performs her most famous “breeches part,” the role of Romeo, the play takes a surprising turn to reveal the woman behind the mask.

The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman is a treat for lesbians, for women’s history students, for theatre history buffs, and for fans of Shakespeare! But it is Charlotte Cushman’s profoundly human struggle against a terminal illness which makes the play an unforgettable experience.

One woman (plus one very brief walk-on part) 90 minutes Single set (platform reading)

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AMY LOWELL: IN HER OWN WORDS A Reading

This is a poetry reading by the famous Imagist poet herself. The reading is interlaced with tormented confessions from Lowell’s diary as a teenager, observations on the art of writing poetry, her version of the historic rupture with Ezra Pound, witty rebuttals to her critics, and her notorious demonstration of how to unwrap a cigar as if one were undressing a woman!

More than half the evening is given to the actual reading of Lowell’s works, including her poem “The Sisters,” about Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson; “A Fairy Tale,” an expose of her fall from grace as a child when she realized the fate in store for an “ugly, fat” girl; “The Bath,” her aggressive and sensuous celebration of her body and its pleasures; and many of the erotic love poems written to her partner, the actress Ada Dwyer.

Lowell, who did not begin her life work until she was almost forty, waged a tactically brilliant, militant campaign against fat phobia, against ageism, and against the stereotypes of passive female sexuality and sentimental artistic expression. She paid a high price for her rebellion, however, and after her death, her many enemies saw to it that she was treated patronizingly, if at all, in the historical record.

Not a play in the traditional sense, Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words is nonetheless a compelling piece of living history, as well as a stimulating evening of lesbian poetry. Where biographers and critical essayists have attempted to consider Lowell on a continuum with the other two poets (both males) of her famous family—or to locate her among the lesser poets of her day, this theatre piece places her squarely in the tradition of pagan lesbian artists, a tradition with which Lowell strongly identified in both her life and in her work.

One woman 60 minutes

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Single set (platform reading) DEEP HAVEN

A Dramatic Adaptation

Deep Haven takes the audience through the life of 19th century Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett, beginning with her tomboy childhood and ending with her touching final communications with her life partner Annie Fields.

The text of the play is adapted from Jewett’s novels and letters, as well as from the poems and diary entries of her juvenilia.

Apparently, Jewett’s father, a country doctor, identified that his daughter, from a very early age, was destined for a different life than the traditional New England wife and mother. He consciously set out to prepare her for an independent life, and in the play, Jewett shares his theories about rearing a gender-deviant daughter in citing A Country Doctor.

Jewett’s frustrated love affairs with young women are chronicled in the empassioned poems she writes, attempting to persuade them to stay to true to her. In fact, their abandonment of her in favor of heterosexual marriage was probably less about fickleness of heart and more about wanting children as well as economic security.

It was not until Jewett met Annie Fields, a widower and philanthropist, that she found her love and her longing for security reciprocated. Seeking approval for their unorthodox union, both women attended séances to communicate with the spirits of Jewett’s dead father and Fields’ dead husband.

This was the era of the Boston Marriage, before the sexologists of the next century would begin to pathologize same-sex orientation. The openness and sweetness of the two women’s letters testifies to an era more tolerant than the twentieth century. This contrast is foreshadowed by lesbian novelist Willa Cather’s exchanges with Jewett toward the end of Jewett’s life. Jewett challenged Cather, a rising novelist, about her needing to adopt a male voice for her narration.

Cather, speaking for a new generation of lesbians who will be called “inverts” by the sexologists and treated like freaks of nature, responds, “It’s always hard to write about the things that are near to

8 DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS your heart, from a kind of instinct of self-preservation you distrust them and disguise them.”

Illuminating the lesbian challenges and joys of her life, Deep Haven pays tribute to the deeply matriarchal and woman-loving stories and novels of one of Maine’s most beloved daughters.

Four women (can be done with two) Single set 30 minutes

EXTRAVAGANT LOVE: THE LIFE OF VIOLETTE LEDUC A Dramatic Adaptation

Extravagant Love is the story of Parisian writer Violette LeDuc.

Using narrative excerpts from LeDuc’s works, the play tells a passionate story of a lesbian struggling with her disturbing memories of a narcissistic, incestuous mother whom she both adored and hated. Against a backdrop of Parisian fashion salons, decadent hotels, and garish street carnivals, LeDuc unfolds her story of her search for female autonomy.

In the first act, LeDuc reenacts her obsession with Parisian high fashion—an obsession complicated by her strong identification with the male gender. She relives an episode of shoplifting, as well as the horrifying betrayal of her lesbian lover by an act of prostitution.

In the second act, LeDuc takes us back to her first lesbian experience in a girls’ dormitory of a Parisian boarding school. This scene was fictionalized in her lesbian erotic novel, Therese and Isabelle, and in the ‘60’s became the basis of an erotic film of the same name.

LeDuc narrates in dramatic tableaux the events surrounding her illegal abortion, and in doing so, she uncovers the primal trauma behind her gender confusion and misogyny: child sexual abuse at the hands of her mother.

Breaking the silence about one of society’s deepest taboos, Extravagant Love takes its audiences on an unforgettable odyssey

9 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE into a lesbian world of passionate tenderness and devastating betrayal.

Production rights must be negotiated individually with the agent for the author’s estate.

One woman One hour Single set

BRETT REMEMBERS

A Dramatic Adaptation

In this play, Taos painter Dorothy Brett, 73, is entertaining us in her 1956 studio, when her reminiscences are interrupted by the ghost of her younger self as she was in 1924, when she first accompanied D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to New Mexico with the plan of establishing a spiritual and artistic community.

“Younger Brett” is hopelessly and obsessively in love with Lawrence, and her soliloquies are addressed to the object of her adoration. She continually attempts to uncover the mysterious painting on the easel, which is a copy of a painting Brett destroyed thirty years earlier.

Brett’s memories include the “Bloomsberries” who gathered themselves at the estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell during World War I, as well as Tony and Mabel Dodge Luhan, at whose invitation the Lawrences had come to New Mexico. She shares more personal memories of her adult-onset deafness and the incident of childhood sexual molestation to which she attributes her lifelong sexual reticence.

Younger Brett continues to interrupt the narrative with her more immediate and emotionally raw memories of Lawrence during the years at the Ranch.

Finally Brett breaks her silence about the tragic night when Lawrence attempted unsuccessfully to make love to her. This memory unveils the mystery of the painting, and Brett is finally able

10 DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS to make peace with herself, inviting the Younger Brett to collaborate on the finishing of the painting.

2 woman 50 minutes Single set

I HAVE COME TO SHOW YOU DEATH

Scenes on Lesbians and Dying by 19th Century, New England Women Writers

I Have Come to Show You Death is collection of dramatic adaptations of works by four 19th century New England writers, all of whom appear to have been in Boston Marriages and whose writings celebrate intimacy between women and negative appraisals of the effects of heterosexual marriage on women.

Three are adaptations of short stories dealing with the death of a lesbian life partner. The fourth adaptation is taken from a novel, and it explores the meaning of life for two young lesbians.

Two Friends by Mary Wilkins Freeman. The impending death of one woman drives her partner into desperate denial and the confession of an old betrayal.

Since I Died by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. A woman who has recently died attempts and fails to communicate with her lesbian life partner, who is unable to see her.

There and Here by Alice Brown. A woman receives a ghostly visitation from her former beloved companion, and together they revisit scenes from their childhood. At dawn she receives news that her friend has died overseas.

Scene from Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett. Two young women, ending their summer of independence in a Maine fishing village, share an intimate evening, musing on the mystery of life.

Five women: Two young, three middle-aged Multiple sets 60 minutes.

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SPEAK FULLY THE ONE AWFUL WORD

A Dramatic Adaptation of Lady Byron Vindicated by Harriet Beecher Stowe

That “one awful word” was “incest,” and Harriet Beecher Stowe was referring to Lord Byron’s incestuous relations with his half-sister, as witnessed by Byron’s wife.

Late in her life, Stowe had befriended Annabella Byron, a woman with a lively interest in social justice, including abolition, who engaged in many philanthropic pursuits. During one of their visits, Lady Byron shared the story of her traumatic engagement, honeymoon, and brief marital co-habitation with the infamous poet. After Lady Byron’s death and the publication of a memoir by Byron’s last mistress, Stowe published a rebuttal to the slanderous attacks on her friend, as well as the details of Byron’s abuses. Stowe was as vilified for writing this book as she had been lionized for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

By 1870, Lord Byron was a romantic and literary icon on two continents, and the myth of the frigid and puritanical wife who had abandoned this martyred genius was an essential part of the legend. Speak Fully the One Awful Word is a one-woman dramatic adaptation that captures the passion of Stowe in defending her friend, as well as her radical framing of incest as an oppression, and domestic violence as a human rights violation. She specifically repudiated the prevailing Christian ethos that encouraged wives to suffer in silence for the sake of protecting the family.

Stowe’s courage in confronting incest, and her willingness to sacrifice her own reputation to defend that of a dead friend, shine like beacons on a world that still invests in doctrines of “false memory syndrome.”

2 women, 1 man Single Set 40 minutes

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THE AMAZON ALL-STARS A Lesbian Musical

Music by Sue Carney

Sample of songs at www.myspace.com/theamazonallstars

• 2007, Stage Q (reading), Madison and Upstart Productions, Colo. Springs. • Dorothy’s Place, Highgate Hill, Queensland, Australia. • Actors Community Theatre, Santa Cruz, CA. • Tribad Productions, Petaluma, CA • NTM Productions, Ashland, OR and Corvallis, OR. • Title play for Amazon All Stars: 13 Lesbian Plays (edited by Rosemary Keefe Curb, Applause Books, NYC, named national finalist Lambda Literary Award. • Musical highlights showcased at Sisters on Stage Lesbian Theatre Conference, NYC. • First lesbian musical to be licensed and published by a mainstream play publisher!

“… rollicking, fun piece that does touch on some serious issues… The audience was in stitches for most of the play and the rafters rang with applause.”—Santa Cruz Sentinel, CA.

“… delightful foot-tapping, arm-in-arm down the streets, sing- at-the-top-of-your-lungs stuff… The Amazon All-Stars is ours. It’s good, it’s fun… Lesbians need to see this show, to laugh

13 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE and cry with it, to love it...” —Lee Lynch, lesbian author and nationally syndicated columnist.

“sexy, raucous… a real crowd-pleaser… ” —We the People, Santa Rosa, CA.

“This is a sparkling, funny play...” —The Lithiagraph, Ashland, OR.

“… a great show...” —Women’s Voices, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… delightfully funny and sweet musical… With enlightening musical numbers by Sue Carney and humor abounding, [we] are drawn into the lives of these women as players and as people.” —Lambda Book Report, Washington, DC.

The Amazon All-Stars is a zany musical comedy about a women’s softball team. Kelly, the left fielder, is truly “out in left field,” preferring her fantasies to reality. This makes for some great lesbian-style Walter Mitty scenes. When Jan, the new short stop, decides to test her sexual prowess with Kelly, both women are brought to a crisis about the way they see themselves and the world. Amid various subplots and subterfuges, team spirit triumphs, and everybody’s a winner. Who could resist “Come Out for the Team,” “When Women Do It to Each Other,” or “Ya Gotta Get Under the Glove”?

The Amazon All-Stars is written in the genre of the “naive musical” of the 1930’s, but it’s anything but simple! The nine members of the team are all fully developed with distinct personalities and motivations. Also, there are three subplots, all presenting aspects of denial in lesbian community and relationships: sorority politics in collectives, alcohol abuse, infidelity, and the mistaking of sex for intimacy.

The leads in the play, Jan and Kelly, are both ingenues, but their relationship touches on the deeper issue of exploitation of women who suffer syndromes from child sexual abuse. The secondary relationship of the play is between an older couple with an eight- year history. This relationship mirrors Jan and Kelly’s dilemma, but with more depth, adding resonance to the central plot.

The lesbian empowerment fantasies encompass several areas of our oppression and invisibility: sports, popular music, TV and film,

14 MUSICALS and families of birth. And the use of the Leather Woman provides a “picture frame” device for the show, enhancing the theatricality of the work and allowing women’s communities to showcase a local band.

The three ball players who “triple up” for additional fantasy chorus roles, have parts written for them which allow them to play their own alter-egos in the fantasy numbers. For example, Ursula, the high school player, is the teenage bass player in the nightmare sequence. Later, in another fantasy, she is Mary Richland, a former high school friend who betrayed Kelly and turned straight. The audience experiences a consistency of character through these sequences, which adds coherence to the plot and helps anchor the fantasy scenes in the realities of the ball players.

The numbers are all highly recognizable parodies of specific types of popular music: the sleazy Stones rock-and-roll number, the fifties ballad, the “womyn’s music” take-off. The lyrics range from sophisticatedly cynical (“When Women Do It to Each Other”) to sublimely ridiculous (“Under the Glove”).

The Amazon All-Stars takes a lightweight tradition and sets dramatic precedent with a thoughtful and multidimensional treatment of lesbian community.

Twelve women Two hours Three sets

LEADING LADIES A Cabaret Musical Revue Music by Teresa Wilhelmi Sample of songs at www.myspace.com/leadingladiesthemusical

• Staged reading, Music in a Box, the Dramatists Guild, NYC.

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• First Place, Musical Theatre, Seattle New Plays Buffet, juried by Civic Light Opera. • National Finalist, Aggie Players Playwriting Competition, Texas A & M University.

Leading Ladies is a sparkling all-women cabaret musical incorporating seven separate historical vignettes onto a single set, a backstage dressing room.

At the opening of the play, Mary, a young actor tortured by doubts about her ability, debates whether or not she should abandon her career in “The Voice of My Critics.” The dressing room comes alive with ghosts of famous women actors, and one by one they reenact critical moments in their own careers, when they had to confront fear and doubt:

SARAH SIDDONS, fired from Drury Lane, realizes her meteoric rise to fame was only the payoff for David Garrick’s sexual exploitation of her. She resolves to play the provinces until she can make it back to London by herself. She belts out “When the Show Is Over,” the strip song to end all strip songs.

CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN, laughed off the stage for being fat, determines not to give in to humiliation with her inspirational “Audience of One.”

ELEANORA DUSE, pregnant and abandoned by her lover at the time of her big theatre break, pulls herself together so the show can go on. The Stage Manager joins her for a theatrical soft-shoe duet, “Improvise!”

SARAH BERNHARDT, rejected by French audiences who have not forgiven her for deserting the national theatre, turns the tables on Bastille Day at the Paris Opera. Thumbing her nose at traditional proprieties, she sings, “I Know What Pleases the People,” a song which gives her the opportunity to reprise a half dozen of her best on-stage dying effects.

MINNIE FISKE, the longest holdout against the notorious Syndicate, rallies her troupe to give up their New York run

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when she learns that the theatre where they are playing is “all sold out.” Her loyal company joins her in the gospel stomp, “All Sold Out” - but not before their rambunctious rendition in three-part Sweet-Adeline harmony of “An Actress Needs a Home.”

LAURETTE TAYLOR, after fifteen years without work, overcomes the stigma of alcoholism to stage a risky comeback in an unknown vehicle --- The Glass Menagerie. Putting on “a little more rouge to hide all the blue,” she sings a compelling torch song to “The Old Ingenue.”

Finally, Mary, with the help of the crusty stage manager and the feisty older actor Edith, reaches a resolution to her dilemma: She will stay.

A note about the music: The fourteen musical numbers run the gamut from bump-and-grind to gospel stomp, from three-part harmonies to piano bar blues. Cabaret numbers with the emphasis on entertainment.

Six women Two hours Single set

BABE: AN OLYMPIAN MUSICAL Score by Andrea Jill Higgins

Sample of songs at www.myspace.com/babeanolympicmusical Video clips at http://www.youtube.com/user/BabeTheMusical

• 2008, workshopped by Arizona Women’s Theatre Co. (Phoenix) and Theatre Unbound (Minneapolis) • Excerpt, Manhattan Monologue Slam, NYC. • Excerpted in More Monologues for Women, By Women, ed.

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by Tori Haring-Smith, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH. • Winner, Walden Writers Fellowship, Lewis and Clark College, OR.

