Carolyn Gage
  • Home
    • Butch Visibility Project
    • Bio and Vitae
    • Endorsements
    • Production History
    • Catalog of Books and Plays
    • Online Essays >
      • Lesbian Culture and History Essays
      • Theatre Essays
      • Feminist Essays
      • Tributes/Obituaries
      • Reviews
    • Interviews >
      • Audio/Video Interviews
      • Print Interviews
  • Books and CD's
    • Gage Play Anthologies
    • Feminist Thought And Spirituality
    • Lesbian Theatre
    • CD's and DVD's
    • Anthologies with Other Authors
    • Journal Anthologies
  • Plays
    • One-Woman Shows >
      • The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
      • La Seconde Venue de Jeanne d'Arc
      • Joana Dark - a re-volta
      • Giovanna d'Arco - la rivolta
      • ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ НА ЖАНА Д’АРК (Bulgarian tranlsation of The Second Coming of Joan
      • 贞德再临_中文 (Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc)
      • The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
      • Crossing the Rapelands
    • Musicals >
      • The Amazon All-Stars
      • Babe! An Olympian Musical
      • How to Write a Country-Western Song
      • Leading Ladies
      • Women on the Land
    • Full-Length Plays >
      • The Abolition Plays
      • The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women
      • AXED!
      • Black Star
      • Coming About
      • Esther and Vashti
      • The Goddess Tour
      • In McClintock's Corn
      • Sappho in Love
      • The Spindle
      • Stigmata
      • Thanatron
      • Ugly Ducklings
    • One-Acts >
      • Ain't Got No - I Got Life
      • The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Millennial Gold-Diggers
      • Artemisia and Hildegard
      • Battered on Broadway
      • Bite My Thumb
      • The Boundary Trial of John Proctor
      • Cookin' with Typhoid Mary
      • The Countess and the Lesbians
      • The Drum Lesson
      • Easter Sunday
      • Entr'acte or The Night Eva Le Gallienne Was Raped
      • The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide
      • Female Nude Seated
      • The Gage and Mr. Comstock
      • The Greatest Actress Who Ever Lived
      • Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist
      • Head in the Game
      • Hermeneutic Circlejerk
      • Heterosexuals Anonymous
      • Jane Addams and the Devil Baby
      • A Labor Play
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Lighting Martha
      • Little Sister
      • Louisa May Incest
      • Mason-Dixon
      • The Obligatory Scene
      • The P.E. Teacher
      • The Parmachene Belle
      • The Pele Chant
      • Planchette
      • The Poorly-Written Play Festival
      • Radicals
      • The Rules of the Playground
      • St. Frances and the Fallen Angels
      • Souvenirs from Eden
      • Starpattern
      • 'Til the Fat Lady Sings
      • Valerie Solanas At Matteawan
    • Short Short Plays >
      • 52 Pickup
      • At Sea
      • Black Eye
      • El Bobo
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter
      • The Clarity of Pizza
      • The Great Fire
      • Hrotsvitha's Vision
      • The Intimacy Coordinator
      • The Ladies' Room
      • Miss Le Gallienne Announces the New Season
      • On the Other Hand
      • Patricide
      • The Pickle Play
    • Dramatic Adaptations >
      • Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words
      • Brett Remembers
      • Deep Haven
      • El Bobo (one-act play)
      • El Bobo (short screenplay)
      • Emily & Sue >
        • Touring Production of Emily & Sue >
          • The Creative Team
          • Director's Vision
          • Adaptor's notes
          • Open Me Carefully
      • I Have Come to Show You Death
      • Speak Fully The One Awful Word
      • We Too Are Drifting (Screenplay)
    • Special Index: Plays That Deal with Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls
    • Special Index: Women's History Plays
    • Special Index: Romantic Plays with Happy Endings
  • Touring Work
    • Performances >
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Crossing the Rapelands
      • The Parmachene Belle (performance)
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (performance)
      • Gage on Stage
    • Lectures >
      • Lizzie Borden and Lesbian Theatre
      • The Secret Life of Lesbians
      • Paradigms and Paradigm-Shifting
      • When Sex Is Not the Metaphor For Intimacy
      • Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father
      • A Theatrical Journey Through Maine's Lesbian History
      • Tara and Other Lies
      • Teena Brandon's Inconvenient Truth
    • Workshops >
      • The Art of the Dramatic Monologue
      • Acting Lesbian
      • Interrupting Racism: A Workshop
      • Playwriting Techniques for Poets and Fiction Writers
      • Ugly Ducklings Workshop
    • Residencies
    • The Lesbian Tent Revival >
      • Testimonials
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Radio Hour Podcasts
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Sermon on Dying Well
      • Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival
      • Supplemental Sermons
      • Hotter Than Hell
      • The Synapse Pendant
    • Cauldron & Labrys >
      • A Brief History
      • Upcoming Productions
  • Calendar
    • Productions of Gage's Work and Appearances
  • Contact/Storefront
    • Privacy Policy
  • Blog

