I’m afraid I’ve broken my resolution to write bi-monthly this December, a lapse I hope readers will forgive, as the month has been filled with planned family travel, unplanned fatigue, and a general sense of lassitude necessary after the rigors of a semester of teaching. In the new year, I’ll be back to my twice-monthly [...]
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My last blog entry on Sarah Schulman’s representation in the New York Times generated a bit of behind-the-scenes sturm und drang. I received an email from Sarah the day after I posted, in which she both appreciated my attempt to point out the excesses in Jesse Green’s feature story and took apart my own posting, objecting [...]
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The Women and Theatre Program listserve (available at wtp@athe.org) began a conversation a week or so ago about Jesse Green’s New York Sunday Times feature story on playwright Sarah Schulman and Green’s inability to position Schulman as anything but a once-angry lesbian now trying to “reform.” The story, called “Who’s Afraid of Sarah Schulman” (10-23-05), is rife [...]
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These last three weeks and a couple of days in between posts only mean that life has been hectic lately as the fall semester geared up and got underway. As much as I want to be able to comment regularly on all the culture I absorb, I find my observations flying by, while I’m left [...]
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Last Friday, September 16th, I heard Laurie Carlos give the opening lecture of the Fourth Annual Performance as Public Practice Distinguished Lecture series at the University of Texas at Austin where I teach. Carlos is an Obie award-winning artist whose work has long influenced American theatre: she was the first woman to perform “The Lady [...]
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Friends, someone who responded to a post recently asked if I would share some writing I did about a local (Austin) production of Hair at the Zachary Scott Theatre in 2002.The writing was part of remarks I shared at a panel on arts advocacy at the 2002 Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in San Diego. [...]
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Someone wrote in to suggest that in my last posting, on the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs, I neglected to consider the status of the femme, Terri, at the play’s end. While Prin, the quintessential butch, stands alone as the tragic figure, “some femme” (the responder) suggests that Terri is left even more alone, [...]
Oedipus at Palm Springs
Five Lesbian Brothers
New York Theatre Workshop
E. 4th St., Manhattan
Performance: Saturday, August 20, 2005
Run: July 20 – August 28, 2005
I first saw the Five Lesbian Brothers perform when they were a fledgingly troupe of irreverent satirists working out of the legendary WOW [...]
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The Feminist Spectator will offer occasional ruminations on theatre, performance, film, television, and other forms of cultural expression. My primary interests in these forms focus on what they tell us about gender, sexuality, race, class, and other forms of identity (in all their complex intersections and overlaps), as well as what they tell us about [...]
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