“Jill Higgins’s music, with Gage’s lyrics, fulfills musical theater’s aim of driving the plot while having real substance. This very entertaining play has humor, drama, and a wonderful lesbian love story built around the larger-than-life (and very American) character of Babe Didrikson. Girls who love sports and women of all ages who aspire to greatness will be inspired. Taking the risk to focus on a butch lesbian woman, Carolyn Gage has given us all a gift of female courage and tenacity…” —Twin Cities Daily Planet, MN.

This is a major new musical and a milestone in musical theatre. It’s a play about women athletes, about world class competition, about mothers and sisters, and about the bisexual woman who broke all the rules to become the “Athlete of the Century”— Babe Didrikson.

The play traces Babe’s career from high school basketball star, to Olympic gold medalist in track, to vaudevillian sideshow, to first woman on the professional golf circuit. Her struggles for athletic achievement parallel her personal struggles for recognition and acceptance by her mother and sister. Babe’s sexual orientation emerges against a backdrop of feminine stereotypes and heterosexist constraints.

This musical celebrates the woman athlete at the same time it explores the darker themes of how women denied opportunities for professional advancement can sabotage each other, passing on poisonous conditioning from one generation to another. Babe’s founding of the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association is depicted as the crowning achievement of both her personal and her professional struggle.

The show is a big, brassy, full-cast, mainstage musical, featuring a high school gymnasium dance and beauty pageant, a choreographed jazz interpretation of a women’s basketball game, a pajama party on the Olympic train, a tango at the country club, and one of the most stunning love duets in musical theatre. Numbers include “Let the Boys Lead the Dance,” “Olympic Gold,” “Readin’ the Green,” and Babe’s theme song, “Winning Makes Up for It All.”

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Eight women, eight men (can double several roles) Men and women’s choruses Two hours Multiple sets

WOMEN ON THE LAND A Lesbian Musical

• Awarded $7000 grant from City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs for Production.

Women on the Land contrasts the world of the Los Angeles film studio with the rural environment of a lesbian land collective in southern Oregon, and points up the choices lesbian artists are forced to make between selling our art and protecting our vision. The show also provides a retrospective of lesbian culture in the early 70’s, with the attendant witch hunts and “political correctness” wars.

Stevie, who produces lesbian erotic videos in Los Angeles, finds that her protégé and lover, Damian, is becoming impatient to make a “real” lesbian film. Dialogue breaks down over the question of money for the project, and just then Catherine, Stevie’s old lover from fifteen years ago shows up on the scene. Catherine lives at Herland, a lesbian land collective she and Stevie founded in the 70’s. Damian, determined to find the women who don’t care about money, accompanies Catherine back to Herland. Stevie pursues her, and is in turn pursued by a leather porno star bucking for the role of lesbian vampire in the next film.

The second act opens at Herland, in the middle of a severe drought. Tempers flair and cultural and ideological sparks fly as the Los Angeles leather scene invades the kingdom of Oregon country dykes. Magic is abroad on the night of Hallowmas, and the women discover in themselves the common lesbian values that have been lost in both worlds.

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This musical has something for everyone: The opening rock video number from the infamous “Lesbian Vampires From Hell,” the sexual auction at the notorious Ladyfingers Bar, the potluck-western dance “Country Dish,” and playful “Denim and Flannel Rag.”

Six women, one twelve-year old girl Chorus of women Two hours Multiple sets

HOW TO WRITE A COUNTRY-WESTERN SONG A Concert with a Plot Score by Christa Hillhouse (formerly of 4 Non Blondes) and Kitty Rose Sample of songs at www.myspace.com/howtowriteacountrywesternsong

This is a five-women musical featuring gospel, rock, country, hip- hop, and folk music. It is written for the women’s music festivals, intended to be cast with performers from the women’s music community, and requiring no set except a concert stage. The play ends with a twenty-minute concert.

This is a play about love, recovery, and music in the women’s music community. The plot revolves around two couples, an older one and a younger one, who have histories as bandmates.

Country-western singer Trish attempts to lead the audience in a workshop about writing country-western songs. She is repeatedly interrupted by her former partner/bandmate/ rock star Carson. Trish, remembering Carson’s years of active addiction, rejects her attempts to reconcile.

Meanwhile, a band on Trish’s label is scheduled to record their second CD at Carson’s studio. The two very young musicians, Nikita and Jay, have broken up as lovers, but are attempting to continue on as a band. Nikki is an active addict and Jay is struggling

20 MUSICALS with early recovery. Their collaboration breaks down as Nikki uses sex to derail Jay’s recovery.

Sonya, a veteran activist from the Black Freedom Movement and member of an all-women, African American, a cappella group, shows up in time to remind the women of their history. Jay, drunk, insults Sonya’s gospel music, recounting an angry episode where she was expelled from her church when she came out as lesbian.

Back in the studio, Nikki has stolen money from Jay and attempts to seduce Carson, who has busted her. Trish overhears their encounter, stunned to see Carson not only turn Nikki down, but evict her from the studio. Trish sings a song, “The Prison of My Mind,” in which she shifts the focus from judging her former partner to noticing how her resentments have impeded her own growth over the years.

Carson, Sonya, Trish, and Jay come together for a final concert. Jay resolves her conflict over a “higher power” and shares it with the audience in “Believe in the Women Who Believe.” Trish makes amends to Carson for her self-righteousness and finally gets to sing her country-western song. The concert ends with a celebration of diversity, recovery and women’s music.

2 African American women, 3 women of any race Single set (a concert stage) 90 minutes.

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SAPPHO IN LOVE A Lesbian Midsummer Night’s Dream

• 2010 Stage Q, Madison, WI. • Published in Three Comedies, Gage Press. • 2008, Lambda Players, Sacramento. • Sister Act, Cambridge, UK and Eressos Women’s Festival, Greece. • Venus Theatre, Washington, DC (staged reading). • Staged reading, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Act I). • Bailiwick Theatre, Chicago. • Winner Best Stageplay, Moondance International Women’s Film Festival, Boulder, CO.

“Gage's script romps along with sexy smarts and lubricious hilarity… filled with memorable lines and saucy double- entendres.”—The Isthmus, Madison, WI.

“… hardly a minute goes by that the theater does not fill up with laughter… entertaining and wildly pleasing to the audience.”—Badger Herald, Madison, WI.

“… Sappho in Love disproves the old canard about lesbians lacking a sense of humor… These are some funny, funny lesbians.”—Sacramento News and Reviews, CA.

“… delicious… sweet, funny, moving, tender… eminently playable… richly imagined, perfectly conceived piece...” — John Stoltenberg, author and activist.

The following are audience remarks from the public website www.seeaplay.com/productionsReviewsSapphoLP.htm:

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“I caught this show last night at their sold out opening and laughed until my sides hurt. Seriously, the whole audience was howling. If you’re in the mood for a great comedy on a weekend night to help beat the heat, this is the one to see. By which I mean I expect this show to sell out fast if last night’s audience has any say in the matter… THE smash hit of the summer.”

Sappho In Love was a fast moving, funny take on classical Greek comedies. I am not a lesbian, nor was the person I went with, yet we enjoyed it very much. I will probably take some other friends to see this...”

“… Sappho in Love was not what I expected it to be. It was a fun, sassy show that had the audience laughing throughout.”

“My partner and I were looking for a romantic date night activity and happened upon this phenomenal play! Touching, funny, gregarious—well worth the money! For anyone who enjoys the theater, Sappho in Love is one of the most side- splitting two hours you can have! Hysterical, sweet and just a little different! See the play and tell your friends!”

“I thought this play was so funny. I laughed the entire time. I am telling everyone not to miss it. Good job Lambda. One of your best!”

“I watched Sappho on Friday the 18th and must have laughed every twenty seconds for two hours. This play is unique, well- produced, and you shouldn’t miss it… The play is charming, energizing, and I’m so happy to have seen it!”

“You don’t have to be a Lesbian to enjoy the machinations of the three goddesses of love as they plot and scheme to win control of Lesbos and eventually The World! This show is a total romp.”

Sappho in Love is a riotous romp across the slippery terrain of Lesbian romance, as the goddesses on Olympus come down to earth to recruit among Sappho and her followers.

Artemis, the Goddess of Lesbian Celibacy, and Hera, the Goddess of Monogamy, join forces to challenge Aphrodite, the Goddess of Lust, for her hegemony on Lesbos. Sappho, the great poet and teacher on the island, is a devotee of Aphrodite, and because of

23 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE this, her school has become a center for the cult of lesbian sexuality and romantic love. Artemis, denouncing Aphrodite’s use of her intoxicating nectar to attract followers, vows to found a rival school on Lesbos where young girls will be weaned away from Sappho’s decadent teachings to learn the more sober arts of wilderness survival.

But Artemis underestimates the power of lesbian seduction, when Aphrodite sends Persuasion, her handmaiden, to enroll in outdoor school—and when the Goddess of Celibacy finds herself entangled with the Slave of Desire, she discovers that freedom without intimacy can be as meaningless as intimacy without freedom.

Meanwhile… Sappho herself is experiencing girl trouble when her longsuffering partner, fed up with Sappho’s infidelities, begins to date another woman. Add to the midsummer mix-up, the arrival of a new student who can’t wait to taste the pleasures of Lesbian life, and the painful trials of a student whose best friend is on the eve of leaving the island to marry a soldier.

Sapphic poetry abounds amid meteor showers, midsummer eve trysts, masquerades and melodramas—all overseen by the benevolent trio of lesbian “deae ex machina!” Throw in a rowdy troupe of soaking-wet naiads and it all adds up to a tasty dish of lesbian comedy. In the end, the couples sort themselves out, for better or worse, and Hera pronounces her blessings on a new matriarchal order.

10 women, 1 little girl, unspecified number of chorus members 2 hours Multiple sets

THE ANASTASIA TRIALS IN THE COURT OF WOMEN An Interactive Drama in Two Acts

• 2009, published in Three Comedies, Gage Press. • Theatre Unbound, Minneapolis. • Theatre Ventoux, Fresno, CA. • Little Hibiscus Productions, NYC • Columba University, New Zealand

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• Echo Theatre (reading), Dallas, TX. • Women’s Theatre Project, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. • Catholic University, Georgetown and Belmont University, TN. • Venus Theatre, Washington, DC. • Boston College, Boston. • Iowa Women’s Correctional Institution, Mitchellville. (Abridged) • Productions in Portland, Maine; Allentown, PA, Washington, DC, and Boston. • National finalist, Jane Chambers Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education. • Published by Samuel French, Inc., NYC. • Subject of feature article in The Washington Post

“Carolyn Gage’s raucous, multilayered script explores issues of empathy, loyalty, and betrayal among women...” —The Washington Post.

“Verdict: An unexpected delight… ” —Miami Herald, FL.

“… farcical humor, imaginative plot twists, and just pure theatrical fun...” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Ft. Lauderdale.

“… powerful new play… thoughtfully written...” —San Diego Lesbian Press, CA.

“… fascinating and complex play…”—Fresno Beehive.com

“The Anastasia Trials is many things—farce, social history, debate play, agitprop, audience-participation melodrama, satire… makes the head reel!” —San Diego Union-Tribune.

“I am constantly amazed at Carolyn’s ability to make complex social issues not only accessible but also irresistibly fascinating… the play… [The Anastasia Trials ] touched us, made us laugh and gripped us in a white-knuckle intensity usually found only in Hitchcock films.” —R.J. McComish, Literary Manager of the Portland Stage Company, Portland, Maine.

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“… fabulously interesting, brilliantly thought-provoking and exquisitely funny… masterpiece of feminist theater...” —off our backs, Washington, DC.

The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women makes theatre history with an interactive courtroom drama that engages the audience to serve as both judge and jury. The play is shaped by the audience decisions to overrule or sustain the attorneys’ motions, and every night’s audience sees a different play.

The Anastasia Trials is a farcical, but profoundly engaging excursion into the hidden world of ethics for women who are both survivors and perpetrators of abuse toward women. The format is a play- within-a-play, where a radical feminist theatre company comes together in order to perform a courtroom drama.

In presenting the play, the Emma Goldman Theatre Brigade has instituted a new system to insure equal opportunity for the actors: a lottery. As the women assemble to draw their roles from the hat for the evening’s performance, sisterhood is put to the test. The performance itself is a conspiracy trial against five women accused of denying a woman her identity. The plaintiff is none other than Anastasia Romanov, sole survivor of the massacre of the Russian imperial family in 1918. The audience is required to serve as judge and jury for the case, providing both rulings on the motions and the final verdict.

The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women requires intense audience participation, and the question of women betraying women is called for every member of the audience.

Nine women Two hours Single set (nine folding chairs)

THE SPINDLE A Drama in Two Acts

• 2009, published in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales.

26 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

• Staged reading at the Kennedy Center by Venus Theatre, Washington, DC. • Finalist, John Gassner New Play Festival, Stony Brook Univ., NY. • Staged reading, Messenger Theatre, at HERE, NYC. • Semi-finalist, Mill Mountain New Play Competition, Roanoke, VA.

“This play is simply brilliant—in its construct, its characters and its dialogue.”—Sacramento Art and Entertainment Examiner.

“Carolyn Gage’s The Spindle is a brilliant, courageous and important “adult retelling” of Sleeping Beauty, in which Beauty’s hundred-years’ sleep is her amnesia from incest. In reading it (in just reading it!) I saw what is not possible to put into words alone. Like Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, the disconnects we witness on stage could not have been told as well in another genre. Our hypnosis from grasping what we’ve seen all our lives in our own terrible crises, but which are taboo, the-never-put-in-words, the never said, is shattered. Sleeping Beauty/The Spindle is one of the fairy tales we must wake up from (it’s been a lot more than a hundred years). Gage is regularly hailed as one of the best lesbian playwrights in America, but I want to say—if she will allow this and I understand and accept if she won’t—simply one of our best playwrights.”—Sharon Doubiago, My Father’s Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl; Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems.

"Carolyn Gage offers readers important insight and representations in the powerful stories and imagery provided in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales. The collection meets the challenge of creating lesbian fairy tales that look unflinchingly at the world but are still imaginative, creative, and magical. Readers will enjoy these stories in all their complexity and bravery." Rain and Thunder, Northampton, MA.

A radical retelling of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” The Spindle exploits the conventions of children’s theatre to give adult audiences a child’s-eye-view of incest and its effects on the survivors.

27 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

The Princess Beauty has been kept from the knowledge of a curse which decrees she must be pricked by a spindle before her sixteenth birthday and fall asleep for a hundred years. She has been best friends from childhood with Doko, the cook’s helper in the palace kitchen, and the two girls have plans to renovate a gypsy wagon and travel about the kingdom with a puppet theatre after Beauty’s sixteenth birthday.

The plans are disrupted when Beauty’s godfather shows up unexpectedly at the birthday banquet with a “gift” which, according to the perpetrator, will empower her as an adult. The Queen, torn between a desire to protect her daughter and a need to neutralize her as a potential rival, reveals a family secret, which sets the stage for Beauty’s pricking.

Meanwhile, Doko’s three godmothers wrestle among themselves with their various strategies for dealing with the pricking curse. Betheen practices denial in the name of acting grownup; Andrea relies on her prowess in the martial arts to confront her fears; and the third godmother, Mary, surrounds herself with ritual and magical charms. It is Doko’s marionette (played by an actor) who alone knows the truth. She carries Doko’s traumatic memories of her childhood, and it is she who has witnessed the events on the night of Beauty’s sixteenth birthday. But the puppet is mute and can only communicate through acts of sabotage.

When Doko attempts to rouse Beauty from her spindle-induced trance, she becomes a target for a bewildering array of homophobic, morning-after behaviors, and the godmothers fare no better in their attempts to break through the Queen’s alcoholic narcissism.

The final showdown takes place in the perpetrator’s pornographic gallery, where the forces of good meet the forces of evil in an old- fashioned, knock-down-drag-out, chandelier-swinging, skull- cracking free-for-all. The moral of the story is that life is not a fairy tale, and the price of empowerment is coming out of denial, as Doko and her godmothers discover.

The juxtaposition of standard children’s theatre conventions in The Spindle with what is usually considered adult subject matter accentuates the archetypal horror that lies under the surface of so many “normal” childhoods.