The Bill Cosby Rapes: The Reboot

12/28/2014

2 Comments

 
Picture
I just read this:

“The comedian[ Bill Cosby], fighting an onslaught of accusations that he sexually assaulted more than two dozen women over many years, is paying six-figure fees to private investigators for information that might discredit his alleged victims. Multiple sources confirmed that Cosby, through his Hollywood attorney Martin Singer, is implementing a scorched-earth strategy in which anything negative in his accusers’ pasts is fair game.”

Yes, it was on Page Six of the New York Post. Yes, it is citing anonymous “sources.”  But I think it would be incredibly naïve not to understand that this is a story that was generated by Team Cosby, serving the function of threatening current accusers, dissuading potential future accusers, planting seeds of doubt, and testing the waters to see if this is a strategy that will be well-received in Cosby’s struggle to win back his reputation.

Which is why I am going to respond to it.  

Picture
This is what powerful men do… actually, no, correct that…. This is what forceful men do when they are threatened, and especially threatened by women. Men with any kind of understanding of real power don’t rape and abuse in the first place.  Anyway, these forceful criminals know how vulnerable women are to charges of lying, being crazy, or being sluts in patriarchy, and often it is this very knowledge that enables the men to perpetrate, and especially to perpetrate serially as Cosby has allegedly done for decades.

I remember in the bad old days when a defense attorney was allowed to introduce a victim’s entire sexual history in a rape trial. In 1973 I saw how my sweet, hippie housemate, who was a victim of a knifepoint rape, was decimated by her rape trial, where her middle-class rapist, sitting next to his wife and children, actually laughed at her while her freewheeling ‘60’s-style sexual liberation was paraded past a puritanical judge.

And I know that one of the ways that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” played out in the military was in the rape and sexual harassment of lesbian soldiers. Their assailants could blackmail them into silence with threats of “outing” them. Lesbians were actually targeted because of this vulnerability. Now that DADT is gone, lesbians face the same 30% vulnerability to sexual assault that their heterosexual sisters-in-arms confront. And a whopping 85% of women who report military rape are discharged, usually without medical benefits for treating their PTSD. The women are usually accused of fabricating, exaggerating, and/or blaming the military rape for symptoms they already had from previous rapes.


Picture
Picture
The top civil rights attorney in the state agreed to take the case on contingency and then my senator ordered a sweeping audit of the Registrar’s records. The audit confirmed the fraud, that it had been going on for three years, and that it was in all the departments of arts and sciences. So, now, the university wanted to settle the case and they wanted it pretty badly. They had apparently forgotten how unstable I was.

I wanted my day in court, and, against my attorney’s strenuous objections, I turned down the offer. I knew how much money the credit fraud was raising for the university, and the settlement they were offering was not even close. I could do the math as well as they could, and I knew that wealthy perpetrators nearly always can buy their victims’ silence at bargain basement prices. Or, at least, prices that are worth it to them.

So, here is where I’m feeling the pain of the Cosby victims. The state Attorney General sicced his dogs on me. The AG’s office requested seven years of my tax filings, just to see if I would flinch. What did my taxes have to do with anything? Well, most folks would squirm at having a battery of government attorneys take a microscope to their tax filings of seven years. They did it just to scare me off the suit. They deposed everyone who might ever possibly have been a friend, fellow-student, or a colleague, just to see if they could destroy my networks.  A deposition is a very, very unpleasant, under-oath procedure that goes on for hours. I lost many friends. My colleagues felt violated and compromised by having ever associated with me. I would never get recommendations from them. The whole time this “investigation” was pending was a nightmare. It was a form of legal stalking. 

Picture
And college campus rapes? During my ten minutes of an academic career, I advocated for a nineteen-year-old survivor against an administration hell-bent on protecting a three-time rapist. He was, of course, a scholarship athlete. She was officially shamed and blamed, and offered the same protocol used for charges of plagiarism, where she and the rapist could tell their respective version of events to a  hearing made up of her professors and fellow-students. This was 1999. And very little has changed. Campus rape victims are still scapegoated for reporting.

