Books, Plays, Musicals,

One-Acts, and
One-Woman Shows
By

Carolyn Gage

www.carolyngage.com
http://stores.lulu.com/carolyngage

i
 How to Order the Books and Plays:

All plays and books may be ordered from:

http://stores.lulu.com/carolyngage as either hard copy

or downloads.s

For customers outside the US, contact the author at

carolyn@carolyngage.com.

Catalog is also online at www.carolyngage.com.

ii
What Others Are Saying:
“… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in
America…” —Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

“Gage is regularly hailed as one of the best lesbian playwrights

in America, but I want to say—if she will allow this and I
understand and accept if she won’t—simply one of our best
playwrights.”—Sharon Doubiago, My Father’s Love, Portrait of the
Poet as a Young Girl; Love on the Streets, Selected and New
Poems.

“… a whole women’s theatre tradition in one volume… wonderful to

read—rich, original, deeply affirming—and must be phenomenal to
see on stage. The culture of women we have never had is invented
in Carolyn Gage’s brilliant and beautiful plays.” —Andrea Dworkin,
feminist philosopher activist, and author.

“The work of an experienced and esteemed playwright like Carolyn

Gage is the air that modern theatre needs.” — Jewelle Gomez,
author of The Gilda Stories, San Francisco Arts Commissioner.

“Carolyn Gage is a fabulous feminist playwright, and a major one

too. This is great theatre. Gage’s dramatic and lesbian imagination
is utterly original… daring, heartbreaking, principled, bitter, and
often very funny… There is no rhetoric here: only one swift and
pleasurable intake of breath after another… Women’s mental health
would improve, instantly, were they able to read and see these
plays performed.”—Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and
Madness.

“… the toughest, most lesbian/feminist-identified work for theatre I

know… brilliant and daring scripts...” —John Stoltenberg, former
Executive Editor, On the Issues, author of Refusing to Become
A Man.

“Mahalo nui for your play. It is splendid, clever, and sets the
characters in an imaginary world that is,nevertheless, quite
believable. The mark of superb craftsmanship...! Ku’e, ku’e,ku’e!
[Resist, resist, resist!]” —Haunani-Kay Trask, leader of the
Hawai’ian Sovereignty Movement.

“I was more deeply moved and ‘sinspired’ by Carolyn Gage’s new

book [Like There’s No Tomorrow] than by anything else I’ve read in
years… It is a work of burning, uncompromising vision and daring…

iii
a beacon of hope in these chilling times of compromise, timidity and
apparent defeat. This book is Pure Fire. It is true and therefore
extreme… a stunning manifestation of Radical Lesbian Feminist
Courage and Genius.” —Mary Daly, Radical Feminist Elemental
Philosopher and Author of Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust, and The
Wickedary.

“Carolyn Gage's visit was transformative for my department.

Students were able to have close contact with a world-class artist. In
a brief Q&A, Carolyn firmly and respectfully challenged their
assumptions about the boundaries of art, education, and culture.
She responded with enthusiasm and generosity to their staged
reading of one of her short works, which gave them a strong sense
of connection with this renowned artist. And we all experienced her
extraordinarily moving and enlightening Joan of Arc in our own
small theatre, sharing a truly powerful, and for some students life-
changing, evening of performance.”—Dr. Ellen Margolis, Chair of
Theatre & Dance, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR.

“Carolyn Gage’s writing, acting, and teaching are explosive. She

rips away the cultural camouflage that permits us to accept, to be
blind to, the brutal context in which women are still required to live
their lives. When my students remember this semester it will be
because of her visit. She’s a treasure.” —Prof. George Wolf, Dept.
of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

“Many feminists are brilliant, but how many are wise? Playwright
Carolyn Gage is a radical lesbian feminist who is wise, as this book
[Like There’s No Tomorrow] demonstrates. I read the book recently
and realized that I had made a great mistake not reading and
reviewing it when it came out, probably because I was biased
against the word “meditations.” So often radical feminist books are
depressing; I admire them but wish for some inspiration. This book
is uncompromising and tough-minded, yet inspiring.” —Carol
Anne Douglas, off our backs, Washington, DC.