28 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

9 women, 2 girls, unspecified extras Multiple sets times 2 hours

UGLY DUCKLINGS A Lesbian Drama

• 2009, published in The Triple Goddess: Three Plays, Gage Press. • University of Maine at Machias (staged reading), and University of West Virginia (reading). • $150,000 documentary, Ugly Ducklings: The Documentary produced and premiered at the Frameline International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in San Francisco • Stage Q, Madison, WI. • Hardy Girls Healthy Women at Colby College, Waterville, ME. • National nominee, American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award. (Best New Play of the Year Outside NYC) • Curve Magazine, National Lesbian Theatre Award. • Honorable Mention, “Best New Play in Metro DC,” Metro Weekly Review • World premiere, Venus Theatre, Washington, DC. • Published in At Play: An Anthology of Maine Drama, Levant Heritage Library, Levant, ME. • Made in Maine, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (reading), Bangor. • Workshop production, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. • Second Place, Celebration Theatre’s New Play Competition,

29 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

LA. “If it is possible that a piece of theatre can be both gritty and sublime at the same time, then Venus Theatre has achieved it in their world premiere production of Carolyn Gage’s Ugly Ducklings.” —Metro Weekly Review, Washington, DC. “… deserves a central place in the lesbian feminist literary canon...” —off our backs, Washington, DC. “… refreshingly well told tale that while raising all the issues that this anti-homophobic company and playwright want to raise, does so with an admirable restraint, avoiding the obvious traps of sensationalism and titillation and striking an admirable balance of theatricality and realism.” —Potomac Stages, Washington, DC.

“… a play about coming of age and homophobia and how people deal with emerging understandings about sexuality. It’s a tough, tough, tough topic, and it’s handled here with a great deal of raw energy, but also with a great deal of subtlety… a very, very nice piece… definitely worth seeing.” —Peter Fay for WAMU (NPR affiliate station), Washington, DC. “Radically redefining beauty… Ugly Ducklings reveals how notions of homosexuality can shatter the souls of girls and women… an impressive work… a brutally honest examination of what it means to be a young lesbian...” —The Washington Blade, Washington, DC.

“Funny, poignant, unpredictable… very well-written. Educational without being preachy. Engaging. Absorbing. Sweet.” —Mariah Burton-Nelson, Athlete, Speaker, Author of Are We Winning Yet?

“… like the best drama, Gage’s play is filled to bursting with sharp-edged double meaning and irony… accessible and engaging format, with the social consciousness of Ibsen and Shaw...” —Assunta Kent, Phd., from introduction to At Play: An Anthology of Maine Drama.

Ugly Ducklings picks up where Tea and Sympathy and The Children’s Hour left off. Set in a girls’ summer camp, the play explores the dynamics of homophobia in a same-sex environment.

30 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

A gothic thriller, Ugly Ducklings examines the unhealthy turns that relationships between girls can take when they are not allowed their natural expression. The so-called “Ophelia Syndrome” comes alive as the cabin of younger girls, their self-esteem still reinforced by the primacy of their relationships, comes into contact with the older girls who have begun to turn against themselves and each other in their attempts to conform to the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality.

Angie, a middle-class college student, is falling in love with another counselor at the camp, Renée, who is a working-class “out” lesbian. Against this backdrop of intense homophobia, the young women struggle with their feelings for each other and the problems of defining themselves in a society that insists they be invisible. The camp legend about a monster in the lake parallels the adult phobias about lesbianism, and, confronted with an attempted child suicide, campers and counselors are compelled to face their worst fears in the microcosmic world of the summer camp.

Ugly Ducklings breaks ranks with male-centered queer drama in foregrounding the experience of women and girls who are survivors of sexual violence and shattering romantic and sentimental conventions about the “gentle sex.”

Nine girls, five women Two hours Single set

THANATRON A Comedy in Two Acts

• 2009, published in Three Comedies, Gage Press. • Reading by invitation, at Pen and Brush Club, NYC. • Named one of the “Best Productions of 2003,” The Portland Phoenix, Portland, ME. • Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME.

31 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

This is a rollicking farce about the world’s most dysfunctional family, a doctor with a penchant for assisted suicide, and a lesbian housekeeper with a crush on her employer. An over-the-top comedy about leaving, being left, and what it takes to stay.

The play opens a few hours before Molly Hawthorne’s assisted- suicide, going-away party. Molly, a depressed, middle-class housewife, has become distressed by what she perceives as a loss of memory that has impaired her ability to function as a perfect wife and mother. Convinced that suicide is an empowering choice, she encounters a snag in her plans when she attempts to recruit her lesbian housekeeper to bartend for the party.

Dani, an Italian butch, is appalled by Molly’s project and disgusted with her family for supporting it. She teams up with Caitlin, the ten- year-old, tomgirl daughter, to sabotage Thanatron, the notorious “death machine” for the doctor-assisted suicide.

Thanatron relies on a sodium pentathol intervenous drip to render the “patient” drowsy enough to trigger the lethal chemical that will stop the heart. When the sodium pentathol dose is altered, Molly finds that, instead of losing consciousness, she is regaining her memories—including memories of repressed childhood trauma.

A satiric commentary on a culture that would rather see its women dead than telling the truth, Thanatron deconstructs the social machinery that makes death an appealing alternative for the old, the disabled, the single, and the lesbian.

Five women, five men, one girl, and a variable number of adult extras Single set Two hours

ESTHER AND VASHTI A Drama in Two Acts

• 2009, published in The Triple Goddess: Three Plays, Gage Press.

32 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

• Reading, Provincetown Players, Provincetown, MA.

A radical feminist retelling of the traditional Purim story from the Bible—a retelling that foregrounds the part of the story that is glossed over in the patriarchal text, namely, the sexual colonization of women.

Esther, a radical Jewish lesbian living in exile, and Vashti, a Persian woman of privilege, were lovers. Complying with her family’s expectations, Vashti has married the king of Persia, but Esther cannot interpret this as anything except a betrayal and an abandonment. When Vashti encourages a Persian captain to court Esther, Esther is outraged and goes to the palace to confront her former girlfriend.

The ambitious vice-chancellor Haman has been stirring up anti- Semitic sentiment among the officers of the Persian army, in order to use a massacre of the Jews to divert attention from his usurpation of the throne.

In the meantime, during Esther’s visit to the harem, the king is holding a banquet for his officers—a banquet that features the rape of one of the women from the harem. Vashti is shocked and terrified when she discovers that she has been called to “dance” for the officers. Esther engineers her escape from the palace, and the two women go underground, hiding in the homes of Jewish women.

Esther is discovered by Haman during a roundup of eligible virgins as candidates for queenship. Vashti, knowing that Esther could never submit to sexual violation, goes to the palace to die with her lover. The play reaches its dramatic climax when the plight of the two women coincides with the palace takeover by the army, a revolt of the harem women, and a daring rescue attempt by Jewish vigilante women, led by Esther’s young cousin.

Esther and Vashti attempt to avert the impending massacre of the Jews by issuing an edict granting the Jews permission to arm and defend themselves against their enemies. This mandate for self- defense is ritualized in the final scene, when the Jewish women and the harem women join together to commemorate the anniversary of their victory and to pledge themselves to the defense of their daughters and each other.

33 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

This is a fast-paced, high-action drama where the love story of two women of different cultures and class backgrounds plays itself out against a backdrop of anti-Semitism and the sexual colonization of women.

Thirteen women, eight men, two teenaged girls (unspecified of male and female extras) Two hours Multiple sets

STIGMATA A Tragedy in Five Acts

Based on a true story, Stigmata is a five-act tragedy about the extraordinary life of the 16th century, Italian nun, Benedetta Carlini.

Benedetta, raised like a son by her father, is caught acting out sexual tableaux with her girlfriends. Fearful of the consequences of Benedetta’s precocious sexuality, her mother incarcerates her in a convent when Benedetta begins to menstruate.

The Abbess, whose enlightened policies have kept the convent from becoming enclosed, makes Benedetta her assistant, and the two women fall in love with each other. On the eve of the move to a large convent, Benedetta confronts the Abbess on this love, and the Abbess suffers a heart attack and dies. Benedetta, without the protection of the Abbess, faces demotion to a convent servant position. In an attempt to counter this, she stages a miracle in the middle of the procession to the new convent, receiving the stigmata (spontaneous bleeding of the hands and feet, in imitation of Jesus’ wounds) in front of the entire town of Pescia.

On the strength of this miracle, Benedetta becomes the new abbess. She moves for immediate enclosure of the convent and adoption of the draconian Rules of Saint Augustine. With the approval of the old-fashioned, misogynist confessor of the convent, Father Ricordati, she introduces Church-sanctioned, sado- masochistic practices, including whipping, in order to punish her critics and consolidate her power. She seduces a gullible young nun by convincing her that it is the will of God for the girl to have sex

34 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS with an angel named Splenditello, who will come and occupy Benedetta’s body for the duration of the sex act.

Benedetta organizes a public wedding between herself and Jesus. The town provost, realizing that things have gone too far, orders Ricordati to stop the wedding. When Ricordati tries to confront Benedetta, she stages a miracle that sets Ricordati up for blackmail. At the height of the wedding spectacle, the provost confronts Benedetta with the charges against her. She manages to hold her own, until the victim of her seduction steps forward with her story. Placed under arrest, Benedetta curses the town and promises that God will send the plague to punish them.

Fifteen years later, when the plague is once again ravishing Italy, the townspeople storm the convent, demanding the release of Benedetta, who has been imprisoned all these years. Benedetta defies her tormentors, including her mother, dying with a vision of her beloved Abbess. At her death, she manifests authentic stigmata. The provost and the new abbess decide to parade Benedetta’s body through the town in order to appease the crowd—knowing that this concession to popular ignorance and superstition, will result in mass contagion of the plague.

Ten women, two men, unspecified number of extras Three hours Multiple sets

COMING ABOUT A Three-Act Play About Changing Roles in Marriage

• National Finalist, Maude Adams Playwriting Award, Stephens College, MO. • Winner, New Plays in Progress, Portland State Univ., OR. • Nominee, Oregon Playwrights Award, Oregon Institute of Literary Arts.

35 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Coming About is a play which looks at the dramatic change in the institution of marriage over the last forty years. Kay, in her early thirties, is married to a man over twice her age. Finally confronting the facts about their age discrepancies, she begins to move toward establishing her own life.

The play opens at the wedding reception for a neighbor, and the presence of Kay’s husband’s grown children, the question of inheritance, and her mother’s bitter reminders about her own marriage turn the festive weekend into a pressure cooker of gender roles. The wedding gives way to a hurricane, and the five couples in the play undergo a sea change before the night is over as the women come to terms with their loss of identity in marriage.

Six women, three men Two hour Single set

THE GODDESS TOUR A Murder Mystery in Two Acts

• 2009, published in The Triple Goddess: Three Plays • 2009 Maine Playwrights Festival, Acorn Productions, Portland. • 2008 Ohio State University, (reading), Columbus, OH. • 2007 Thorny Theatre, Palm Springs • 2007 Venus Theatre (reading), Laurel, MD.

“… a mix of comedy, drama, murder-mystery and a whole lot of fun… ” —Talk, Palm Springs, CA.

Dr. Lorraine Livingstone leads women’s tours to ancient, sacred sites of goddess worship. She and five members of her tour are gathering at an inn on the Burren of Western Ireland for a tour of Celtic sites. The guests include a feuding lesbian couple on their way to China to adopt a baby, a celebrated author of best-selling murder mysteries, a frivolous divorcée, and a mysterious last-minute arrival.

36 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

It’s February 2, Imbolc—the Celtic celebration that marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. It’s also the season when, according to legend, the Greek earth-mother goddess Demeter emerges from the Underworld with her rescued daughter Persephone. The theme of lost daughters haunts the inn and its inhabitants, as mysterious voices and artifacts point to the murder of a girl-child, and each of the guests admits to some form of betrayal of the sacred mother-daughter bond.

Lorraine is haunted by the memory of the out-of-wedlock child she was forced to relinquish at sixteen. The divorcée laments her failure to fight harder for the custody of her children. The lesbian partners, still bedeviled with the demons of their own childhoods, debate the wisdom of becoming mothers.

The inn harbors a secret that is shared by the mysterious innkeeper Bridie and her nemesis, the author. Their history unfolds as a backdrop to the secret history between Lorraine and her mysterious latecomer.

This is a murder mystery with all the classic ingredients: the dark and stormy night, the remote location , the strangers at the inn with their mysterious pasts, the ghostly intrusions, the attempted murder, and the obligatory gathering of the guests in the parlor for the final dénouement.

What sets The Goddess Tour apart from the genre is the depth of exploration of the potentially murderous dyad of mothers and daughters, pitted against each other in a struggle for survival in a corporate, capitalist, colonialist world. Celtic ritual and goddess lore are interwoven with sacred imagery of gestation and birth, as these are counterposed with legacies of violence against women and children, the brutal history of Ireland’s colonization, and the horrors of slavery on the American continent. Class and race divisions inform discussions of adoption, with a pervasive critique of “globalization” and its impact on motherhood. A good, old-fashioned murder mystery that packs a feminist punch.

7 women Single set 2 hours

37 ONE-ACT PLAYS

MASON-DIXON A One-Act for Two Women

• Fourth Annual Juneteenth Festival, Univ. of Louisville, KY. • National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA) • Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama Festival. • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA. • Winner, Portland State University’s New Voices Competition, OR.

“… extremely powerful piece… Gage takes on race issues, feminism, incest… stunning… ” —The Vanguard, Portland, OR.

“… complex and painful subtleties of racism...” —Lithiagraph, Ashland, OR.

Mason-Dixon explores the complex relationship between a Black woman and a white woman, who loved each other as children, were separated at puberty, and who find themselves at mid-life divided by race, class, and politics.

As a plantation owner’s daughter, Elizabeth was “given” an enslaved child, Mary, who was her same age. The two girls grew up together, loving each other as sisters and sharing their resources. At puberty, Elizabeth was sent to a private boarding school, and it was thirty years before she was to see Mary again, by then a free woman teaching in a Black school in Philadelphia.

When the play opens, Elizabeth is demanding that Mary recognize their former friendship. Mary, now an angry Black separatist, is not

38 ONE-ACT PLAYS so eager to reclaim the past. Elizabeth has become a spy for the Union army, and in what she sees as the ultimate gesture of reconciliation, offers Mary the “opportunity” to gather intelligence by working as a maid at the Confederate White House.

Mary, repudiating Elizabeth’s claims of sisterhood, reveals that she was sexually molested by Elizabeth’s father. She is shocked to discover that Elizabeth was also his victim. The women struggle with issues of race, class, and gender oppression as they alternately challenge and deny the great love they once had for each other. The play is based on the true story of Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Bowser.

2 women 35 minutes Single set

JANE ADDAMS AND THE DEVIL BABY A One-Act Play

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, (HerBooks, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA) • Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama Festival. • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA. • Second Place, Political Plays, Seattle New Plays Buffet.

In 1912, Jane Addams was witness to a strange phenomenon, as thousands of immigrants flocked to Hull House in response to the rumor that there was a “Devil Baby” there. The Devil Baby was supposedly an infant with hooves, horns, and tail. According to folk myths, this incarnation of the devil was the result of a drunken husband’s curse that he’d rather see a devil in the house than another baby.

39 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

In this one-act, Jane confronts an elderly Irish woman who has broken into Hull House with the single-minded intention of gaining access to the Devil Baby. The woman is not to be deterred, and Jane matches wits with her in her attempt to find an explanation for this strange obsession which seems to have taken possession of half Chicago.

A radical confrontation between the sensibilities of a nineteenth century emigrant wife and mother, and a modern American lesbian of independent means.

Three women 20 minutes Single set

LOUISA MAY INCEST A One-Act for Two Women

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Provincetown Fringe Festival, Women’s Week, Provincetown, MA. • Featured at National Women’s Music Festival, Muncie, IN. • National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA) • Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama Festival. • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA. • Published in Lesbian Culture (edited by Penelope and Wolfe, Crossing Press, Freedom, CA,). • Published in Trivia, Amherst, MA.

40 ONE-ACT PLAYS

“… crackled with energy and glowed with warmth… illustrated all that is the best about theatre.” —-The Maui News, HI.

