The experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in their own words. Curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges offer insight into the field and point out limitations due to discrimination and unequal opportunity for performance artists in the United States over the past 55 years. In this work, performers, often unknown beyond their immediate audience, articulate diverse influences. They also reflect on how artists are educated and supported, what content is deemed valuable and how it is brought to bear, as well as which audiences are welcome and whether cross-community exchange is encouraged. The book's voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.

The experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in their own words. Curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges offer insight into the field and point out limitations due to discrimination and unequal opportunity for performance artists in the United States over the past 55 years. In this work, performers, often unknown beyond their immediate audience, articulate diverse influences. They also reflect on how artists are educated and supported, what content is deemed valuable and how it is brought to bear, as well as which audiences are welcome and whether cross-community exchange is encouraged. The book's voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.

Why is it useful to look at theatre and performance through the lens of sexual identity? How has commercial theatre embraced gay and lesbian work?
"Theatre and Sexuality" introduces critical methods and artistic practices that link drama, theatre and performance with minority sexualities in both the U.S. and UK. It narrates a select history of LGBTQ theatre from the early 20th century through today. Including an extended reading of Split Britches/Bloolips' production Belle Reprieve, the book offers clear analysis, as well as a celebration, of LGBTQ performance.

"Jill Dolan is the theatre's most astute critic, and this new book is perhaps her most important. Utopia in Performance argues with eloquence and insight how theatre makes a difference, and in the process demonstrates that scholarship matters, too. It is a book that readers will cherish and hold close as a personal favorite, and that scholars will cite for years to come."
---David Roman, University of Southern California

What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In "Utopia in Performance," Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change.
She traces these "utopian performatives" in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of "feeling utopia" found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

The women's experimental theater space called the WOW Cafe (Women's One World) has been a vital part of New York's downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to create, perform, and witness a cultural revolution. Its renowned alumnae include playwright and actor Lisa Kron, performance artists Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana, the theater troupe the Five Lesbian Brothers, and actors/playwrights Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin, among others. Memories of the Revolution collects scripts, interviews, and commentary to trace the riotous first decade of WOW. While the histories of other experimental theater collectives have been well documented, WOW's history has only begun to be told. The anthology also includes photographs of and reminiscences by Cafe veterans, capturing the history and artistic flowering of the first ten years of this countercultural haven.

The women's experimental theater space called the WOW Cafe (Women's One World) has been a vital part of New York's downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to create, perform, and witness a cultural revolution. Its renowned alumnae include playwright and actor Lisa Kron, performance artists Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana, the theater troupe the Five Lesbian Brothers, and actors/playwrights Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin, among others. Memories of the Revolution collects scripts, interviews, and commentary to trace the riotous first decade of WOW. While the histories of other experimental theater collectives have been well documented, WOW's history has only begun to be told. The anthology also includes photographs of and reminiscences by Cafe veterans, capturing the history and artistic flowering of the first ten years of this countercultural haven.

"With classic butch finesse---that handsome combination of vulnerability and toughness---Peggy Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950s. Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."
---"Gay Community News"

Obie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.

This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic "Menopausal Gentleman"); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw "You're Just Like My Father"); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated "To My Chagrin"); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical "Must: The Inside Story," a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind "The Feminist Spectator" website.

A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance
Cover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

In Presence and Desire, Jill Dolan critically engages contemporary feminist and poststructuralist theory in addressing the major issues for women in theater. Taking sexuality as a primary category of analysis throughout, Dolan examines a wide variety of performances: academic and professional, mainstream and subcultural, in formal settings and in everyday life. Dolan explores the potential for performance strategies and theatrical representation to intervene in normative constructs of sexuality and gender, and to provoke American culture to examine and reimagine its social relations. Each essay addresses a different aspect of performance studies, such as U.S. feminist theater since the 1960s, pornography and performance in various contexts, or the potential to increase gay and lesbian visibility through theater production. Performance is currently one of the most important metaphors in both the humanities and gender studies. Presence and Desire will be useful in theater studies, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies; it will interest anyone committed to cultural criticism that blends theory and practice from a feminist perspective.