“We were so delighted with Carolyn’s powerful drama and her

personable style of teaching that Carefree [retirement community]
women asked her to return and be our first Artist-in-Residence…
Participating in the readings and listening to the performances were
powerful experiences for the women of our community. Carolyn’s
dramatic works, her teaching methods, and her passionate belief in
women inspired many of us to look at our lives and come to see
ourselves as heroines and Amazons. Her ability to clothe her

iv
meticulous research and knowledge of women’s and especially
lesbian history in enthralling dramas helped many of us to realize
our rich lesbian/feminist heritage… she’s personable, down-to-
earth, and fun to be with. Her time with us was intense, fascinating,
and a lot of fun. Who could ask for more?” —Dana G. Finnegan,
PhD., Leader of Writers’ Workshop at Clubhouse for Resort on
Carefree Boulevard, Ft. Myers.

“Ms. Gage’s visit to Washington College was inspiring. Her passion

for what she does is so obvious and her intellect so impressive that
students and faculty alike were immediately and permanently
engaged by her presentation and presence.

Washington College is, in part, known for it’s writing program. We

have regular visits by well known writers—everyone from Edward
Albee and Israel Horovitz to Toni Morrison and John Barth in recent
years. I can honestly say I have never seen students so enthusiastic
about a guest. Another thing that is unusual and impressive is that
she has kept in touch with several of our students since her visit.

One of the things I was most impressed with was the clarity of her
aesthetics and politics. This is a person who does not apologize for
her agenda or the militancy necessary to further that agenda. The
amazing thing is she combines that unswerving commitment with
compassion, understanding, warmth, and generosity. She is totally
committed to her art in a way that is truly inspiring. Don’t let the
lesbian/feminist moniker scare you, this is a formidable artist in
every way.” —Dale Daigle, PhD., Theatre Department Chair,
Washington College, Chesterton, MD.

“Recalling The Second Coming of Joan of Arc leaves me practically

speechless, but boiling over on the inside with sadness and a
hunger to “right all the wrongs” of the world. Never before have I
attended an event at my University that evoked tears and heartache
and feelings of invincibility and empowerment simultaneously. In
Dorothy Allison’s book Skin, she encourages women to speak and
write ourselves raw, until we are vulnerable and we produce
captivating and personal art that evokes tears, laughter, and rage
from the audience. Carolyn Gage epitomizes Allison’s vision. Her
brilliant performance touches everyone deeply by providing an
educational, cathartic, heartbreaking, and empowering experience.
She speaks the unspeakable truths about women’s oppression that
most of us are afraid to say…”—Kristina Armenakis, Women’s
Resource Center, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR.

v
“The night I saw Second Coming [of Joan of Arc], six years ago, I
borrowed a copy of the play from a friend. Ever since then the book
has lived in my book bag, purse, shoulder bag, carry on, reminding
me that there are “two ways to destroy a woman”, reminding me not
to get ripped apart. Gage has… has given us a hero that doesn’t run
around in her underwear and taught us to take back the voices in
our heads. Gage has changed so many lives she will never know
about. and the only way I know how to thank her is to never stop
fighting.” —Tamanya Garza, The University of the Sciences,
Philadelphia.

“Carolyn Gage is to lesbian playwriting as Georgia O’Keefe is to

women in American art: You can scarcely think of one without the
other.”—off our backs, Washington, DC.