“… an overlay of brilliantly ironic humor on the utterly serious issues with which it deals.” —Lithiagraph, Ashland, OR.

“Watching Jo confront Louisa, the audience’s collective belief marked a new point in taking ourselves seriously as people with a herstory; as creators and receivers of lesbian mysticism and art. Lesbian writers, theorists, and professors—in large numbers at ECLF [East Coast Lesbian Festival]—were absolutely transported by the academic significance of Gage’s work.” —Introduction by Bonnie Morris in Amazon All Stars: Thirteen Lesbian Plays (New York: Applause Books, 1996),

Louisa May Alcott has locked her alter-ego, Jo March, out of her study in order to finish Little Women alone. Jo manages to break in. She confronts Louisa about her desire to end their collaboration. Louisa admits her intention to have Jo burn all her writing and marry the aging and self-righteous Professor at the end of the book.

Jo knows her author better than Louisa knows herself, and she begins to uncover Louisa’s true motives in violating her own creation. When Jo introduces evidence of Bronson Alcott’s child molesting and Louisa’s lesbianism, the conflict between Jo and Louisa becomes a life-and-death struggle for control of the book.

Two women 30 minutes Single set

BATTERED ON BROADWAY A Vendetta in One Act

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Maine Association of Community Theatres Conference, Auburn, ME. (staged reading) • National Women’s Music Festival, Muncie, IN.

41 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA). • Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama Festival. • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books.

“… shockingly fresh and compelling...” —Women’s Voices, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… daring iconoclasm...” —The Lithiagraph, Ashland, OR.

Nellie Forbush of South Pacific is in Mame’s Manhattan penthouse to host a benefit luncheon for a Broadway Battered Women’s Shelter. Her guests include Bess of Porgy and Bess, Julie Jordan of Carousel, Sally Bowles of Cabaret, Mei Li from Flower Drum Song, Maria from West Side Story, and Aldonza from Man of La Mancha. These women, most of them now in their sixties, look back in horror on their various onstage rapes, batterings, and partnerings with inferior men.

Orphan Annie puts in an unexpected appearance and is outraged to discover that Daddy Warbucks has donated the money to buy the building for the shelter. She tells Nellie that when the reporters arrive, she will expose him as a child molester. Nellie is concerned that this will jeopardize the project. She threatens to have Annie arrested if she doesn’t leave. Sally Bowles intervenes, and Annie is in for a surprise when the nun reveals her secret identity and initiates Annie into the mysteries of an underground men-killing vigilante group.

Battered on Broadway is a theatrical tour-de-force, combining the farcical romp of comic strip characters with the conventions of an old-fashioned murder mystery in a plot which not only rewrites the history of musicals from a woman’s point of view, but which also tackles the most divisive social issue of the 90’s: violence toward women. A play with many layers!

Ten women 35 minutes

42 ONE-ACT PLAYS

Single set

CALAMITY JANE SENDS A MESSAGE TO HER DAUGHTER A Monologue

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays). • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays. • 2007, International Center for Women Playwrights Readings, Dramatists Guild, Time Square. • 2007, Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, Ireland • 2006, Maine Association of Community Theatre State Conference, Bath. (Cauldron & Labrys Production). • Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC. • Winner, Boston Theatre Slam, Boston Playwrights Theatre. • Provincetown Fringe Festival, Women’s Week, Provincetown, MA. • Winner, Festival of Ten, State University of New York, Brockport. • National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA,) • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA. • Winner, New Voices Competition Portland State Univ., OR. • Featured at Sisters on Stage Lesbian Theatre Conference, NYC.

43 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

“… lyric prose lines to die for...” —The Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.

“… wondrous… ” —Asbury Park Press, NJ.

This work is based on the real Calamity Jane. Vulgar, debauched, and raunchy, Jane is considered a freak by women and a laughing stock by men. Without the strictures of compulsory heterosexuality, she might have had the freedom to live the life of a roughrider without having to pass as a man. She might have been given the place in history which was accorded to her sidekick, James Butler Hickok. And she might have found a way to satisfy her frustrated desire for acceptance by women.

Jane is a butch woman who had the misfortune to be born in an era before lesbian culture. She is a feisty woman with a keen sense of humor, who has kept herself going with a number of destructive myths which are familiar to all of us.

One woman 15 minutes Single set

COOKIN’ WITH TYPHOID MARY A Culinary Monologue

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays). • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • “Women, Health, and Representations” Conference, Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Westbrook, ME. • Provincetown Fringe Festival, Women’s Week, Provincetown, MA.

44 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• City of Cleveland Health Department sponsors a tour and a video of the play. • National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA) • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA. • Excerpted in Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health, Judith Leavitt (Beacon Press, Boston).

“… blood-curdling, side-splitting… out of the mouths of full- blown characters who can mount a stage and own it.” —The Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.

Mary Mallon, dubbed “Typhoid Mary” by a hostile press, never admitted that she was a typhoid carrier. Her persistent refusal to defer to medical experts infuriated George Soper, a sanitation engineer for New York City. He built his career on tracking down Mary and incarcerating her. In this monologue, Mary speaks for herself. An Irish emigrant, she traces the story of her persecution back to the Potato Famine, all the while eyeing and chopping potatoes for the stew pot in the kitchen of the mysterious institution where she cooks.

Mary’s version of events is both humorous and chilling. She resists a theory of germs that would indict her for murder, when half of Ireland starved to death before the indifferent eyes of the world.

One woman 25 minutes Single set

ARTEMISIA AND HILDEGARD An Exorcism in One Act

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second

45 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays). • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • 2009 Columba College, New Zealand. • Women in Washington Theatre, Washington, DC. (staged reading) • Cauldron & Labrys Productions, Portland, ME. • Featured performance, National Women’s Music Festival, Muncie, IN. • Staged reading, Maine Women’s Studies Conference, Augusta, ME. • Winner, Playwrights Festival, Actors Theatre, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… threatened the status quo like Thelma and Louise… a truly remarkable play… ” —We the People, Santa Rosa, CA.

Artemisia and Hildegard is a complex and powerful two-woman show, featuring two of the most famous women artists in history, together on an explosive arts panel about survival strategies for women artists.

Hildegard Von Bingen, German abbess from the 12th century, and Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian baroque painter from the 17th century, have been scheduled as guest speakers on a panel titled, “Women Artists: Strategies for Survival.” As the women display slides of their work, the sparks begin to fly. Confronted with conflicting philosophies, each woman attempts to take control of the evening’s agenda.

Hildegard, whose art is multi-disciplinary and created in an all- women collective environment, has strong words for the woman who does her art for hire. Likewise, Artemisia, who struggled hard to achieve the same status and independent income as her male contemporaries, has a lot to say about the so-called virtues of poverty and humility. She resents the accusation from women that she is “just like a man,” because of her commercial success.

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But the debate takes a personal turn when the women are pressed to defend their positions. Both women are compelled to reveal secrets of their childhood, secrets which have shaped their strategies for survival. Hildegard’s parents banished her to a convent at the age of eight, where she was walled up for ten years in a cell, a form of extreme religious renunciation she “practiced” as an anchoress. Her rationalization of this trauma into a form of spiritual blessing requires an elaborate mythology about a mystical calling and special relationship to the deity.

Artemisia was raped at sixteen by her father’s colleague who had been hired to give her lessons on perspective. Her possessive and covertly incestuous father exposed her to a humiliating public trial, which involved an examination of her vagina and the administration of torture to determine if she were telling the truth. Artemisia has devoted her life to downplaying the role of gender in her life and in her art.

As the women struggle to justify their choices, choices which invalidate each other’s work, they find themselves exposing the contradictions in their own lives. The panel ends on a dramatic high note, as the audience is recruited in the debate about strategy for women artists in patriarchy.

Two women One hour Single set (podium)

HARRIET TUBMAN VISITS A THERAPIST A One-Act for Two Women

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays). • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Unity Players Ensemble, Hollywood, CA. (A Black Trilogy 2006).

47 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• Published in Under 30: Plays for a New Generation, Vintage Books, NYC. • Douglass Theatre, Macon, GA. • Bailiwick Theatre, Chicago. • Ladyfest Midwest, Chicago. • Juneteenth Festival, sponsored by Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY. • Featured performance at National Women’s Music Festival, Muncie, IN. • Published in Off-Off Broadway Festival Plays, Twenty-Third Series, Samuel French, Inc., NYC. • Staged reading, Martin Luther King Day, Bates College, Lewiston, ME. • Reading at Howard University, Washington, DC, funded by Ford Foundation grant (national leadership conference for historically Black colleges) • National Winner, Off-Off Broadway Original Short Play Festival, sponsored by Samuel French, NYC. • Winner, Festival of One-Acts, Love Creek Productions, NYC. • Nat’l Winner, Perishable Theatre Women’s Playwriting Festival, Providence, RI

“… marked with originality and cleverness as well as thoughtfulness in both conception and execution... In a time in our society when slavery and its sustaining effects are never acknowledged and outright denied, it is good to read a contemporary version of the classic freedom fighter— Harriet Tubman.” —Aishah Rahman, playwright and Associate Professor in Brown University’s Creative Writing Program.

“The discussion [following the play]… lasted well over an hour, a record for such events at the theatre.”—Vanessa Gilbert, Perishable Theatre, Providence, RI.

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“The play has the power of anger.” —The Providence Journal, RI.

“… a satirical, funny and yet poignant and serious look at the abuse black women took in those days, with some interesting comparisons to today.” —The Warwick Beacon, RI.

“vivid and evocative… ” —The Providence Phoenix, RI.

“Arthur’s performance [as Tubman] was so powerful and raw that the audience literally could not stop cheering and clapping at the end.” —Our Weekly.Com, Los Angeles.

“Playwright-editors Lane and Shengold have assembled five full-length plays, 11 shorter plays, and excerpts from four plays, all written for actors under 30… Jessica Goldberg’s Refuge, Jenny Lyn Bader’s None of the Above, and Carolyn Gage’s Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist are all standouts… fresh and gripping…” —Library Journal, reviewing Under Thirty: Plays for a New Generation (Vintage)

Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist is a gripping confrontation between two women who share the same oppression, but whose definitions of survival are in direct conflict.

Harriet Tubman, suspected of planning an escape on the Underground Railroad, has been sent to the Therapist for an evaluation. The Therapist, another African American woman, warns Harriet about the dangers of radical action. Harriet accuses the Therapist of colluding with the enemy in the guise of practicing therapeutic intervention.

As the Therapist attempts to convince Harriet of the benefits of accepting the things she cannot change and learning to live one day at a time, Harriet uncovers the Therapist’s secret - a secret which will give her access to the information she needs.

The plot takes a sudden twist during one of Harriet’s spells of sleeping sickness, and in resisting the suggestions which justify the Therapist’s ideology, Harriet discovers a source of spiritual support rooted in her own activism.

Two women 20 minutes Single set

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ENTR’ACTE

OR THE NIGHT EVE LE GALLIENNE WAS RAPED

A One-Act Play

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Stage Q (reading), National Women’s Music Festival, Madison. • State University of New York, Potsdam. • Produced in Beyond the L-Word: An Evening of Lesbian Theatre, Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME. • 2004, Third-Place Winner, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Short Fiction One-Act Play Competition. • Pandora’s Box Theatre, Buffalo, NY. • Looking Glass Theatre, NYC. • Love Creek Productions, NYC.

In October 1923, Eva Le Gallienne was raped in her dressing room during the Broadway run of Liliom, a play in which she performed the role of Julie Jordan, the battered girlfriend of an abusive, alcoholic carousel operator.

Entr’acte takes place in the private sanitarium on the night of the rape, after Eva has checked herself in. In a state of post-traumatic hyper-arousal, she waits for a “friend” to arrive.

The friend is Mimsey Benson, Eva’s former lover and fellow-actor, who left her ten months earlier for the security of a heterosexual marriage. Eva has not seen Mimsey since the breakup.

In this charged environment, the two women confront their feelings for each other, and Mimsey, who had lost her identity in her former relationship with Eva, walks a tightrope between compassion for the young women and the detachment necessary to protect herself from Eva’s overwhelming neediness.

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This play is a tour-de-force for a young actor (Eva is twenty-three). In the space of the thirty-minute drama, Eva runs a gamut of extreme dissociative states as she moves through denial, bargaining, rage, and grief to finally arrive at acceptance of her losses. Making rapid transitions, she is alternately the abandoned lover, the imperious Broadway star, the enraged child, the dazzling performer, the terrified victim, the skillful seductress, and the visionary entrepreneur who will go on to found the Civic Repertory Theatre.

The interpersonal drama of the two women is punctuated by interactions with two of the nurses on the staff, one of them an adoring fan of Eva’s and the other a hard-nosed pragmatist. Balancing between the two poles represented by the nurses, Eva and Mimsey struggle to create a new relationship toward each other and toward their art.

Four women Thirty minutes Single set

THE PARMACHENE BELLE A One-Woman, One-Act Play

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays). • 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • 2009, Black Hills Equality Pride Festival, Rapid City, SD. • 2009, Maine Association of Community Theatres Conference, Auburn, ME. • 2007, Published in The Harbor Journal, Cozy Harbor Press, Southport, ME. • National Women’s Music Festival, Univ. of Illinois, Normal,

51 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

IL. • Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC. • Off-Broadway performance, Bleecker Street Theatre, NYC. • New England Academy of Theatre One-Act Play Festival, New Haven, CT. • Published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Binghamton, NY. • Finalist, Maine Playwrights Award, Acorn Acting School, Portland, ME. • Excerpted in Still More Monologues for Women, By Women, ed. by Tori Haring- Smith (Heinemann Books, Portsmouth, NH.)

Cornelia Crosby, a 19th century lesbian, was the first licensed hunting guide in Maine. Six feet tall and known as “Fly Rod,” she led fishing and hunting expeditions for wealthy vacationers in the Rangeley Lake district.

The play opens on the day that Fly Rod, who has been sidelined to a hospital bed in Portland with a serious knee injury, is scheduled for surgery. She may, in fact, never walk again. This prognosis poses a threat not only to her livelihood, but also to her plans to rendez-vous with Annie Oakley in New York at the annual Sportsman’s Exhibition. Having listened to the stories of Annie’s sexual abuse as a child, Fly Rod has become obsessed with “rescuing” her.

Hoping to lure Annie away from the Wild West Show, Fly Rod proposes to teach Annie the art of fly-fishing. Explaining the difference between “imitations,” the flies designed to replicate actual species of insects and “fancies,” the flies that make no attempt to resemble anything except themselves, Fly Rod notes that she and Annie are “fancies”—like the Parmachene Belle. It is her dream to wean Annie away from her obsessive practice with guns.

Fly Rod’s optimistic fantasizing is disrupted when she opens a gift that Annie has sent her. It is an arrow case that belonged to the famous Indian warrior Sitting Bull. Disturbed by the potential meaning of the gift, Fly Rod reflects on the death of Sitting Bull, who

52 ONE-ACT PLAYS was killed for his participation in the Ghost Dance, a form of ecstatic trance-dancing believed to bring back the buffalo and get rid of the white man.

Outcasts, misfits, and survivors—Annie, Fly Rod, and Sitting Bull all struggled to invent ways to continue in the face of shattered dreams and hopeless prospects. Fly Rod, in her monologue, wrestles with her fears and negotiates the fine line between faith and denial as she constructs a system of belief that will hold some possibility of happiness for her, a lesbian in a heterosexual man’s world.

1 woman 35 minutes Single set

THE PELE CHANT A Civilized Conversation in One Act

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Semi-finalist, Eileen Heckart Senior Drama Competition, the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University. • National Finalist, Association for Theatre in Higher Education One-Act Competition.

“Mahalo nui for your play. It is splendid, clever, and sets the characters in an imaginary world that is, nevertheless, quite believable. The mark of superb craftsmanship…! Ku’e, ku’e,ku’e! [Resist, resist, resist!] — Haunani-Kay Trask, leader of the Hawai’ian Sovereignty Movement.