And I have my own story to tell. It’s not a rape story, but it is a story of a young woman (me) who attempted to speak truth to power and, as a result, became a target for a vicious witchhunt. I was a whistleblower for a credit fraud scandal at a large state university. I was told by the head of my grad school department, on orientation day, that all the students who were on state fellowships would be required to participate in credit fraud. Every professor in the department was in the room when they did this. They did not use the word “credit fraud,” but they did say we would be required to register for six hours every semester of courses that did not exist. We were instructed to register for these as pass/fail “Reading and Conference” classes. Needless to say, we were assured we would pass. 

I resigned from the program and reported the practice. The university attempted to frame it as a misunderstanding, but when I refused to go along with the cover-up, they offered to investigate themselves… you know, like the military does. It took them a year to release their results, and not surprisingly the official report was unable to turn up any evidence of fraud, but they were able to
determine that I was “emotionally unstable.” Yeah. They had no idea.

Picture
And let’s put this in context, specifically the context of rape. Rape laws are always being revised. It used to be that a woman had no grounds to accuse a man of rape if she was not a virgin or if she was over eighteen. And during my own lifetime most states held that a wife had no legal right to claim that her husband had raped her. He was simply enforcing his conjugal rights with a party attempting to reneg on a contract.  And historically women, because of our supposed innate frailty, feeble intellect, and emotional instability, were not allowed to serve as jurors… a situation that lent itself to juries partial to the defendant and hostile to the victim.

Picture
So we come to rape with this historical baggage. Women lie, exaggerate, suffer from delusions, are emotionally unstable. We are simply not credible. Oh, and we are greedy. The university spent five hours in deposition with me attempting to prove that my low-income job of working with developmentally disabled children was my motivation in attempting to extort money from a university. Seriously.

So I have a gut understanding of what Cosby is going to do. And, of course, he’s going to find stuff. Because we are all human. Sadly, he will probably find stuff that will make some of his accusers settle with him or back off entirely. Because getting violated twice by the same perpetrator is more than many of us could bear.
PictureWarrior Woman Hill
Finally… Anita Hill. Anita Hill, who testified against Clarence Thomas at the Senate hearing to confirm him as a Supreme Court justice. She was characterized as unstable, vindictive, and sexually delusional, because she had the temerity to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment. Thomas referred to it as a “lynching.” After the hearing, there was a serious effort to get her fired from her university and to permanently destroy her reputation in academia.

But something happened. The women of America who had watched the hearings, the women of America—a majority of whom had suffered harassment ourselves and lost jobs because of it—rose up and said, "We believe Anita.
" It was on buttons and bumper stickers all over the country. Dr. Hill ended up teaching at Brandeis, becoming a national role model, and going down in history as the woman who put sexual harassment on the national agenda. She changed the lives of millions of women.

And here is why I am writing this: I want to say, Stay strong, Cosby victims. Stay strong and understand that this is when you shine. This is when your credibility is the greatest… when they find reputation-destroying vulnerabilities and you continue to hold the line. Because no one deserves to be raped, and this is what it really comes down to.

I want to suggest a hashtag campaign of #webelievecosbyaccusers and I want to encourage a bumper sticker campaign, too.

Because I believe
Andrea, Tamara, Beth, Barbara, Joan, Linda Joy, Janice, Carla, Louisa, Theresa, Kristina, Renita, Angela, Victoria, Jewell, Judy, Helen, Chelan, Beverly, Choe, Lisa, Kathy... and all the Jane Does who have not come forward publicly... yet.

Let's let Bill Cosby know that this tactic is only going to make it worse for him. 
Picture
Suggested Bumper Sticker
2 Comments

Game!

12/21/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
My recent housemate was graduating from a program that would launch her into the world of corporate law... and from where I sat, for better or worse, it appeared to me that her education was deficient in the arena of "game"-- and specifically game for women who are infiltrating networks of good old white boys.

Being a witch and all, I decided to sew her a power object... something with thousands of stitched iterations of intention. So I embroidered the word "Game" and my housemate chose the white rose to underscore it... a white rose with thorns.
... and I gave her this:

"Game is a term used to describe a “design of action,” played with charisma and gumption, angled for a specific purpose."

