Some may be tempted to liken Rivka Solomon’s and Bobbi Ausubel’s play That Takes Ovaries to The Vagina Monologues because they’re both collections of women’s stories and they’re both named after parts of a woman’s anatomy. But the ovaries in this play are purely metaphorical (whereas the vaginas were, well, fully embodied). These ovaries are [...]
How should artists approach remounting the classics? Should they respect all of the author’s original intentions and stage a version of the show that reflects them perfectly? Or should they attempt to remove the historical residue attached to pieces that, however conscious the authors may have been of trying to do good, inevitably reflects the [...]
Dixon Place, on New York City’s Lower East Side, is many things: theater, performance laboratory … bar. But one thing it is not? Beholden to trends in art or performance. The 25-year-old venue, recently reborn in a commercial space (it used to operate out of one of the founder’s homes), is used to carrying the [...]
In my Ms. review of Burlesque, the musical film starring Christina Aguilera and Cher, I argued that it contained certain pro-feminist and queer qualities. At the same time, the thin legs, arms and waists of its stars are quite dissimilar from the curvy bodies of most burlesque performers, both historically and in the contemporary neo-burlesque [...]
Like The Vagina Monologues, The Panza Monologues is a collection of short performances based on interviews and stories of different women. But instead of being about vaginas, it’s about panzas–Spanish for bellies. The play focuses on the lives of Latina women, putting the panza “front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths [...]
Tina Fey isn’t afraid to throw around a few F-words in her new memoir, Bossypants. She stands up for funny women, and says to those who don’t like–or believe in the existence of–women comedians, “We don’t fucking care if you like it.” Throughout, she makes clear that she views herself as a feminist and offers [...]
Masked crusaders. Feminist artists. Culture jammers. Though several groups have branched out of the famous Guerrilla Girls feminist collective that first plastered New York City with posters about art-world sexism 25 years ago, all of its offspring work to the same end–expose discrimination against women in various artistic mediums. World-traveling troupe Guerrilla Girls on Tour! [...]
Four hundred years ago, a man named Shakespeare opened the famous Globe Theatre with Julius Caesar–kicking off a rich history of soon-to-be classics that inspired and encouraged men playwrights around the world to aspire to reach this particular stage. Four hundred years later, a woman playwright has finally been invited to the party. Nell Leyshon became [...]
The founder and president of Freedom and Fashion describes herself as a slave to end slavery. Constantly networking, fundraising, and sometimes sewing by hand in the dimly lit rooms of friends and family until 4am, Bonnie Kim and her board of directors work in the background to support fair trade organizations and NGOs that raise [...]
I am a playwright living in Los Angeles. Am I an oxymoron, or just a regular moron? Everybody knows that Los Angeles is a movie town! In spite of this, through great good fortune all of my plays have been produced, and I have nothing to complain about. So why this blog post? When we [...]