The play opens in 1969, with Dr. Evelyn Bateman, a white college professor, interviewing Miss Lydia Aholo, a ninety-two-year-old Native Hawaiian. Miss Aholo is the hanai (“adoptive”) daughter of Queen Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawai’i. Dr. Bateman is preparing to write the first Western biography sympathetic to the Queen, detailing her overthrow by the US government.

53 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

During the course of the interview, Miss Aholo reveals that the Queen entrusted her with a mission before her death. She asked her adoptive daughter to answer the question that tormented her at the end of her life: “What did I do that was so wrong that I should lose my country for my dear people?”

Dr. Bateman is shocked by the question, insisting that the Queen was a helpless victim of a colonial effort that had its beginnings before she was even born. Dr. Bateman is adamant that the Queen could have done nothing to change the course of history. Miss Aholo is equally insistent that there is an answer to the Queen’s question and that the future for Native people depends on an understanding of this answer.

As the Western liberal historian and the Native woman struggle with the metaphysics of language, colonization, and victimization, their collaboration begins to unravel. When Dr. Bateman recounts an anecdote about a visit to Queen by three Native kahunas, or priestesses, urging her to join them in an act of civil disobedience involving the recitation of the Pele Chant, Lydia finds the answer to the Queen’s question—and with it, the secret of spiritual decolonization.

Two women Single set Thirty minutes

THE DRUM LESSON

A One-Act For Women Drummers

• Gabriola Players, British Columbia. • Published in Sinister Wisdom, Sebastopol, CA. • Luna Sea Women’s Performance Space, San Francisco.

This one-act for five women drummers explores the dramatic uses of the language of the drum.

In the play, the drum teacher Aisha has lost control of her class: One student is improvising with no attention to the directives from

54 ONE-ACT PLAYS the teacher; another student who keeps losing her rhythm has voluntarily moved herself out of the circle; a third student has not even unpacked her drum.

Confronted with the lack of unity in the class, Aisha explains that the only way she knows how to teach is through the drum: It teaches her and it teaches through her. As tensions among the students escalate, one of the drummers breaks into chaotic drumming. At first, this is perceived as an act of aggression, but it quickly becomes evident that something more serious is happening. When the student fails to resond to attempts at verbal or physical intervention, Aisha tries to reach her via the drum.

Her initial attempts at “call-and-response” are rebuffed, but slowly the teacher manages to establish a dialogue with her runaway student. As Aisha “drums her down from the ledge,” the other students, chastened by this lesson in alternative language, rejoin the circle.

Five women who can drum Single set Twenty minutes

THE RULES OF THE PLAYGROUND An Anti-War Play in One Act

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Philadelphia Fringe Festival. • Published by Femspec: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal, Cleveland, Heights, OH. • Produced by Code Pink in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, Washington, DC.. • Maine Women’s Studies Conference, Portland, ME. (reading) • Stockyards Theatre, Chicago (reading).

“To introduce the futility of a nation state and ethnic-based separation in such a simple and effective way is brilliant...” — Laura Lampela, co-editor of Femspec, Vol. 5.

55 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Five women, all mothers, have gathered in a classroom of their children’s middle school to take part in an experimental, new program designed to eliminate playground violence. Experts from international “think tanks” and peacekeeping forces are training the women on how to analyze playground dynamics in order to detect the class, ethnic, and racial inequalities among the children that are, in theory, the sources of conflict. On the chalkboard, there is a diagram of the playground, which has been divided up into “safety zones” in accordance with sophisticated formulas intended to balance out these inqualities. The program’s focus is emphatically on confronting social imbalances, not individual behaviors, and, to facilitate this focus, the women have been forbidden to look out the window at the playground. In fact, the blinds are shut.

As the women enter the classroom to wait for the trainer, they register varying degrees of discomfort and distrust. Evidently something traumatic has happened a week earlier, at the first session of the training, but, because of the injunction against focusing on individual behavior – and especially against “male- bashing,” they are reluctant to talk about it.

An enthusiastic newcomer joins the group, excited to have found a school for her daughter where the problem of violence is being so openly addressed. Her enthusiasm changes to confusion as she learns that the program prohibits any form of disciplining of the children, insisting that all conflict be resolved through the rules of the playground.

As the newcomer’s concerns escalate, the women’s self-censorship begins to break down, and it is revealed that, a week earlier, one child was shot on the playground and another was raped. The newcomer reacts with disbelief and then alarm, as the sounds of gunfire and screaming are heard from the playground. She is intercepted as she attempts to raise the blinds, and flees the room, accusing the other women of being insane. After she leaves, the mother of the raped girl begins to question the absence of a gender analysis amid all the sophisticated formulas for equality on the chalkboard. She calls for a division of the playground that would provide a safety zone for girls. This proposal is met with hysterical denial, and the play ends with the women whose losses have been the greatest joining forces to close the partially-opened blinds and to reinforce the attention to the rules of the playground.

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This is a scathing social satire, along the lines of Shirley Jackson’s electrifying short story “The Lottery.” The Rules of the Playground demonstrates how the everyday social conditioning of women is exploited as a means of enabling the perpetuation of male violence. Women’s collective failure to identify war as an unacceptable expression of male aggression, and our acceptance of it along male-identified terms of “political expedience,” is depicted as nothing less than complicity—a complicity that renders us victims and betrayers.

Six women Single set Twenty-five minutes

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO: THE STORY OF THALIDOMIDE A One-Act For Radio Or Stage

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • Broadcast on KRCL radio, Salt Lake City, UT.

This one-act was originally written as a radio play, but it can also be produced as a stage drama.

The Evil That Men Do (title taken from a Shakespeare play) is the story of Dr. Frances (“Frankie”) Kelsey’s fight to keep thalidomide out of America. The play traces the development of her friendship with Dr. Barbara Moulton, who resigned from the FDA and was testifying against the agency’s corruption at the time when Frances was hired. In her courageous act of befriending a whistle-blower, Frances was laying the foundation for her subsequent battles with the drug companies.

The play unveils the conspiracy between the German manufacturers, the American distributor, and the officials in the FDA to pressure Frances to issue a license for “the sleeping pill of the century.” Frances plays for time against the good-old-boy network, while the horrifying evidence mounts that thalidomide, prescribed as a cure for morning sickness, causes severe birth defects.

Since 1960, the date of the thalidomide “scare” in this country, companies whose products are designed for women have continued

57 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE to follow dangerous and deceptive practices. In 1991, a Texas jury awarded $33 million in damages to the parents of a child born with birth defects as a result of taking Bendectin, an anti-nausea drug, which had been on the market since the 1950’s with no testing for its effect on human fetuses.

Nestle persisted in promoting their infant formulas in Third World countries, despite the proof that it was responsible for infant malnutrition, disease, and death. Proctor and Gamble engaged in an extensive cover-up of the fact that their Rely tampon was responsible for toxic shock syndrome, even after the deaths of many women. And A.H. Robbins dragged its heels for more than a decade, fighting settlement awards for victims of their deadly

Dalkon Shield IUD, a birth control device that has left women sterile, crippled, and dead. The most recent example of the medical exploitation of women has been the scandal over the use of untested silicon breast implants.

The Evil That Men Do is an old, old story—but one which points a moral for a happier ending.

Three women, eight men Thirty minutes Single set

A LABOR PLAY A One-Act Propaganda Piece

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays • Published in Sinister Wisdom, Sebastopol, CA.

A Labor Play is a satirical piece about what might happen if surrogate mothers become a commodity in the corporate world. The two chief executive officers are concerned about the bad publicity which might result from a worker’s desire to gain control over the

58 ONE-ACT PLAYS distribution of the goods. (The mother has decided to keep the baby.)

The collision of male dominance with the women’s value system is violent, and the scenario, in light of the “Baby M” case, might not be as far-fetched as it seems.

One woman, two men Fifteen minutes Single set

HETEROSEXUALS ANONYMOUS A Twelve-Step Spoof

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • Published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Vol. II, Harrington Park Press, Binghamton, NY.

Five women come together for a regular meeting of Heterosexuals Anonymous, an organization designed to help women overcome their unmanageable addictions to men. The women share their experiences of automatically deferring to men, of battering, of rape, of sex discrimination, and of inability to relate to the males in their own families.

The women, having admitted that they were powerless over their addiction to men, work through the steps of the program towards recovery. The steps include Step Two: “Believing that a power greater than men can restore us to sanity” and Step Four: “Making a searching and fearless moral inventory of all the men in our lives, including fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.”

A lighthearted spoof, the play nevertheless points up the political analysis which is lacking in tradition 12-Step programs, a lack which often leads women to believe personal growth is possible without social change.

Five women Twenty minutes Single set

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RADICALS A One-Act About Women in the Anti-War Movement

Radicals is a play about straight women during the late sixties. The play illustrates the damaging effects of compulsory heterosexuality on women who must express affection for each other through each other’s boyfriends. An explosive play, examining the roots of violence between women.

In Radicals, two women live together; one is an activist in the anti- war movement, and the other is apolitical - but paying all the bills. The women’s inability to communicate their feelings for each other leads them towards increasingly destructive and competitive roles. Finally, Margo invites a fugitive radical, wanted for killing a policeman in Miami, to stay in their apartment. Sexual and political tensions become entangled, and the war comes home.

The play moves swiftly as a political thriller for a close ensemble group. The idealistic rhetoric of the characters stands in stark contrast to their day-to-day choices. Radicals interweaves the personal with the political, never losing sight of the fact that these self-styled radicals are no more respectful of the life around them than the “enemy” they oppose.

Two women, two men Forty-five minutes Single set

THE BOUNDARY TRIAL OF JOHN PROCTOR A One-Act Play

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

The Boundary Trial of John Proctor takes up where Arthur Miller’s Crucible leaves off. This play opens with Miller’s anti-hero stumbling into the boundary lands where women’s lives are lived, a territory so marginal to patriarchy that it has escaped by Proctor and his creator’s awareness.

60 ONE-ACT PLAYS

The women accused of witchcraft in Miller’s play are assembled in a sewing circle. We meet Elizabeth, Proctor’s pregnant wife, and Abigail, the employee he sexually exploited. We also meet Tituba, the formerly enslaved Carribean housekeeper; Sarah, the town baglady; Martha, the intellectual; and Rebecca, the town matriarch.

The women are assembled to make baby clothes for Elizabeth’s child. They ask John Proctor to join their circle and take up the knitting. Balking at “women’s work,” John discovers that he is unable to assert his male supremacist values in the Boundary of women’s existence. He is as marginal here as the women were in his world, and his discovery that witches are real results in an explosive verdict.

Six women, one man Thirty minutes Single set (bare stage)

THE LADIES’ ROOM

A Play in Six Minutes

• 2010, “Best of Fest” in Girl Play: Second Annual Lesbian Play Festival, Women’s Theatre Project, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. • 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • 2009, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. • 2009, article published in On the Issues about the play. • 2009, (reading), Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

The scene is just outside a ladies’ room in a shopping mall. Rae, a a seventeen-year-old butch, has just been misidentified as a man, and a woman has gone to report her to mall security. Rae, humiliated and insulted, is hurling insults. Her girlfriend, Nicole, is oddly unsupportive.

When Nicole discloses the reasons for her silence, Rae is overwhelmed emotionally, and she makes a surprising choice when her accuser returns.

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Two teenaged girls Six minutes Single set (bare stage)

PATRICIDE A Play in One Minute

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Evening of Lesbian Theatre, Cork Arts Theatre, Ireland (reading). • Victim to Survivor: Mythologies,” Dallas County Sexual Assault Coalition, Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas. • Java Theatre, Providence, RI and Boston. • “Picking Up the Pieces,” University of North Dakota. • 10th Annual International Women’s Playwriting Festival, Perishable Theatre, Providence, RI • Stageworks, Tampa, FL. • Published in Night of 1,000 Playwrights, Rain City Projects, Seattle.

Patricide is a one-minute monologue by a woman of any age, race, ethnicity, physical ability, sexual orientation, or class background— who telephones her father and confronts him with her memory of his sexual abuse of her.

More than a novelty piece, this monologue provides actors with the opportunity to run an intense gauntlet of peak emotions in the space of sixty seconds: panic, terror, disorientation, relief, euphoria.

One woman One minute Bare or elaborate set, with telephone

THE P.E. TEACHER A One-Act Play

62 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

The P.E. Teacher is a suspenseful thriller exploring the interface of misogyny, racism, and homophobia in the public schools.

Dana Willets, an African American lesbian, has just been hired to teach P.E. classes at Rosa Parks Middle School. She is replacing another lesbian teacher who resigned suddenly in mid-term under mysterious circumstances. Dana’s attempts to discover the reason for this resignation are frustrated by the vice principal, who lectures her on the need to be a team player.

Dana recognizes the English teacher Anne, who is white, as a former lover from college, and as she presses her for information about the P.E. teacher, Anne becomes increasingly nervous and uncommunicative. An African American girl is assaulted in the halls by male students, and the school nurse, guidance counselor, and vice principal engage in a cover-up of the incident, focusing their attention on the attitude of the victim.

As information about the P.E. teacher’s resignation begins to surface, Anne is scapegoated for her recent breakdown, and a gun that was concealed in the sofa of the lounge resurfaces in the violent resolution of the drama.

Five women, one man, two girls Thirty minutes Single set

BITE MY THUMB A Skirmish in One Act

• 2009, Published in Sinister Wisdom, Issue 76, Sebastopol, CA. • 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Optioned by CottonLover Films, Indianapolis, IN. • Produced in Beyond the L-Word: An Evening of Lesbian

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Theatre, Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME. (staged reading) • Produced by the School of International Migration and Ethnic Studies, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden.

“… a great success… the most popular and attended play… we even had to add two extra performances to meet the demand.” —Matilda Marshall, Malmö University, Sweden.

Two “gangs” from rival Off-Off Broadway productions of Romeo and Juliet meet in an alley to rumble, sixteenth-century style. Female-to- male transgender meets lesbian cross-dressing, and lesbian butch squares off against male machismo in this swashbuckling gender- bender!

A male “Romeo” from a traditional production shows up at the stage door of an all-women theatre company, challenging their “Romeo” to come out and fight like a man. The fact that this cross-dressing, female Romeo has stolen his former girlfriend by offering her the role of Juliet only fans the flames of his indignation. When Juliet’s Nurse, a lesbian butch, takes up his challenge, however, Romeo finds himself outclassed in the martial arts. On the brink of surrender, he is rescued by his own masked “Mercutio,” who takes on the Nurse in a dazzling display of sword-fighting techniques.

In another surprise twist, “Mercutio” is unmasked, revealing his identity as a transgender male. Accused of being a woman by his former buddy, he is also attacked by the lesbian butch for alleged lesbo-phobia. Meanwhile, the female “Romeo,” threatened by the butch’s superior fighting skills attempts to put her back in her place as a character actor. The butch, however, joins forces with the transgender actor, with the result that both find themselves expelled from their respective companies.

Having pronounced a plague on both their houses, the butch launches into a tender coda about the unsung heroism of those who renounce traditionally assigned gender roles. She and the transgender male commit themselves to the creation of a new kind of theatre that can support their stories.

Two males, three females, one transgender male Thirty minutes Single set

64 ONE-ACT PLAYS

THE POORLY-WRITTEN PLAY FESTIVAL Just Possibly the Worst One-Act Play Ever Written

• Winner, Maine Literary Award in Drama, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. • 2009, International Cringe Festival, New York Artists, NYC. • Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, NYC (Acorn Productions of Maine). • Maine Festival of One-Act Plays, Acorn Productions, Portland, Maine • Finalist, George P. Kernodle One-Act Competition, Univ. of Arkansas. • Open Book Players, Gardiner, ME. (reading)

“Absolutely the BEST of the "insider" plays about (community) theatre we have read. A satire exposing whilst exemplifying all the elements of bad playwriting.”—International CringeFest, NYC.

Five members of a play selection committee have gathered in the Green Room to choose the plays for their Festival of Poorly-Written Plays. The artistic director begins with a review of the more common criteria for a bad play: blatant exposition and contrived names for the characters. He then suggests that they all go around the table and introduce themselves and say a little something about themselves—blatant exposition if ever there was. As he calls on Hedda, the literary manager, and Mrs. Bracknell, the benefactress, it becomes obvious that the folks around the table all have contrived names.

