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Carolyn Gage
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Carolyn Gage (fl. 1990s & 2000s) is an American playwright (and theatrical director and actor), and an activist on lesbian and feminist issues. The author of four books on lesbian theatre and fifty plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history.
Gage tours internationally in her one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, a play which was named national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in drama, and which has been featured on National Public Radio.
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Encyclopedia
Carolyn Gage (fl. 1990s & 2000s) is an American playwright (and theatrical director and actor), and an activist on lesbian and feminist issues. The author of four books on lesbian theatre and fifty plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history.
Gage tours internationally in her one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, a play which was named national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in drama, and which has been featured on National Public Radio. A Brazilian production of the play achieved first-class production in 2001-2, and it was the top-selling show in both Rio and in Sao Paolo.
In 2008, her collection of one-acts, Nine Short Plays was published. She is premiering a new musical, Babe: An Olympic Musical in Phoenix and also workshopping it in Minneapolis this year. The score is by Andrea Jill Higgins.
Her play Ugly Ducklings was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for the prestigious ATCA/ Steinberg New Play Award, an award with given annually for the best new play produced outside New York. It won a 2004 Lesbian Theatre Award from Curve Magazine, and a $150,000 documentary on the play premiered in 2005 at the Frameline International Film Festival in San Francisco. This film was produced by Hardy Girls and Healthy Women. (www.uglyducklings.org) In 2004, The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women was named national finalist for the Jane Chambers Award given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Receiving top reviews in Miami and in Washington, DC, it was the subject of a feature article in The Washington Post. Her one act, Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist, was presented at Actors Theatre of Louisville in the Juneteenth Festival of African American plays. It was a national winner of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, and is included in Random House's anthology Under 30: Plays for a New Generation.
Gage's musical, The Amazon All-Stars is the first lesbian full book musical ever published by a mainstream play publisher. Published by Applause Books, it is the title work of an anthology of lesbian plays that was a national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her manual on lesbian theatre production, Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play was published by Scarecrow Press. Gage has also written Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, the first collection of its kind in the world. The University of Oregon has acquired her personal papers for their Special Collections Archive.
Gage's work has been endorsed by Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, Phyllis Chesler, Victoria A. Brownworth, Diana E.H. Russell, Jewell Gomez, and John Stoltenberg. Gage was named contributing editor to the national feminist quarterly On The Issues. Gage has also been published in the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, Trivia, Sinister Wisdom, Lesbian Ethics, The Lesbian Review of Books, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Lambda Book Report, and off our backs. Gage has written the first meditation book for feminist activists, Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy.
Gage was a Guest Lecturer at Bates College in 1998-99. She has won the Oregon Playwrights Award from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts. She has also been awarded grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the Maine Women Writers’ Collection at the University of New England, the Walden Writer's Fellowship from Lewis and Clark College, the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts Writer's Grant, and the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. In 2002, she received the Janine C. Rae Cultural Award for the Advancement of Women’s Culture from the National Women’s Music Festival. Former recipients include Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Margarethe Cammermeyer, Nikki Giovanni, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. In 2005, she won the national Lynda Hart Memorial Grant from the Astraea Foundation.
Most recently, Gage's tours have included the University of Colorado in Boulder, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Maine at Orono, Gettysburg College, the University of Connecticut at both Stamford and Storrs, the University of Oregon at Eugene, the University of New England, SUNY Geneseo, Hollins University, Bates College, Washington College, Kalamazoo College, the University of Virginia, the National Women's Music Festival, the National Women's Studies Association Conference, the University of Nebraska, Kansas State University, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the United Kingdom Women's Studies Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Women's Week at Provincetown, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival. In 2007, she was a Libra Resident at the Celebration of Writers at the University of Maine at Machias, and she has taught at the Stonecoast MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine. In 2008, she was nominated for the Dublin City Counsel Intercultural Dialogue Award, as well as the Oscar Wilde Award for Best New Writing at the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival.
One of the most prolific femimist playwrights in the world, Carolyn Gage is a dynamic speaker and a powerful role model.
Her books include:
- Nine Short Plays, a collection of nine of Gage's best short plays.
- Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play, a manual on lesbian theatre production,
- Scenes and Monologues for Lesbian Actors, the first collection of its kind ever published,
- Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy, a book of meditations on feminist activism.
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, a collection of award-winning short plays.
Her plays include:
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, a one-woman show in which Joan of Arc speaks to contemporary audiences,
- Ugly Ducklings, about blossoming lesbian love and homophobia at a girls' summer camp,
- The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women, an audience participation courtroom drama presenting the trial of five women who betrayed the Anastasia Romanov of Russia,
- Thanatron, a dysfunctional family comedy.
- The Amazon All-Stars is a musical, the first lesbian full-book musical published by a mainstream publisher.
Other plays include Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist; Cookin' with Typhoid Mary; and The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman.