  • No resentment. It kills your game. Ditto self-righteousness. Doesn't matter if you're entitled to them. They will still kill your game. Focus on your part.
  • “When people have inadequate information, they tell themselves stories.” This will kill your game, also… or else put you into the wrong game. One of the best things to do in ANY situation is to interrogate  your assumptions. What do I actually KNOW about this person or situation? What am I assuming? On what are those assumptions based? Stories are based on previous data, prior trauma—sometimes generational, etc. When people resort to stories instead of collecting more information, they pretty much live the same story over and over. It’s good game to change the game.
  • It’s not very good game to attempt to leverage sex appeal into anything at all. It usually is a dominance move on the part of the person who is responding to it, and for that reason it will never leverage into respect or promotion, and it is far more likely to morph into resentment and obstructionist behaviors. It’s good game not to ever identify with your appearance. Identify with your character and your intelligence. When they try a dominance move like noting how pleasant it is to have such a pretty boss, be able to say with honesty, "I have no idea what you're talking about." Which one of the very few moves you can make when they do that.
  • Losing a round will often put you in a position to win the game. Your graceful or skillful comeback from a loss can set you up for success even more than winning an early round. It’s like ice skating in competition. They penalize you mostly for losing your focus, not for the fall itself. 
  • Lying and all its permutations are terrible game. That includes editing the truth, omitting pieces of the truth, glossing over aspects of things.  People nearly always can tell when you are attempting to hide something or manipulate them, and often, even if they are not conscious of it, they will still register it on a visceral level. They won’t trust you. In my experience, once trust is lost, it’s over. It may take a while to play out, but basically, the game is over. Avoid doing anything that puts trust at risk. It’s not going to be worth it. When you lie, you forfeit your spiritual power. And when you do that, you are in a very dangerous game.
  • True humility is a beautiful thing and it will allow all kinds of flexibility and options that rigid pride will not. False humility and false modesty, however, are not good game.  They are a set-up. If you send a message that you are not aggressive or competitive or ambitious, people will resent it when your actions communicate otherwise. Be clear and upfront about who you are and that you are in it to win it. Then they will roll up their sleeves and engage. Unless they are weak and petty… but never cater to weak and petty people.
  • Own your choices. Unlearn “But I have to…” Or “they make you…”  Learn to start sentences with, “I am choosing to…”
  • Trying to be one of the boys is not game. They love women who try this. They play along, laughing behind their sleeves the whole time. You will never be one of them. They will never for one second forget you are female. Own your gender and own the differences… which are significant. Men secretly respect loyalty to one’s own sex. What men approve of and what they actually respect are frequently two different things. Choose respect over approval.
  • Learn to make friends with rejection. Practice makes perfect, so ask for things you probably won’t get, just so you can make friends with rejection. This is a discipline. And it’s fabulous game. See the next one down…
  • Attempting to control or limit rejections is not game. Many women “protect” themselves right out of the game. Be ready and willing to hear “no.” Consider it a victory to hear no, because it means you asked! Great role modeling for other women.
  • Avoiding other women is not game. Actively, aggressively look for the women. Ask them to mentor you. Cultivate friendships with them. Especially older women. We know things you can’t know, because we have been here longer. And help younger women. Never fear that your mentoree might supplant you. If they do, up your game.
  • Lack of vulnerability is not game. The tree that cannot bend will break. Have safe people in your personal life with whom you can be honest. Share early and often. Do not share this stuff in the workplace. You are human, and if you are not sharing stuff that bothers you, I guarantee it will come out sideways to the wrong people and in the wrong places. This is an either-or. Either you get your issues out in healthy ways or they will find their way out in unhealthy ones. There is no such thing as healthy repression.
  • Self-sufficiency is not game. It’s a total boondoggle and one that women frequently fall into, trying to prove that we are not weak and dependent. Interdependence and mutuality are big-time game. It’s how the boys got where they are. Make yourself practice interdependence and mutuality until they become habits. Ask others for help, advice, feedback, and access to resources. When people offer you something, there is NO GAME in refusing or only taking half. Receive with enthusiasm and gratitude. Yes, you will need to reciprocate… and that is how it is done. That’s The Game. People do not admire you when you refuse them. They pull away. They feel hurt, and they get very clearly that it is important to you not to need them, maybe even a source of pride. Terrible game.
  • It’s never too late to correct impressions, set the record straight, confront something that made you uncomfortable, or take responsibility for something. It just takes communication skills and those can be learned.
  • The best game in the universe is to be playing your own game, one that is about spiritual growth. Too many women get caught up in games not of their making or working for goals they really don’t care about. If you play your own game, even if you lose, that loss will be rich in meaning. 
  • “Rising above” unacceptable behavior is not game. Confront, big and small. When you “rise above” something, you are the only person who believes that is what you are doing. Everyone else sees you being victimized and letting someone off the hook (enabling). They also see you "acting like a girl." Which means acting the way the patriarchy would train and discipline us into doing. So, instead, do a functional confrontation and, if there is no accountability, detach. But do not “rise above.” Never “rise above.” Because none of us are “above.” The stronger, better players are direct and they confront. Women traditionally “rise above.” Resist the temptation.
  • Never owning mistakes is miserable game. You are not your behavior and be so very happy that you are not. You can own mistakes with joy, with glee! You are not your behavior. And it frees up everyone else in the environment. They aren’t going to be identified with their behaviors either! Everyone can relax and make the mistakes that are necessary for creative and successful endeavors. Be a leader.
  • Communication classes and assertiveness classes are good game.