And so it goes—the committee enacts every broken rule of playwriting in the course of their wrangling over their selections of bad plays. These broken rules include the use of asides, characters who unaccountably reverse their positions, overly-complicated relationship histories, unrealistic set requirements, mysterious strangers, phony disguises, implausible explanations, significant action that takes place offstage, reference to scenes that have been

65 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE cut from the script, and the setting up of the expectations of the audience only to disappoint them.

This is a hilarious “actors nightmare” for playwrights, guaranteed to delight audiences, whose attempts to follow the action are constantly frustrated by the dramaturgical liberties of this “poorly- written” play. The incoherencies and inconsistencies build to a frantic climax, as the artistic director, faced with a plethora of plot difficulties, resorts to the cheesiest playwriting device of all.

Three females, three males Seventeen minutes Single set

THE OBLIGATORY SCENE A One-Act Play for Two Women

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO. • Stage Q (reading), National Women’s Music Festival, Madison. • Adapted as a comic book by Katie Diamond, Portland, ME. • Evening of Lesbian Theatre, Cork Arts Theatre, Ireland. • Produced in Beyond the L-Word: An Evening of Lesbian Theatre, Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME. (staged reading) • Published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Binghamton, NY. • Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Hart, MI. (reading)

Ostensibly arguing about The Taming of the Shrew, a lesbian couple come to grips with their own marital struggles and break their deadlock around the issue of sex.

Vivey and Dru are both graduate students, living together in a committed relationship. Vivey’s distress over being assigned to direct a scene from Taming of the Shrew triggers an argument with her partner about the sexual politics of the play. Dru makes the case that the play is subversive, with Petrucchio exaggerating his gender role in order to mock it. Vivey resists this interpretation until Dru

66 ONE-ACT PLAYS cites the dialogue describing the wedding night, where it is apparent that Petrucchio does not have sex with Katharine. On the contrary, he delivers a mocking lecture on abstinence.

On the strength of this argument, Vivey accepts that the play might indeed be about a companionate, or even “passing” marriage. She redirects the conversation to address the lack of sex in their own relationship. Dru, a survivor of child sexual abuse, is reluctant to discuss the subject.

As the argument escalates, the two agree to role-play an exercise in which Dru plays an alien from another planet, describing her experience. The exercise, set up to pathologize Dru, backfires on Vivey, and she discovers that she is more accurately the alien from another planet. Dru’s experiences are universal and pandemic among women, and Dru’s insistence on incorporating that understanding into her practice of intimacy shatters Vivey’s complacency and self-righteousness.

Deeply in love, but deeply self-assertive, both women struggle to avoid playing out the traditional “obligatory scene” of a break-up or a sexual stalemate. The ending of the play points to a radical transformation the holds the promise of healing for both.

Two females Twenty minutes Single set

THE GAGE AND MR. COMSTOCK A Ten-Minute Monologue

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • “Voices of Vashon,” WQHK904, Vashon Island, WA. • Venus Theatre, (staged reading) Washington, DC. • Winner, Got Theatre? Project, Syracuse, NY.

Formidable editor, author and Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, 67, lies in bed ripping up congratulatory notes from her well-wishers

67 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE about the recent publication of her lifework, Woman, Church, and State.

Her book, an impeccably-researched, comprehensive indictment of the historical misogyny of the christian church, is intended to start a revolution, and Gage is distressed by the polite responses from those who already share her views. In an attempt to stir controversy, she has sent a copy to a conservative member of the local school board, donating the book to the school library. She expresses her frustration that she has received no response.

After a mini-lecture on the custom of “throwing down the gage,” she vents her frustration about the fact that challenges by women are so seldom taken seriously. Gage’s exhaustion changes to exhilaration when she comes across a letter from Anthony Comstock, the notorious author of the national “Comstock Laws” that banned birth control and instituted strict censorship in arts and literature. Apparently, the school board member sent the book to him, and he has written to Gage threatening to press criminal charges against anyone who attempts to place the book in the hands of children.

Gage is delighted. She exposes the hypocrisy of Mr. Comstock and tells the appalling story of his persecution of Ann Lohman, a woman who was incarcerated for having performed abortions, and whom he pursued after her release, entrapping her in the sale of contraceptives to undercover agents. Lohman, unable to face the humiliation and trauma of a second incarceration slit her own throat the morning she was to appear in court for the second trial. Gage scores Comstock for his callous indifference to Lohman’s death, a direct result of his persecution of her.

Gage is delighted that Mr. Comstock has taken up her challenge and she gleefully anticipates the prospect of escalating the controversy surrounding her book, noting that, if all goes as she plans, Woman, Church and State should make it onto the Pope’s list of banned books.

One female Ten minutes Single set

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‘TIL THE FAT LADY SINGS A Play with Music in One Act

Music by Andrea Jill Higgins (and Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, and Gluck)

Sample of songs at www.myspace.com/tilthefatladysings

• Staged reading, Ohio State University, Columbus (directed by Christopher Purdy) for International Center for Women Playwrights Annual Retreat. • Maine Short Play Festival, Acorn Productions, Portland, ME.

Sara, a young woman in her early 30’s, lies in a hospital bed, waiting to be taken down to surgery for a gastric bypass operation. Sara weighs more than 250 pounds, and she is convinced that, without the surgery, she will never be able to realize her ambition to become a professional opera singer. Her years of training and graduate school will have been wasted.

Sara’s partner, Gillian, is opposed to the surgery, and when she shows up in the hospital room, an argument ensues. Realizing that their conflict is causing Sara distress, Gillian apologizes and asks Sara to sing “Vissi d’arte,” a favorite aria by Puccini. When a nurse arrives to administer a sedative, however, Gillian renews her opposition and exits.

Under sedation, Sara experiences a series of dreams which incorporate elements of well-known operas with concerns about the impending surgery and her experiences with fat oppression. The dream sequences include a comic interlude as a Rheinemaiden, an encounter with the “Ghost of Callas Past,” a confrontation with a Met director who insists on a graphically realistic finale of La Traviata, a duet with Papageno, confusion between Madame Butterfly’s hari- kari and gastric bypass surgery, and a scene from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in which Gillian plays the tormented troubadour on a mission to retrieve his love from the Underworld—a mission which must be achieved without turning and looking back at her.

At this point, Sara wakes up, but she is still confused by the drugs. Mistaking Gillian for Orfeo, she insists that Gillian not look at her,

69 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE because that is the only way to lead her out of hell. Gillian expresses a concern that perhaps Sara’s immersion in operas that reflect morbid male fantasies might be coloring Sara’s perceptions. She points out that what is making life hell for Sara is not the way she sees Sara, but the way other people see her. She challenges Sara to give a voice to her body, instead of trying to give a body to her voice.

Sara considers the suggestion and the play ends with her singing the aria, “This Body Is My Song,” a radical love song between a diva and her body.

Two female opera singers (soprano and contralto), one non-singing, walk-on role Thirty minutes Single set

THE A-MAZING YAMASHITA AND THE GOLDDIGGERS OF 2008 A Transnational, Postmodern Magic Show for the Millennium

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • Staged reading, Venus Theatre, Laurel, MD. • Acorn Productions, Portland, ME (reading).

Yamashita is a female magician, who promises us an evening of entertainment, where she will personally escort her audience “through the secret tunnels and nubiferous passageways of a post- colonialist, global economic maze, more hidden than King Solomon’s Tomb, more baffling than the riddle of the Sphinx and more impenetrable than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”

In fact, her Assistant has run away, and the A-Mazing Yamashita is compelled to recruit volunteers from the audience for her classic acts of levitating a woman, sawing a woman in half, and causing a woman to vanish in a magic cabinet, the Cabinet of GATT (yes, as in “General Agreements on Tariff and Trade”).

In the course of her highly unorthodox magic, the Assistant returns via the Cabinet, to warn the audience that Yamashita is actually

70 ONE-ACT PLAYS trafficking the women who volunteer for her magic acts. Yamashita, assuring the audience that this is all part of the act, produces a young Thai woman who has “chosen” to prostitute herself, illustrating the “magic” of GATT in generating market conditions that support the disappearing of women. Entering the Cabinet herself, Yamashita manages to convince the Stage Manager that there is no need for intervention. To reassure the audience, she calls on a Professor who responds to audience concerns with postmodern “deconstructions” of all their questions.

When her Assistant takes matters into her own hands, telephoning the police, Yamashita must disappear them all and then undertake the mass hypnosis of her entire audience. Explaining how the synaptic association of inequality with sexual arousal will eliminate any sense of discomfort about the evening, and, in fact, greatly enhance the audience’s ability to participate in the new global economy, Yamashita announces her intention to achieve this effect via displays of pornographic imagery. At this point, the Stage Manager pulls the electrical plug and the fate of the evening lies in the hands of the audience.

The real trick is to apply the lessons learned to the economic sleight-of-hand that globally erases women’s productivity, disappears over a hundred million women and girls a year, and commodifies the culture via increasing dissemination of pornography.

Seven women One man Two teenaged girls, one Asian Three adults, any gender Thirty minutes Single set

THE COUNTESS AND THE LESBIANS A One-Act for Three Women

• Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, Ireland. • Ballindoon Productions, Liberty Hall, Dublin. • St. Lawrence Arts Center, Portland, ME (Cauldron & Labrys).

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• Maine Association of Community Theatres Conference, Dover- Foxcroft. • TOSOS (reading), NYC.

“… an intelligent and witty look at the parallels between the Irish struggle and the struggle for gay rights… As the play unfolds, tensions between the characters surface not only because of the tricky love-triangle, but also due to the more contentious and telling political sympathies and views of the women… cleverly written and lucid… ” [Five-star rating] — The Metro, Dublin, Ireland.

“… a spirited dramatization of women’s involvement in the Easter Rising… The historical elements of the play are intriguing… engaging a broader narrative of feminist history.” —Irish Times, Dublin.

“Michael Collins meets The L-word? As unlikely as this sounds, Carolyn Gage’s provocative new one-act, The Countess and the Lesbians, pulls it off beautifully, while still managing to be that brave and sometimes daunting thing, an intellectual play about political issues… the graceful pacing, creative characterisations, and flashing good humour of this highly intelligent script means that it’s entertaining instead of polemic, a rousing good piece of theatre with a thoughtful message… an important play and a highly satisfying piece of theatre in its own right.” —Queer ID, Dublin.

“… some great one liners and wonderful comic construction peppered throughout a solid feminist argument that few could fault about recognition and identity… professional, perfectly- pitched and thought-provoking… The Countess and the Lesbians is a fascinating deconstruction of a time of Irish heroism, posing questions you’ll be talking about for days afterwards.”—Gaelick, [online magazine], Ireland.

“If Countess Markiewicz is sometimes overlooked, Eva is completely ignored in history. Before we did the play I had never heard of Eva Gore-Booth, but these women, these lesbians are part of our history and I think that the full houses prove that people are willing to re-educate themselves.” —Gina Costigan, Ballindoon Productions, Dublin.

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Kathleen is directing a play about Countess Constance Markiewicz, after her arrest for her participation in the Easter Rising. The play is based on the writings by the Countess, by her sister Eva Gore- Booth, and by her sister’s life companion Esther Roper.

Kathleen’s partner Grace is performing the role of Eva, while Kathleen plays the Countess. Their real-life relationship mirrors the dynamic between the sisters: Grace, who despises conflict, plays a supporting role to Kathleen, who is multi-talented and very ambitious. Nan, playing the role of Esther is in love with Grace, and she becomes increasingly aggressive in challenging Kathleen’s directorial and dramaturgical choices.

When Kathleen fires Nan from the play, Grace produces excerpts from a play by Eva Gore-Booth, The Death of Fionavar, and requests that they do a reading of them. In the play, Eva has used a tale from Irish mythology to illustrate her political differences with her sister. Fionavar, the Queen’s daughter, is so upset by the sight of bloody corpses, she falls dead—even though her mother was the supposed victor.

As the women wrestle with their pride and their options, they make a radical choice to continue to cling to the wreck of the rehearsal process until there is some light. The play, like the love of Ireland among the historical characters, is a thing that unites them and that transcends their ego, and as they continue to inhabit the characters, the actors discover that the script becomes a vehicle for expressing and transforming their emotions. As the template for their former relationships is shattered, they use the Irish play as a temporary structure from which they can begin the process of rebuilding.

Three women One hour Single set

SOUVENIRS FROM EDEN A One-Act Play

• 2009, St. Lawrence Arts Center, Portland, ME.

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Souvenirs from Eden is a play about a survivor struggling to make peace with memories of betrayal and abandonment. In the play, the ghost of the lesbian poet Renée Vivien returns to a memory of her summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, (then named “Eden”) in 1900, when she was the guest of her lover Natalie Barney, who would later become a celebrated salonist. Both women were very young and very wealthy.

Renée’s attempt to revisit the memory in order to gain closure is disrupted by both Natalie and the Stage Manager. The Stage Manager manipulates props and impersonates a dangerous visitor from Renée’s past, and Natalie perpetually goes “off script,” refusing to allow Renée to demonize her.

The memory continues to recycle, as Renée imposes different endings on it. Finally, the deeper betrayal by her mother surfaces, and Renée is offered an authentic opportunity to gain closure. Instead, she escalates her blaming of Natalie, and Natalie responds by appropriating the narrative. She describes her first lesbian crush in Eden, and the innocence of her memory antagonizes Renée who fails to recognize it as the key to closure and healing. Natalie walks out, as Renée resorts to her familiar abuse of sedatives and alcohol. The memory starts to loop again, unassimilated and inassimilable.

Three women Single set 25 minutes

BLACK EYE A Knockout in Nine Minutes

• 2010, Pace University, NYC. • 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays. • 2009, Women’s Theatre Project, Ft. Lauderdale. • Art of the Play, Kennebunk, ME.

The year is 1953 and the setting is a middle-school principal’s office and the waiting area outside the door. Amanda, a thirteen-year-old

74 ONE-ACT PLAYS tomboy, is waiting disconsolately on a bench. She sports a brand new black eye, and has apparently been fighting.

Her P.E. teacher, Miss Marshall, has been summoned to a consultation about the incident with the principal. On the way to his office, she checks in with Amanda, and the audience understands that she has been coaching the girl on her fighting skills.

The principal, Mr. Kent, is expelling Amanda and is hoping that Miss Marshall will be willing to convey the news to both Amanda and to her mother, as Miss Marshall is the girl’s favorite teacher. Miss Marshall is angered by the decision, arguing that the fight was provoked by the boys’ homophobic harassment.

When Mr. Kent attempts to terminate the meeting, Miss Marshall admits that she has taught the girl how to defend herself, and she informs him that she believes in fighting. She threatens to “out” Mr. Kent to the school board if he follows through on the expulsion. Mr. Kent is confident that she will not do this, as he knows that she is also in a same-sex relationship. Miss Marshall manages to trump his ace, however, and he agrees not to expel Amanda.

Leaving the office, Miss Marshall has a final, triumphant and subversive interaction with her student.

A woman, a girl, and a man Single set Nine minutes

HERMENEUTIC CIRCLEJERK

A Postmodern Exposé

• 20210, Venus Theatre, Laurel, MD. (reading)

The play opens in a café in Paris, in 1977. Michel-Henri, a middle- aged academic, sits at a small table with a bottle of wine. Jacques- Pierre, his colleague, rushes in with the news that the Parliament has just rejected a petition they both signed, to abolish the age of

75 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE consent and decriminalize “consenting” relations between adults and children. Jacques-Pierre is distraught, blaming Michel-Henri for having persuaded him to sign it.

Michel-Henri argues that it was the right thing to do, and that he, Michel-Henri, can no longer settle for a life of shame and hiding, but must take a public stand for who he is. Jacques-Pierre, drinking heavily, begins to agree with him, becoming more and more inappropriate as the evening wears on.

Agreeing with Jacques-Pierre that the rejection of the petition has left them both vulnerable, Michel-Henri hits on the idea of founding a new philosophy that will confuse people and undermine the moral objections to pedophilia. He appeals to Jacques-Pierre to help him create a special language of obfuscation for the movement.

Jacques-Pierre refuses, telling Michel-Henri he intends to repair his reputation by saying that Michel-Henri made him sign the petition. At this point, their interaction moves into a perpetration scenario, with Michel-Henri overriding Jacques-Pierre’ protests and Jacques- Pierre becoming more and more submissive. The play ends with his capitulation, and postmodernism is founded.

