Shows: Past Productions

SINGLE WET FEMALE

They were just a couple of white chicks living on the edge of perversion in a New York City rent-controlled apartment. Margaret is a struggling Caucasian music supervisor allergic to plantains and loudness. Cahmy is the desperate voyeur from Minnesota who moves into Margaret’s bathroom and awakens not only Margaret’s homoerotic desires, but also her subconscious love of the merengue. The boyfriend they are fighting over is played (via video) by gender-bending cult idol Murray Hill. An overt spoof on the movie “Single White Female,” this erotic romp is dripping with suspense and simulated nudity. Featuring Latina legends Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana, this low rent, high anxiety thriller was presented in San Francisco and at PS 122 in NYC to sold out crowds and was nominated for a GLAAD award for outstanding Off Off Broadway theater in 2002. Too moist to miss!

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Carmelita Tropicana

Carmelita Tropicana, a Cuban board writer/actress won the 1999 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance. In 2004 wrote and starred in “With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?” at New York’s Intar Theater which the New York Times described as “a deliciously outrageous solo piece.” She is the author of the lambda nominated book “I, Carmelita Tropicana – Performing Between Cultures” which includes her plays “Milk of Amnesia”, “Chicas 2000”, as well as a short story entitled “The Social Visit” and the essay “Food for Thought.” Her film “Your Kunst is Your Waffen (Art is Your Weapon), co-written with film director Ela Troyano, won Best Short at the Berlin Film Festival. She has appeared in Off Broadway shows including the solo “Late Night Catechism” which she translated into Spanish. She is one of the recipients of the prestigious “Anonymous Was A Woman” award for 2004. As a comedian she has appeared at Joe's Pub, Gotham Comedy Club, and on TV in the PBS Special “Out in New York.” Her commercial credits include Lancome, Dr. Pepper and Febreeze.

Marga Gomez

Marga Gomez was born in Harlem to a Cuban comedian and a Puerto Rican dancer. With parents like these she acquired a taste for comedy, drama and fried bananas. Marga now tours nationally as a stand-up comedian and as the writer/performer of seven solo shows. She is the recipient of the 2004 GLAAD Award for Off-Off Broadway theater and the 1994 ‘Theatre LA’s Ovation Award’ for her performance with Culture Clash at the Mark Taper Forum. Margas’ solo shows include “A Line Around The Block”, “Memory Tricks”, “Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty & Gay”, “jaywalker”, “The Twelve Days of Cochina”, “Marga Gomez's Intimate Details” and “Los Big” have been produced Off-Broadway at The Public Theater, The Whitney Museum, Performance Space 122, La Mama Theater, Dixon Place, nationally at The Kennedy Center, Museum of Contemporary Arts Massachusetts, Boston Center for the Arts, San Diego Repertory Theater, Highways Performance Space and The Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles,) The Marsh and Theater Rhinoceros (San Francisco,) and internationally at The Montreal Comedy Festival, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London ICA and Amsterdam's Triple X Festival. Marga’s career is profiled in the 2003 documentary Laughing Matters. Her acting credits include Off- Broadway and San Francisco productions of “The Vagina Monologues” and featured roles in “Sphere”, “Batman Forever” and HBO’s “Tracy takes on...” Selections from Marga's work have been published in several anthologies including “Extreme Exposure”, “Out, Loud & Laughing”, “Contemporary Plays by American Women of Color” and “Out of Character.” Marga was one of eight playwrights to be commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum's Latino Theater Initiative as part of 2004’s Amor Eterno project. For more about Marga visit www.margagomez.com

written and performed by Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana
directed by David Schweizer

February 24 - 26, 2005

INDEX TO IDIOMS

“Index to Idioms” is a lyrical, personal performance that takes place on the collapsible boundary between fiction and memoir. Inspired by the title of a grammar book that belonged to her son, Deb’s solo performance tells the story of a woman whose son comes home from school with a list of English idioms from his language arts class. The woman decides that she will use her solitary moments and the list of idioms to tell the story of her life. As the idioms mount up, the landscape of this mother’s life is mapped – her suburban childhood, her coming to consciousness as a sexual and intellectual young woman, and her discoveries of the body, in childbirth, in performance, in cleaning spit-up off her shirt, and in tango with a charismatic and moody mortality. The arc traced by the stories leaves the audience with a wide-angle view of a woman’s life, with its tiny grandeurs and mysteries, its endurance of casual cruelty, and its sense of the beauty in common, daily experience.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Deb Margolin is an internationally recognized playwright, performance artist and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company whose work has influenced feminist theatre in the U.S. since the early 1980’s. As the author of six full-length solo performance pieces that have toured throughout the United States, Deb is the recipient of a 1999-2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Her solo performance pieces include “O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms” which was commissioned by the Jewish Museum of New York, “Critical Mass” which premiered at PS 122 in New York, and “Bringing the Fishermen Home” was part of the New Work Now Festival at The Public Theater and premiered at The Cleveland Public Theater. “Index to Idioms” premiered in workshop at The Kitchen Theatre's Bring in the Spring! Performance Art Festival this past April. She has appeared on both Comedy Central and HBO Downtown. A book of Deb’s performance pieces and plays, entitled “Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO” was published in 1999. Deb has lectured extensively at universities throughout the country, has been artist in residence at Hampshire College and University of Hawaii, and writer-in-residence at Tulane University. She is currently a faculty lecturer in Playwriting and Performance in Yale University's Theater Studies Program.