 

0 Comments

Award Acceptance Speech at Venus Theatre

12/15/2014

2 Comments

 
On December 13, 2014, Venus Theatre in Laurel, Maryland, held an event to celebrate the production of their 50th play. At this celebration they gave out their first ever "Lifetime Achievement Award" and I was lucky enough to be the recipient. What follows is an attempt to recap my acceptance speech. (At the event, I spoke off-the-cuff, using a few notes.)
Picture
In the lobby of Venus Theatre with my award!
Picture
Eva Le Gallienne in Liliom, schooling her daughter in the fine art of enabling domestic violence.
I began by telling the folks at Venus that I was going to tell three stories, and that the first was about the actress Eva Le Gallienne.  She was twenty-three years old and starring in her first Broadway role. She was the lead in Liliom, which was the play from which the musical Carousel was adapted. This play, which you know, if you know Carousel, is a sentimentalizing of domestic violence. It has lines like “When some men hit you, it feels like a kiss.” The role that Eva was playing was that of the victim. During this run, she was battered and raped backstage by an actor who was in the show. She left the theatre and checked herself into a private sanatorium. She never named the rapist, aware that this would be the end of her career. And in case people are thinking that this was because it was 1923, I say look at all the actresses only coming forward now about the Bill Cosby drug rapes they suffered decades ago… and the dozens who are still afraid to come forward.
PictureThe legendary, lesbian-powered Civic Rep
Anyway, she stayed in the sanatorium for three days and then returned to the show. It ran for another year. After that, she had a breakdown. And then she came back and founded her own professional theatre. She founded it away from Broadway, figuratively and literally. She produced plays of her own choosing… plays with powerful roles for women. She produced the work of women playwrights. Her theatre was run by lesbians… a lesbian artistic director (herself) and a lesbian administrator. She hired lesbian actors, lesbian set designers, lesbian costumers. And after shows, the cast and crew would go over to the lesbian nightclub, the Cosmo, where Spivey, the lesbian proprietor, would cook them all scrambled eggs. And she did plays in repertory, which is tougher than long runs and more expensive, but better for the actor who gets to play all kinds of different roles. This was the Civic Repertory Theatre, and it was one of the legendary theatres in American history. 

PictureThe HUAC boys' club
And then the Depression hit and Eva and everyone else lost their funding. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in a lesbian relationship and in networks of power lesbians, approached Eva about heading up the Federal Theatre Project that was just being set up under the New Deal. This would enable Eva to keep the doors of the Civic Rep open. But Eva was very well aware that government and art are a bad mix. She was also very aware of her vulnerability as a lesbian. She turned it down and closed her theatre.

As a footnote, Hallie Flanagan took over the Federal Theatre Project, and sure enough, it was the first program to be witch-hunted by political enemies of the New Deal. She was called to testify before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. At the end of her life Hallie developed dementia, and sadly, she would relive this nightmare over and over, wandering the halls of the nursing home and still defending herself against hallucinatory interrogators from these hearings.

PictureDeb Randall, Founder and Artistic Director of Venus
Deb Randall, following in the footsteps of Eva Le Gallienne, makes the connection between the cultural narratives about women and the victimization of women in real life. Like Eva, she privileges the work of women playwrights and chooses the roles and stories that tell the truth, that unmask the perpetrators and the institutions that oppress women, and that offer radically different roles and scripts for women and for girls.