Two adult males, one adult woman of color (narrator) Single set 20 minutes

LACE CURTAIN IRISH A One-Woman, One-Act

• Staged reading, Fall Playwrights’ Festival, Provincetown Theatre, MA.

Thirty-five years after the infamous Fall River ax murders, a 61- year-old Irish woman, working in her kitchen in Anaconda, Montana, opens a newspaper to read about the death of the alleged murderer, Lizzie Borden. The woman is Bridget Sullivan, the Borden’s former maid.

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As she reads the article, Bridget shares with the audience her rage toward her former employer’s daughter, whom she believes attempted to frame her for the murders. She has been haunted by a recurring, mysterious dream that begins with lace curtains and believes she was a witness, but that she has blocked the memory.

Drinking heavily, she shares with us what she remembers of that fateful day: how, in spite of being sick with food poisoning on the hottest day of the year, Mrs. Borden had still ordered her to wash all the windows in the house.

As she speaks, Bridget is stretching lace curtains on blocking frames. The frames have small pins around the edges for attaching the lace, and Bridget, in her anger, keeps pricking her fingers and staining the margins with blood.

After the trial, Lizzie sent Bridget a substantial amount of money, with the condition that she leave the US and return permanently to Ireland. Bridget believes Lizzie must have seen her face at the window, and that the offer was an attempt to buy her silence. Bridget brags about returning under another name to Anaconda, Montana, a prosperous mining town run by Irish immigrants.

Declaring that Lizzie was a “tommy” (a lesbian), Bridget accuses her of courting her with kindness, in an attempt to set her up for the murders. Bridget’s childhood with fourteen siblings was a harsh one, and, wanting to escape her mother’s fate, she has emigrated with a dream of having an independent life.

Holding up a frame of lace, she is surprised by the sudden retrieval of a memory from the day of the murders. Approaching the parlor window, she did not witness the murder, but saw instead the reflection of her own face, resembling the face of her mother. This memory triggers a string of other memories that contradict her version of events for that day. Increasingly confused, Bridget begins to realize the true identity of the murderer and understand that the woman she has demonized for thirty-five years nearly sacrificed her life in order to save Bridget.

One woman Single set 30 minutes

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THE GREATEST ACTRESS WHO EVER LIVED

A One-Act Play

A young, closeted reporter arrives at the dressing room of stage and film star Nance O'Neil. The year is 1930 and O'Neil is playing Irene Dunne's mother in the film Cimarron.

The reporter is aware of the rumors about Nance's lesbian affairs, and Nance is aware that the reporter is closeted. As the two women spar over issues of authenticity and reputation, Nance makes the intriguing proposal to give the reporter the story of "the greatest actress who ever lived" in exchange for the opportunity to interview the reporter about her life.

The reporter reveals the fact that she is divorced with a daughter, and Nance begins to tell the story of her affair with alleged ax- murderer Lizzie Borden. In the telling of this story, Nance claims to have discovered the identity of the real murderer, as well as the deception that Lizzie practiced throughout her life in order to protect this woman.

The women share a moment of intimacy before the reality of their respective lives claims their allegance.

Two women Single set 30 minutes

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THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND SELECTED PLAYS [2009]

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama. • Published by Outskirts Press, CO. • “Self-Published Book-Review-of-the-Week,” http://selfpublishingadvice.wordpress.com

“… an exciting page-turner that is at once challenging and informative… inventive and thought-provoking take on women’s lives.”—HerStoria, Wallasey, UK.

“… penetrating, gutsy and often painfully funny.”—John Manderino, playwright and author.

This is a brand new collection of Gage’s best historical plays, including the award-winning title work, a play that has been performed around the world for more than two decades.

In Artemisia and Hildegard, Gage explores the tensions between assimilation and separatism in the explosive encounter on an academic arts panel between 17th century baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi and 12th century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. She revisits this theme in her widely-produced play, Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist. Tubman, suspected of planning an escape, has been sent to the Therapist, another African-American woman, for an evaluation. Radical activism meets one-day-at-a-time therapism in this play that won the Off-Off Broadway Festival and was produced at the Louisville Juneteenth Festival.

The one-woman plays include The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman, a full-length play about the l9th century performer whose lesbian affairs were a dramatic as her cross-dressed roles on the stage. The Parmachene Belle is a one-woman show about Cornelia Crosby, a 19th century Maine hunting guide with a crush on Annie Oakley, who was a survivor of torture and child sexual abuse. This is a play about outcasts, misfits, and survivors—Crosby, Oakley,

77 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE and Sitting Bull—who all struggled to invent ways to continue in the face of shattered dreams and hopeless prospects.

The other plays include Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter and Cookin’ with Typhoid Mary.

NINE SHORT PLAYS

• Published by Outskirts Press, CO.

“As Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America, the book is an intellectual banquet… the reader will get the education of a lifetime.” —Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

“… complex and beautiful…”—Lesbian Connections, East Lansing, MI.

Nine Short Plays is a collection of the best of Gage’s one-act plays from 1988 to 2007.

In these plays, Gage explores the impact of the dominant culture on intimate relationships, illustrating with dramatic intensity how interpersonal dynamics reflect political paradigms.

For example, in Louisa May Incest, the author of Little Women is confronted by her alter ego Jo March for her decisions to force her spunky heroine to burn her writing, abandon her career, and marry an impoverished, unambitious older man.

One of Gage’s strongest themes is internalized oppression. In Patricide, an incest survivor confronts her father in a telephone conversation. The real dialogue, however, is between her self-doubt and her need to assert her truth.

Another theme of the plays is the impact of colonization on the human spirit. The Pele Chant, a play about the daughter of Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani, explores how the often hidden mechanism of spiritual colonization can be the “Trojan horse” through which entire dominions are lost.

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And, as always, the conflict between Gage’s love for theatre and her critique of its historical misogyny is represented in the collection. Bite My Thumb is a satirical look at cross-dressing and gender- bending as practiced—or not—by a mainstream rep company and a women’s theatre. Battered on Broadway examines the masochism and martyrdom embedded in female roles in the traditional Broadway musical. In Entr’acte, the war comes home in a play about a rape that occurred backstage during a Broadway run of a play that romanticized domestic violence. The victim, lesbian actress Eva Le Gallienne, is in a sanatorium, facing the crisis of her career—a crisis that will lead to her founding of one of the most famous theatres in the world. Gage describes her process in the introduction:

My modus operandi is to tell a story wherein the character’s irresistible impulsion, usually toward some form of freedom, is checked by a seemingly immoveable force of society. If the characters have enough integrity and the situation enough authenticity, I find myself, at least for a while, wrestling with angels or demons. And then there is a break- through, a shift into another paradigm, where radical possibility abounds. This is why I write.

The anthology includes The Obligatory Scene, Bite My Thumb, Entr’acte or The Night Eva Le Gallienne Was Raped, The Pele Chant, Louisa May Incest, The Rules of the Playground, Patricide, Jane Addams and the Devil Baby, and Battered on Broadway.

THREE COMEDIES

A collection of three award-winning, full-length comedies.

The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women: A farcical, audience-interactive courtroom drama, where the audience must serve as judge and jury in a case against the five women who betrayed the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, the last surviving daughter of the Tsar of Russia. Complex ethical questions on a set of folding chairs.

Sappho in Love: A lesbian “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with the goddesses of celibacy, love, and marriage competing for Sappho’s

79 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE attention amid poetry contests, meteor showers, lessons on lesbian love-making, romantic trysting, mix-ups and disguises. Wet and wild romantic comedy!

Thanatron: A rollicking farce about the world’s most dysfunctional family, a doctor with a penchant for assisted suicide, and a lesbian housekeeper with a crush on her employer. An over-the-top comedy about leaving, being left, and what it takes to stay.

THE TRIPLE GODDESS

A collection of three full-length dramas:

The Goddess Tour: It’s a dark and stormy night at a remote inn on the Burren of Western Ireland, as six American women -- strangers to each other (or are they?)—gather for a tour of ancient goddess sites. A murder mystery exploring potentially deadly mother- daughter dyads, played out amid ghostly sightings of lost children and pre-Celtic rituals involving various aspects of the goddess

Ugly Ducklings: Two counselors at a summer camp struggle with their love against a backdrop of homophobia. Scenes with the campers depict with chilling accuracy the cruelty of girls towards those they perceive as outsiders. Powerful lesbian drama!

Esther and Vashti: A romantic drama set against a backdrop of war in ancient Persia. A young Hebrew woman and her former lover, the Queen of Persia, struggle against their personal and political differences to form an alliance against a common enemy.

BLACK EYE AND OTHER SHORT PLAYS A collection of ten short plays.

Black Eye: Subtitled “a knockout in nine minutes,” this short play packs a punch. The year is 1953, and Amanda is a 13-year-old tomboy who has been sent to the principal’s office for fighting the boys who have been lesbian-baiting her. When the principal, who is in the closet, moves to expel her, Amanda’s lesbian P.E. teacher shows that she is just as willing to fight as her student. A taut play, filled with surprises.

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The Ladies’ Room: A five-minute play about two lesbian teenagers in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. The butch has just been mistaken for a man, and mall security is on the way. Her girlfriend, because of her own history,is conflicted about offering support.

A Conversation on a Foreign Planet:

The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Gold Diggers of 2011: “The transnational, postmodern magic show of the millennia!” The A- Mazing Yamashita promises to levitate a woman, cut a woman in two, and disappear a hundred thousand women—all through the wizardry of modern pharmaceuticals, the presto-chango of sexual com-modification, and the wonders of the Great Cabinet of GATT.

The Rules of the Playground: Six mothers of middle-school children come together for a special training on playground violence. Focusing on perfecting the rules of the playground to eliminate inequality, the women, literally, turn a blind eye to the real cause of violence. A chilling interrogation into the ways women teach each other to enable male violence.

The Boundary Trial of John Proctor: A one-act featuring the notorious anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s Crucible, and the women he exploited. John Proctor, finding himself in the boundary lands of patriarchy after his execution, encounters a second trial—this time by the women. Proctor, who does not believe in witches, scrambles desperately for context as he is tested by his ex-wife, his mistress, a formerly enslaved Caribbean woman, the town baglady, the town bluestocking, and the town matriarch.

The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide: Fast-paced radio drama, suitable for stage production. The conspiracy of the German drug manufacturers and the FDA unfolds like a murder mystery, as Dr. Frances Kelsey, suspecting birth defects, stalls for time against mounting pressures to license sale of “the sleeping pill of the century.”

A Labor Play: Kafka-esque one-act about a multi-national corporation in the business of selling babies. “Business as usual” comes to a halt when one of the workers strikes for control of the distribution of manufactured goods. In other words, she wants to keep the baby.

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Heterosexuals Anonymous: A playful send-up of the 12-step movement. Five women in recovery from their addictions to men, convene at their weekly meeting. The format includes personal testimonies and the reading of the 12 Steps of HA.

The P.E. Teacher: A one-act about misogyny, racism, and homophobia in the schools. A new teacher is hired to replace a lesbian teacher who resigned under suspicious circumstances. When a former lover turns up on staff, it becomes evident that the scapegoating is a cover for the school’s institutionalized violence against women and girls.

The Gage and Mr. Comstock: A monologue by feminist foremother and Suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, in which she sets the bait for Anthony Comstock to ban her book, Woman, Church and State, a comprehensive exposé of the historical misogyny of the christian church.

TAKE STAGE! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play

• Featured in Feminist Bookstore Network Catalogue. • Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Hilo, HI. • Published by Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD.

“In Take Stage!, Carolyn Gage has given us an invaluable resource for producing lesbian theatre in our communities— brilliant in attention to the details of theatrical production, uncompromising in its treatment of the human and economic factors involved, firmly grounded in her experiences as a playwright, director, and producer, and throughout informed by a solid, lesbian-centered politic that prioritizes class, race, and accessibility in specific, practical ways. This book is so full of information about organizing, fund-raising, and the dynamics of lesbian groups that any lesbian engaged in grassroots politics should own at least one copy. WARNING! If you loan it out, Take Stage! is a book that probably won’t come back!” — Julia Penelope, co-editor of The Original Coming Out Stories, For Lesbians Only, and Lesbian Culture: An Anthology.

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“… chock full of new ideas and common sense about choosing, mounting, publicizing, and surviving the live theatre experience… cracks open the mysteries of the successful theatre venture… Most important, the book addresses the complex underpinnings of accountability, leadership, and collaboration in the differently structured world of women-run groups… a real resource guide… concise, readable, and inspiring.” —The Lesbian Review of Books, Hilo, HI.

“… a kick-ass primer on self-producing, with timelines, sample press releases, flyers, and every other kind of helpful thing. ... Her coverage on “victims and victimizers” and the effects of traumatized people who dissociate and create backstage “drama” is psychologically spot on. I wish I had read this years ago. It would have saved me many the headache and “blame game” in dealing with struggling small groups. It’s a unique book on producing plays… It just went onto my top shelf.” — Linda Eisenstein, author of Three the Hard Way and Marla’s Devotion.

The first comprehensive “how-to” book for lesbians wanting to produce or direct lesbian theatre. 300 pages of everything you would ever need to know, from script selection to striking the set, about putting on a lesbian play.

The author has been the founder and artistic director of three theatre companies, including a studio art theatre, a large community theatre, and a radical feminist theatre. She has worked with lesbian theatre collectives, toured and performed at women’s festivals and conferences for the last six years, and worked with lesbian producers all over the country.

Conversational and anecdotal, TAKE STAGE! is written for the lesbian who has no previous experience with theatre or lesbian organization. In addition to the chapters on auditioning, rehearsals, picking the script, booking the space, assembling a staff, etc., the book also includes special chapters on the unique challenges to lesbians creating theatre.

TAKE STAGE! includes information on how to challenge the “isms” - looksism, racism, ageism, ableism, fat phobia, and all the other prejudices that are entrenched in mainstream theatre. TAKE STAGE! also looks at co-dependence in women and the problems this can cause in an organization staffed by volunteers. The author

83 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE takes on the class structure and hierarchy that can develop within a theatre, and she proposes concrete strategies for developing alternative systems.

The fifty-page appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms, light plots, budgets, and schedules. A gold mine of practical forms and charts!

TAKE STAGE! is filled with examples from real lesbian theatre groups, examples of situations which arose when the structure of the company was ambiguous, when the roles were poorly defined, or when the communication was not clear.

SCENES AND MONOLOGUES FOR LESBIAN ACTORS: REVISED AND EXPANDED The First Scene Study Book for Lesbians

• Published by Odd Girls Press, Anaheim, CA. • Second Edition published by Outskirts Press, Parkman, CO.

“No playwright has created as amazing a pantheon of historical lesbian characters as Carolyn Gage. Her book, Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, provides a sumptuous feast of possibilities for both seasoned and budding lesbian performers to use portraying a full range of emotion and political perspectives. Carolyn Gage is a national lesbian treasure.” —Rosemary Keefe Curb, editor of Amazon All Stars: 13 Lesbian Plays.

“Her dozens of strong, funny, determined characters are a gift to lesbian actors everywhere... She also has a wicked sense of humor… ” —Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco.

“… remarkable strength and universality… moving and courageous… the collection will appeal to a readership beyond lesbian actors, because through careful research and deliberation Gage has created many stories of women’s lives.

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In her writing, she makes one face truths one might normally try to avoid.” —Lambda Book Report, Washington, DC.

“Gage’s imagination and her richness of dialogue are a wonderful offering to a theatre community that could certainly use a push in the direction of representing us all on the stage.” —On the Purple Circuit, Los Angeles.

“Strong contributions such as Gage’s should indeed help alleviate the long-standing situation of lesbians having to learn the craft of acting by impersonating heterosexuals… recommended for libraries supporting drama programs (schools as well as academic) and public libraries in towns and cities with community theatre.” —Newsletter of the Theatre Library Association, NYC.

“… a diversity of roles to stimulate the most adventurous lesbian performer… this text enables the reader to see the impressive range of her work as well as to supply a needed sourcebook for auditions and scene work in one volume.” — The Lesbian Review of Books, Hilo, HI.