Plays
- The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Gold-diggers of 2008 (One-act play)
- The Amazon All-stars (Musical)
- Amy Lowell: in Her Own Words (One-woman show)
- The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women (Full-length play)
- Artemisia and Hildegarde (One-act play)
- Babe:An Olympian Musical (Musical)
- Battered on Broadway (One-act play)
- Bite My Thumb (One-act play)
- Blackeye (10-minute play)
- The Boundary Trial of John Proctor (One-act play)
- Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (One-act play)
- Coming About (Full-length play)
- Cookin' with Typhoid Mary (One-act play)
- The Countess and the Lesbians (One-act play)
- The Drum Lesson (One-act play)
- Entr'acte (One-act play)
- Esther and Vashti (Full-length play)
- The Evil That Men Do: the Story of Thalidomide (One-act play)
- Extravagant Love: the Life of Violette LeDuc (One-woman show)
- The Goddess Tour (Full-length play)
- Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist (One-act play)
- Heterosexuals Anonymous (One-act play)
- Jane Addams and the Devil Baby (One-act play)
- A Labor Play (One-act play)
- The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman (One-woman show)
- Leading Ladies (Musical)
- Louisa May Incest (One-act play)
- Mason-dixon (One-act play)
- The Obligatory Scene (One-act play)
- The Parmachene Belle (One-act play)
- Patricide (One-act play)
- The P.E. Teacher (One-act play)
- The Pele Chant (One-act play)
- The Poorly-Written Play Festival (One-act play)
- Radicals (One-act play)
- The Rules of the Playground (One-act play)
- Sappho in Love (Full-length play)
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc (One-woman show)
- Souvenirs of Eden (One-act play)
- The Spindle (Full-length play)
- Stigmata (Full-length play)
- Thanatron (Full-length play)
- Ugly Ducklings (Full-length play)
- Women on the Land (Musical)
Books
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (Outskirts Press 2008)
- Nine Short Plays
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays (Herbooks, Inc. 1994)
- Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors
- Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy
- Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play
Plays in Anthologies
- Under 30: Plays for a New Generation (contributor, Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist)
- At Play:An Anthology of Maine Drama (contributor, Ugly Ducklings)
- Amazon All-Stars:13 Lesbian Plays (contributor, The Amazon All-Stars)
Essays and Short Stories in Anthologies
* “Rewriting the Script,” Live Through This, ed.by Sabrina Chapadiev, Seven Stories Press,
NYC.
* “Keening in Bangor,” Those Who Stayed Behind, ed. Karen Mueller Bryson,
Transformational Stories.
* “My Life Among the Dolls,” Secret Spaces of Childhood, ed. by Elizabeth Goodenough,
Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
* “The Second Floor of J. C. Penney,” Hard Jobbin’: Women’s Experiences of the Workplace,
Ride the Wind Press, Beausejour, MB, Canada.
* “Hidden Disability: A Coming Out Story,” Restricted Access: Lesbians and Disability, ed. by
Victoria K. Brownworth, The Seal Press, Seattle, WA.
* “Joan of Arc,” The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures, ed. Bonnie
Zimmerman and George Haggerty, Garland Publishing, Inc., Levittown, PA
* Essay on lesbian theatre in The St. James Press Gay and Lesbian Almanac, St. James Press,
Detroit, MI.
* “Becca and the Woman Prince,” in Love Shook My Heart: New Lesbian Love Stories,' ed. by
Irene Zahava, Alyson Publications, Seattle, WA.
* "Letter To My Father." Her Father's Daughter, ed. Irene Zahava, Crossing Press
Freedom,CA.
Essays and Lectures
"So You Know a Dyke with CFS ..." "Teena Brandon: Gender Identity Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome" "Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father: On Marlowe and Shakespeare" "Lizzie Borden and Lesbian Theatre:Axes to Grind" "When Sex is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy" "No Dobermans Allowed: A Dramatic Argument for Separatist Theatre" "Writing Lesbian History: Outing the Dead or Owning Our Own" "The International Women's Rape Memorial: A Prospectus" "Oscar Wilde: Not My Cup of Tea"
Awards
- Janine C. Rae Cultural Award for the Advancement of Women's Culture, 2002 (Recipients include Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.)
- National Finalist, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, for
The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays Winner, Maine Playwrights Award, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, for The Poorly-Written Play Festival [2007] Nominee,Michael MacLiammor Award (Best Female Performer), Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival [2007] Nominee, American Theatre Critics Association's annual ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award, for Ugly Ducklings Winner, Curve Magazine's National Lesbian Theatre Award, for Ugly Ducklings National Finalist, Association for Theatre in Higher Education Jane Chambers Award, for The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women National winner, Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, for Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist Lynda Hart Memorial Grant, Astraea Lesbian Justice Foundation, NYC. 2005 Play Thanatron named among "Best Productions of 2003" by the Portland Phoenix in Portland, Maine Finalist, Maine Playwrights Award, for Parmachene Belle, 2003 National winner, $3000 Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Grant for best play about a lesbian historical figure, for The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman Acquisition of personal papers for University of Oregon Special Collections Archive Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts for The Second Coming of Joan of Arc Walden Writer's Fellowship from Lewis & Clark College Oregon Literary Fellowship writer's grant from Oregon Institute of Literary Arts Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant National Winner, Nancy Dean Distinguished Playwriting Award Eleanor Humes Haney Fund Grant New York Open Meadows Foundation Grant Maine Arts Commission, Good Idea Grant Winner Best Stageplay, Moondance International Women’s Film Festival,Boulder, CO, for Sappho in Love National semi-finalist for the Eileen Heckart Senior Drama Competition,Ohio State Univ., for The Pele Chant National finalist, George P. Kernodle One-Act Play Competition, University of Arkansas, Poorly-Written Play Festival National finalist, John Gassner New Play Festival, Stony Brook Univ., NY. for The Spindle Winner, Boston Theatre Slam, Another Country Productions at Boston Playwrights Theatre,Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter National semi-finalist, Association for Theatre in Higher Education One-Act Play Competition,for The Pele Chant
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