PictureHenrietta Vinton Davis
The second woman that I talked about was the African American actor Henrietta Vinton Davis, who was born, actually, in Baltimore. [Note: Venus Theatre is located just outside of Baltimore, in Laurel, Maryland.]  Davis was born in 1860, during the last days of legal enslavement. She actually worked for former captive Frederick Douglass, and, under his encouragement, she realized her vision and calling to perform. At this time, African American theatre took the form of minstrel shows and, later, what were called “plantation musicals,” which were post-war sentimental and nostalgic white fantasies about the lives of enslaved people in the South.

Henrietta did not want to participate in these forms. Instead, she went out on the road solo, performing monologues from Shakespeare and poems by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The last African American Shakespeare theatre in New York had been burned to the ground by racists, and the actors who founded it had fled to London. There were no African American companies performing serious work.

Henrietta’s career was spent touring to cities where she could not stay in the hotels or eat in the restaurants. She had to endure reviewers who never failed to make mention of the shade of her skin color, the lightness of it being considered an endorsement as important as her acting talent.

PictureHenrietta in a cross-dressing role
She was well aware that the classical canon was by and about white people and she embraced the work of contemporary Black playwrights attempting to write new epic plays. She produced and performed in plays about the successful slave rebellion in Haiti, and she co-wrote a musical called “My Old Kentucky Home.” Unlike other plantation shows, Henrietta’s play included the war, and the entire second act portrayed formerly enslaved people taking over the plantation of their former captors. Not surprisingly, her theatre company ended up broke and stranded in Denver, but good for her. Henrietta was so far ahead of her time, she has largely been written out of the history of Black theatre. 

Deb Randall, like Henrietta and Eva, has turned away from the popular theatre of her time, because it supports a dominant culture that degrades people of color and women. She cultivates the artists who are working to subvert that dominant narrative… and she pays the price of marginalization and isolation. Like Henrietta, Deb and her work are considered an anomaly. Women of the 21st century, like African Americans in the late 19th century, have not achieved enough financial or cultural autonomy to demand and create our own narratives and forms. It was enough for Blacks in the 1880's to perform in the minstrel shows that were so reassuring to and so well-remunerated by their oppressors. And for many women today, it is enough to perform the princess/whore stereotyped roles that are so reassuring to and so well-remunerated by the patriarchy. It takes a room of one’s own, a theatre of one’s own, an audience of one’s own, to decolonize the imagination, and Eva, Henrietta, and Deb understood this.

PictureMinnie Maddern Fiske
The third woman I want to talk about is Minnie Maddern Fiske. She is one of the greatest actresses of the American stage, and yet she spent many of her prime years performing in church basements and grange halls around the country. This is because a group of men who called themselves the Theatrical Syndicate, had taken control of all the major theatres in New York and on the touring circuit across the country. They specialized in highly commercial “girlie” shows. Minnie Fiske was interested in serious work with strong roles for outspoken women. She was producing Ibsen. She was producing an adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a play about a woman who had been raped. One by one, professional producers and actors sold out to the Syndicate, but Minnie never did. She paid a very high price for her art and her resistance. But one of my favorite quotations is something that a theatre critic wrote about Minnie during this period of her career. He said, “Wherever Mrs. Fiske sits, that’s the head of the table.”

Picture
Me and Deb and the Goddess.
And I want to say to you tonight, wherever Deb Randall sits, that’s the head of the table. In this storefront, on C Street, in Laurel, Maryland. That’s the head of the table for women’s theatre. 

Deb Randall and Venus Theatre are in a long and proud tradition of feminist pioneers who refused to compromise themselves or their art. And the price we pay for this integrity is tremendous. 

I am so proud to have received Venus Theatre’s first Lifelong Achievement Award, and I am very proud to have had thirteen of my plays read or produced by Venus. Gertrude Stein was once asked what artists need most, and she answered “appreciation.” We don’t need criticism. Subsidy is nice, but it’s not essential. What we need is appreciation, and this is what Venus Theatre offers. Appreciation.  And it is mutual: Thank you, Deb, and thank you, Venus!
2 Comments
    Picture

    Carolyn Gage

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

    SUBSCRIBE:
    To subscribe to the blog, scroll down and click on "RSS Feed". To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

    Categories

    All
    Child Abuse
    Civil Rights
    Incest
    In Memoriam
    Interviews
    Lesbian Feminism
    Lesbian History
    Psychotropic Drugs
    Rape
    Reviews
    The Environment
    Women And Theatre
    Women's History

    Archives

    June 2022
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    October 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.