My copy of Carolyn Gage’s Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors is dog-eared from frequent rereading and lending it to my sister-poets. In this book, Gage has given queer women theatre artists more than an array of sincere, intense, and electrically wit-loaded scenes and monologues. I’m thinking in particular of those from The Last Coming of Joan of Arc, The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman, and Ugly Ducklings. Gage showcases a historical pantheon of lesbian movers, shakers, and culture-makers, announces a lesbian playwriting and performance tradition, and locates herself and her work in both. Gage shouts and sings a confirmation, invitation, and challenge to the rest of us.” —R.L. Nesvet, Playwright and Theatre Critic.

Finally! A book for lesbians who are tired of “passing” at auditions and in acting classes and workshops! Here at last, from one of the most talented and inventive contemporary playwrights, is a book of thirty-two monologues and sixty scenes by, for, and about lesbians. Here are dramatic portrayals of our coming-out stories, our strategies of resistance, our rescue of survivors of sexual abuse, our passions, our torture, our triumphs. The settings are historic and

85 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE contemporary, ranging from the goddess temples of Lesbos to the locker rooms of a softball team.

This collection includes scenes with characters taken from lesbian history: Jane Addams, Charlotte Cushman, Joan of Arc, Calamity Jane, Sappho, Babe Didrikson, Benedetta Carlini, Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, and Eva LeGallienne. It also includes women from history whose sexual orientation may or may not have been documented, but whose survival strategies resonate with strategies of lesbians. These strategies include the separatism of Hildegard von Bingen, the confrontation of sexual violation in the art of Artemisia Gentileschi, the liberation struggle of Harriet Tubman, the repression and denial of Louisa May Alcott, the resistance of Mary Mallon (“Typhoid Mary”).

The book also includes material from plays protesting the sexual colonizing of women through the institutions of heterosexism: prostitution, surrogate motherhood, incest, rape, marriage, and the “slow-motion violence” of economic and political disenfranchisement. Two of the plays deal with the historic closeting of teachers in the school system, and one play specifically confronts the constrictive gender roles of the traditional canon.

Many of the scenes reflect contemporary lesbian culture with all of our in-house conflicts and contradictions. These scenes take place on the ball field of a women’s softball team, on a sound stage for a lesbian erotic film company, in a cabin on a 1970’s-style lesbian land collective, at the waterfront of a girls’ summer camp, on the soundstage of a lesbian concert, in a lesbian nightclub, in the bedroom.

THE SPINDLE AND OTHER LESBIAN FAIRY TALES Illustrations by Sudie Rakusin

“Carolyn Gage has created a lasting feminist work in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales, one that shatters stereotypes, defies hetero-convention and will defy the years as it becomes a classic in every feminist’s library.”— Sacramento Arts and Entertainment Examiner.

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"Carolyn Gage offers readers important insight and representations in the powerful stories and imagery provided in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales. The collection meets the challenge of creating lesbian fairy tales that look unflinchingly at the world but are still imaginative, creative, and magical. Readers will enjoy these stories in all their complexity and bravery." Rain and Thunder, Northampton, MA.

A collection of four short stories and one full-length play about lesbian princesses, woman-princes, goddesses, and fairy godmothers! Magic, mystery, romance… with a radical politic!

BECCA AND THE WOMAN PRINCE A European princess meets an African woman prince in this romantic, multicultural, feminist fairy tale! THE PRINCESS OF PAIN A woman struggling with disability sets out on a ten-goddess quest for answers. THE FURIES Three lesbian surper-heroines debate the wisdom of accepting a young survivor into their league. ANDREA AND MEDUSA GET INTIMATE Two lesbian surper-heroines discover that some of the most dangerous missions are the ones closest to home. THE SPINDLE In this “children's theatre for adults,” a young lesbian sets out to rescue the princess from the curse of the spindle-pricking on her sixteenth birthday, only to discover that the entire kingdom is under the spindle spell!

STARTING FROM ZERO

ONE-ACT PLAYS ABOUT LESBIANS IN LOVE

A collection of plays dealing with historical themes, about lesbians in love, including:

THE GREATEST ACTRESS WHO EVER LIVED A closeted reporter arrives in the dressing room of veteran, bisexual stage and film star Nance O'Neil, and as Nance shares

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the details of her affair with alleged ax murderess Lizzie Borden, the two women share a moment of intimacy. SOUVENIRS FROM EDEN The ghost of lesbian poet Renée Vivien returns to a pivotal memory from the summer of 1900, when she was in Bar Harbor (“Eden”), Maine, with her lover Natalie Barney. She wrestles with scenarios of traumatic memories in an attempt to find closure. LACE CURTAIN IRISH Thirty-five years after the infamous Fall River ax murders, an Irish woman, working in her kitchen in Anaconda, Montana, opens a newspaper to read about the death of the alleged murderer, Lizzie Borden. The woman is Bridget Sullivan, the Borden's former maid. A gripping solo one-act that turns history on its head! THE COUNTESS AND THE LESBIANS Three lesbian actors are rehearsing an historical play about Countess Markiewicz and the aftermath of her participation in the Easter Week Rising in Dublin. The play is about her political differences with her sister, who was a pacifist. As the women take up the issues of the play, the power dynamics of their own lesbian relationships are called into question. ‘TIL THE FAT LADY SINGS A play with music for two women in one-act. A fat woman in her 20’s is in the hospital awaiting surgery for a gastric bypass operation she believes necessary for her dream of singing opera professionally. Her partner is against the surgery, and as the patient goes under sedation, she finds herself and her partner in a series of bizarre dreams where her situation incorporates elements of operas by Wagner, Gluck, Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini. DEEP HAVEN A dramatic adaptation of the lesbian writings of beloved 19th- century New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Including excerpts form her novels, diaries, letters, and poems. SINCE I DIED A dramatic adaptation of a 19th century, New England short story. A woman who has recently died attempts and fails to communicate with her lesbian life partner, who is unable to see her.

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LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW

MEDITATIONS FOR WOMEN LEAVING PATRIARCHY

• Published by Common Courage Press, Monroe, ME. • Named top fifteen books for Feminist Theory study group, off our backs, Washington, DC.

“I was more deeply moved and ‘sinspired’ by Carolyn Gage’s new book than by anything else I’ve read in years. Like There’s No Tomorrow has qualities rarely seen in current “theory.” It is a work of burning, uncompromising vision and daring… a beacon of hope in these chilling times of compromise, timidity and apparent defeat. This book is Pure Fire. It is true and therefore extreme… a stunning manifestation of Radical Lesbian Feminist Courage and Genius.” —Mary Daly, Radical Feminist Philospher and author of Pure Lust, Gyn/Ecology, and Outercourse.

“Many feminists are brilliant, but how many are wise? Playwright Carolyn Gage is a radical lesbian feminist who is wise, as this book demonstrates … uncompromising and tough-minded, yet inspiring… ” —Carol Anne Douglas, off our backs, Washington, DC.

“I've had a copy of the manuscript for less than a month, and it is covered with underlined passages and post it notes. Already, I find myself referring to it constantly, incorporating it into what I need to know about the world.”—Elliot, Women’s Books Online.

“I am replete or content. I feel as if I have had a most satisfying feast. I have been reading this book off and on for about two weeks, and although I am a quick reader, this is a book to have by your bedside or your favorite chair to think on as you read passages as needed.” — Mary Atkins, Uppity Women Magazine.

Like There’s No Tomorrow takes no prisoners. This is a meditation book that will clear your political sinuses and blow out the cobwebs of fuzzy “live-and-let-live” thinking. These annotated quotations may be read as a series of mini-lectures, as inspirational meditations, or as a Cook’s tour of women’s history.

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Hot role models! Sor Ines de la Cruz, Chrystos, Sappho, Saadawi —and a host of unsung heroines!

Cool strategy! How to lay in for a siege, turn the tables, seize the offensive.

Suspenseful stories! Donaldina Cameron’s daring rescue of prostituted Asian girls, Fannie Lou Hamer’s courageous resistance to police brutality, Lillian Hellman’s defiant stand at the McCarthy hearings.

Words of wisdom Quotations urging women to hold a grudge, cherish our anger, cultivate our rage, mind other people’s business, and live Like There’s No Tomorrow!

These meditations are written with a light touch, but a deep politic. For the woman who finds “one day at a time” a formula for despair— finally a meditation book for those in search of radical healing.

THE GAIA PAPERS In Search of a Science of Gaia

“I think Gage is onto something here by combining the process of healing used by Mary Baker Eddy with her radical feminist activism… The Gaia Papers has the potential to begin a transformative conversation about spirituality, healing and women…”—Dr. Deidre Michell, author of Christian Science: Women, Healing, and the Church.

The Gaia Papers is a fifty-page tract that applies a lens of radical feminist metaphysic to explore the age-old question of the nature of evil.

Confronting the gendered nature of violence against women and children and the patriarchal systems that promote this violence, The Gaia Papers interrogate the place of “the goddess” in this dismal cosmogony.

Following a line of metaphysical logic pioneered by Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th century, The Gaia Papers invite the reader to draw conclusions about the nature of gender based on a radically feminist

90 BOOKS spirituality… conclusions that may defy the evidence of the material senses.

Without falling into the trap of transcendental or enabling philosophies, The Gaia Papers outline a mode of inquiry intended to aid the reader in working with the metaphors in which they find themselves.

13 PROPOSITIONS FOR REWIRING THE LESBIAN BRAIN

“These 13 Propositions are my "keep it simple stupid" outline. It is an invitation for me to seriously examine what hasn't been working. It is the outline I need to begin to re-wire my brain. I appreciate that they are proposals, not requirements… that the change and healing is left to me. It is gift…”—V.E.

A thirty-six page “electrician’s manual” for reprogramming key concepts about intimate relationships.

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND OTHER PLAYS [1994]

• National finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. • Published by HerBooks, Santa Cruz, CA.

“… a whole women’s theatre tradition in one volume… wonderful to read—rich, original deeply affirming—and must be phenomenal to see on stage. The culture of women we have never had is invented in Carolyn Gage’s brilliant and beautiful plays.” —Andrea Dworkin, feminist philosopher, activist, author.

“… the toughest, most lesbian/feminist-identified work for theatre I know… brilliant and daring scripts… ” —John Stoltenberg, Former Executive Editor, On the Issues.

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“Carolyn Gage is a fabulous feminist playwright, and a major one too. This is great theatre. Gage’s dramatic and lesbian imagination is utterly original… There is no rhetoric here: only one swift and pleasurable intake of breath after another… Women’s mental health would improve, instantly, were they able to read and see these plays performed.” —Phyllis Chesler, Author of Women and Madness

This collection of seven of Gage’s most popular one-acts was a national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. The title work has been the subject of a National Public Radio feature, and a first-class production of the play ran for two years in Brazil. The other plays in the collection include: Mason-Dixon, Jane Addams and the Devil Baby, Louisa May Incest, Battered on Broadway, Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter, and Cookin’ with Typhoid Mary.

SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL

• 2007-2010 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival • 2008 National Women’s Music Festival, Normal, IL • We are 1 Festival in Durham, NC; Deer Creek House in Roseburg, OR; Michfest Fundraiser, Natick, MA; Lesbian All-Star Revue, Portland, ME. • Women in the Arts Festival, Lansing, MI. • Curriculum, Women’s Studies course, Flinders Univ., Australia.

“The Lesbian Tent Revival—inspiring, encouraging, truth- telling, amazing, comedic, must-reading for all Radical Feminists. I never had so much fun as at the Tent Revivals at Michigan, being in a crowd of like-minded, laughing, singing, applauding and shouting-out with Sister Carolyn. She's pure genius. Buy This Book. You won't be sorry.” —Susan Wiseheart.

“… by far the best book I've read all year. It may even qualify as the best feminist book I've read—ever… Each sermon led to another unique discovery within myself—some sermons forced me to think about subjects I had never wanted to address,

92 BOOKS while other sermons expanded my views on topics I thought I already knew enough about. Reading Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival was a remarkable journey to undertake, as a woman and as a reader, and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you are a woman—heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian—you must buy this book and discover Sister Carolyn's Sermons for yourself. It's a journey you won't regret taking. Blessed be!”—N.E. Francis, Sacramento Arts & Entertainment Examiner.

“Sisters, I have seen the light and felt the spark. Sister Carolyn's tent revivals have saved my soul from the hellfire of obfuscation… Hallelujah!”—Amy McLoughlin, Ann Arbor, MI

“The LTR rocked my world! In August at the MWMF my Aussie mates agreed that The LTR was our highlite and we left wanting more—much more. Clearly our weary les fem souls needed saving! Each morning Sister Carolyn delivered a riveting, inspiring and humourous sermon that made us sit up and think, laugh, cry.”—Georgina Abrahams, Sydney, Australia

“Sisters! I have been SAVED!”—Callie

“I know that you brought back full circle what … is in danger of being lost.”—Maria Karpinski

“In these sermons, Sister Carolyn gives voice to women's experiences - the ones we feel in our gut every day, but don't have words for. She paints vivid pictures with her words and illuminates the world in a way that will never leave your mind… Every woman will be moved by these sermons; every lesbian will be transformed by them.”—Amy Lewis, Denver, CO

My sister sent me Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival. People often have a way with words, or a way with ideas, but seldom both. I read Gynecology, Native Tongue, Cyborg Manifesto etc. but I can't say I was racked with laughter to balance the agony. I read your book in one sitting, like a glutton. It was the best read in years. You rock, Sister:)—Helena Saayaman, Pretoria, South Africa.

For the first time in print! Thirteen sermons delivered by Sister Carolyn of the Sacred Synapse at her notorious “Lesbian Tent Revival.” Reviving the spirit of sisterhood from those heady days of

93 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE the early feminist movement, Sister Carolyn revives her flock in a series of hilarious, radical, rabble-rousing sermons designed to heal them of “S.I.N.”—the Synaptically Inadequate Networking that has been imposed on us all by a pornographized, dumbed-down, corporate, consumerist culture!

These thirteen sermons remind women to resist the disconnection that, in the words of Sister Robin Morgan, has become institutionalized by patriarchy. Sister Carolyn urges her congregation to remember, to synapse, to make the connections between the environmental crisis, and personal nutrition, and psychiatric health, and medical misogyny, and social conditioning, and political awareness. She inspires women to reach back into their own histories and the histories of their foremothers for strategies that reinforce connection and weave webs of alliances and support.

Sister Carolyn’s topics range from economics (“The Great Pyramid Scheme”), to lesbian limerance (“The Real L-Words”), to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Einstein’s Unified Field theory. She preaches on the impact of global father-son religions on the well-being and mental health of women, on techniques that engage the imagination to counter the effects of internalized oppression, and on the clinical truth about the clitoris as a tip-of-the-iceberg metaphor for women’s hidden power.

The Lesbian Tent Revival, held at national women’s festivals, has been a rousing success, and the publication of these sermons should help spread the spark of radical feminism across a world sunk in darkness and disconnection.

SUPPLEMENTAL SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL

A second volume of sermons from the fourth and fifth years of the Lesbian Tent Revival, with a section in the back of song lyrics. This volume includes “The LesbianTent Revival Marriage Ceremony” and “The Lesbian Butch: Hope of the Planet.

BIRTH OF A LESBIAN [OUT OF PRINT] A Science Fiction Autobiography

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The author has created a fantastic, nightmarish parable as a tool for understanding the experiences of her childhood.

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A WOMAN’S BOOK OF HEALING

An adaption of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, for use by those who are seeking a metaphysical system of healing with an emphasis on right relation and connection with the natural world, where a higher power is metaphorically referenced as female.

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CD’S AND DVD’S

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC [CD]

Audio recording of a live performance of Carolyn Gage in her award-winning, feminist classic The Second Coming of Joan of Arc. The recording was made in June Millington’s historic recording studio in Bodega, California.

UGLY DUCKLINGS: THE DOCUMENTARY [DVD]

Documentary film by Fawn Yacker, produced by Hardy Girls Healthy Women of Waterville, Maine. The film contains excerpts from Gage’s award-winning play Ugly Ducklings, as well as interviews with Gage and members of the cast. The film is part of a campaign to prevent LGBT youth suicides and homophobic bullying in the schools.

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