I have never really understood Sandra Bernhard. It’s not that I haven’t tried. After admiring her fantastic turn as ballsy sexual harassment lawyer Caroline Poop on Ally McBeal, my absolutely favorite show at the time (1997) about my absolutely favorite “dead feminist,” I told a friend, “I’ve never really gotten the Sandra Bernhard thing.” “Have [...]
Forced feedings of raw eggs. Beatings by prison guards. A woman “doubled over like a sack of flour.” These are not the images that immediately come to mind when we picture U.S. women’s fight for the vote. The facts have been sugarcoated by history, which likes to remember women’s suffrage as a proud moment for [...]
It’s the year 1917. Susan B. Anthony has been dead for 11 years, Elizabeth Cady Stanton for 15. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, currently led by Carrie Chapman Catt, has been agitating since 1890. But women in America still do not have the right to vote. Fed up, a group of militant suffragists called [...]
The moment she enters, walking quickly, in her masculine work boots and jeans, you know that she is a woman in charge. That’s what a real stage manager is, after all, but in most productions of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize winning classic, Our Town, the Stage Manager is an old white man, replete with gray hair, [...]
It was said that during times of chaos, this female force came down to earth to put things right again. — Roadwoman, New Fire Before there was intersectionality, there was Cherríe Moraga, playwright and co-editor of the feminist classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She recently told the Ms. [...]
UPDATE 2013: Project Girl Performance Collective is now Girl Be Heard. A couple of weeks ago, the staff of Ms. magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation were treated to a live, in-office performance by five members of New York’s Project Girl Performance Collective. They had us at “Girl Power.” That was the title of their opening song, which [...]
I felt as giddy as a bridesmaid to learn that Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays was settling in for a cozy run at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. As a proponent of same-sex marriage who has written on this complex topic, I was eager to see what other theater artists [...]
What happens when you take the Trojan women out of The Trojan Women? That’s what playwright Jocelyn Clarke has done in his new play Trojan Women (after Euripides), adapted from the Greek playwright Euripides’ 2,400-year-old original. East Coast-based experimental theater group SITI Company is currently performing the Clarke play, directed by Anne Bogart, at the [...]
When The Help premiered earlier this summer, African American feminists bemoaned the lack of civil rights narratives told by the black women who actually lived through the era. Though it probably won’t be a Hollywood blockbuster, a bulwark American theater is about to open a civil rights play written by an African American woman. In [...]
Looking for a centerpiece for your upcoming fundraiser? Interested in the transformative power of activist art? Look no further: That Takes Ovaries, by Rivka Solomon and Bobbi Ausubel, is powerful theater. As previously reported by the Ms. Blog, this collection of 22 first-person rebellion narratives is culturally diverse, fun and touching. From the pure adventure [...]
