Nine Short Plays
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Read the review in the Lambda Book Report.
"As Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America, [Nine Short Plays] 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.
"... each of these dramas is also built around the woman or women who resist, who keep their truth, who come to consciousness, who fight back alone or together." -- Elliott batTzedek [Read complete review]
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.
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.
“… complex and beautiful…”--Lesbian Connections, East Lansing, MI.
"... each of these dramas is also built around the woman or women who resist, who keep their truth, who come to consciousness, who fight back alone or together." -- Elliott batTzedek [Read complete review]
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.
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.