written & performed by Deb Margolin

February 17 - 19, 2005

DRESS SUITS TO HIRE

A fresh look at this “lesbian noir” classic created by Hughes, Shaw, and Weaver. Hughes and Shaw both won OBIE awards for this heady mixture of erotic fantasy and hard-boiled pulp drama where two "sisters" who live in a rental clothing shop use the merchandise to try on various facets of their personalities. Shaw (who is best known for her uncanny drag) here dresses up like Rita Hayworth and the impersonation unleashes a ribald hilarity that is matched by Weaver's savvy, salivating blond. Their 80 minute duel is a mellifluous ode to lesbian eros and a joyful, literate send-up of all romantic fantasy.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Peggy Shaw (Performer)

Actor, Playwright, and Producer Peggy Shaw has received three OBIE Awards for her work with the legendary lesbian theatre company, Split Britches, which she founded with Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin in 1980. She won the Obie Awards for her performances in "Dress Suits To Hire," a collaboration with Holly Hughes, "Belle Reprieve," a collaboration with the London-based theater troupe BlooLips, and "Menopausal Gentleman," directed by Rebecca Taichman. Among her celebrated works are "You're Just Like My Father," "Lust and Comfort," "Upwardly Mobile Home, "Lesbians Who Kill," and the Jane Chambers Award-winning play "Split Britches." Peggy is a 1988 and 1995, and 1999 New York Foundation For The Arts award winner for Emerging Forms. She received the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award for excellence in "making the world a better place for gays and lesbians," and Split Britches is a two-time nominee for the Cal Arts Herb Alpert Award. Peggy received the 2000-2001 Rockefeller MAP Grant to create her new show "To My Chagrin." In addition to her work with Split Britches, she played Billy Tipton in American Place's production of Carson Kreitzer's "The Slow Drag", she was a collaborator, writer, and performer with Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater and co-founder in 1980 of the Obie-Award Winning WOW Cafe in New York City. Split Britches teaches Performance in residence at various colleges including Hampshire College, University of Hawaii, University of Northern Iowa, U.C. Davis, Cal Arts, U.C. Riverside, Harvard, M.I.T., and William and Mary. Peggy has taught Solo Performance at Vassar, Smith,Wells, U.Mass, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire College. Routledge Press has released a book simultaneously in London and New York on the Company entitled "Split Britches: Lesbian Practice, Feminist Performance," edited by Sue Ellen Case, which includes seven Split Britches’ plays.

Lois Weaver (Performer)

Lois Weaver is a performance artist, director, writer, teacher, and curator. Lois is a co-founder of the legendary theatre company Split Britches and the OBIE award-winning performance space in NYC, WOW Café. She also co-founded Spiderwoman Theatre and was the Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has toured the U.S., U.K. and Europe with Split Britches productions, “Anniversary Waltz”,” Upwardly Mobile Home”, “Little Women – The Tragedy” and “Lesbians Who Kill.” Other landmark collaborations have included “Dress Suits to Kill” and “Bell Reprieve.” In addition to her collaborations, Lois has also toured her one woman shows “Faith and Dancing” and, most recently, “What Tammy Needs to Know.” Her directing credits include Peggy Shaw’s “To My Chagrin” and Holly Hughes’ “Preaching to the Perverted.” She is involved in “Staging Human Rights”, an initiative that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the U.K. Lois has taught Contemporary Performance Practice and the California Institute of the Arts and been a lecturer at Queen Mary and Westfield College.

Holly Hughes (Playwright)

Holly Hughes is an Obie award-winning performance artist and playwright, as well as a central figure in America’s culture wars. Her sassy and brutally honest parables draw from personal experience, from growing up queer in straight 1970’s America, to navigating the perilous waters of post-feminist politics in the 1980’s, to dealing with desire and facing middle age at the end of the 1990’s. On the forefront of performance art for more than two decades, Hughes past works include “The Well of Horniness”, “Dress Suits to Hire”, “World Without End”, and “The Lady Dick.” She is the author of “Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler and O Solo Homo.”

Sue-Ellen Case (Guest Lecturer)

Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of Critical Studies in Theatre at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of "Feministm and Theatre; The Domain-Matrix: Lesbian Performance at the End of the Print Culture"; and the editor of "Split Britches," the collected plays of the famous feminist performance troupe. Her lecture addresses the performance of "Dress Suits to Hire" that Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver recently mounted with female students in Taiwan.

written by Holly Hughes, in collaboration with Peggy Shaw & Lois Weaver
performed by Peggy Shaw & Lois Weaver
directed by Lois Weaver

April 14 - 23, 2005