“Carolyn Gage is a living manifestation of the power of articulate

anger. Her play is raw, uncompromising, in your face, and her
politics are no different. In the flesh, however, her passion, humour
and quicksilver insight shine through her rage against the
patriarchal machine. An inspired spokeswoman for revolutionary
radical feminism, I love to think of Carolyn out there now, urging
women all over the world to access that submerged anger that,
once released, will enable them to find hope, pleasure, selfhood.” —
Women’s News, Belfast, Northern Ireland

“While it was probably the novelty of having a lesbian feminist in

Hattiesburg, Mississippi that brought the people out, it was
Carolyn’s intelligence, wit and charisma that motivated us to
participate. Her complex mixture of righteous anger and compassion
and her insight into the human psyche inspired those of us who live
with the daily oppression of southern patriarchal culture to open our
minds and hearts and speak our truths. When we left the theater
that night, we had all been touched by Carolyn’s powerful politics.”
—Dr. Kate Greene, University of Southern Mississippi.

“… powerful and moving, to the point of angry, as well as sorrowful

tears… Your truthful and emotional performance should be
mandatory for all students—especially women, who need to make
decisions and choices in their lives often based on the same issues
that Jeanne confronted in her own pilgrimage.” —Karla Alwes,
PhD., Professor of English, State University of New York,
Cortland.

vi
“… Superb acting… Enjoyable first-rate theater performance, and a
rich source for thoughtful analysis and evaluation of the
representation of heroines by the patriarchal control institutions...”
—Hilda Hidalgo, PhD.,Professor Emerita, Rutgers University.

“Calamity Jane Delivers A Message to Her Daughter was one of the

best acting performances of this [Dublin International Gay Theatre]
Festival. Carolyn Gage was mesmeric as the aging infamous female
cowboy recalling happier times. Both writing and performance were
of the highest standards and it was a riveting piece of comic
theatre… you could almost smell the booze!” —Gordon Farrell,
Queer ID, Dublin.

“Ever since I first saw Carolyn Gage perform her work, I have been
convinced that she is one of our greatest living artists… the value of
Gage’s plays goes far beyond their ability to hold and entertain
audiences. I know of no living playwright who is grappling with
issues as controversial and as central to the survival of our people
as Carolyn Gage. Possibly the most potentially transformative work
of our time is the work on trauma conducted by psychologists and
academics as well as within feminist and recovery movements. By
joining her intellectual and political engagements with these
movements to her considerable skills as a dramatist, Gage creates
plays that bring the “magic” back to theatre. I have seen many of
her plays performed – among them, The Second Coming of Joan of
Arc, Sappho in Love, Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist, and
Artemisia and Hildegarde. The impact of these performances on
audiences is profound and life-changing.

I can also attest to Carolyn Gage’s rapport with university students

and faculty… I sponsored a lecture and performance by Carolyn
Gage on our campus. These events were well-attended and
enthusiastically received by the faculty, students, and community
members who attended. Carolyn Gage was on my campus for four
days and throughout that time she was most generous in making
herself accessible to students. In the discussions with her audience
and during small group meetings with students, Carolyn was lively,
provocative, brilliant.”—Dr. Patricia Cramer, Dept. of English,
University of Connecticut, Stamford.

“Although she has worked in other literary genres, Carolyn’s genius

is best appreciated in her theatrical work as an author, performer,
and director. Whatever the subject, her work focuses on the lives of
women, situates them in their historical context, and illuminates their

vii
thoughts and actions from a feminist and, yes, lesbian perspective.
And although one might assume that her radical perspective would
ensure permanent obscurity for Carolyn’s work, this has not been
the case. Her plays continue to receive national and international
attention. Carolyn will bring not only her incredibly prolific theatrical
repertoire but also the richness of her intellect and astute political
comprehension of women’s lives and the necessity of our struggle—
of all people’s struggles—against the colonization of our minds and
bodies. She has a great gift and the ability to synthesize the truths
of women’s lives and to tell them without shrinking from their pain
and complexity.”—Julia Penelope, co-editor of The Original
Coming Out Stories, Lesbians Only, and Lesbian Culture: An
Anthology.

“It was an excellent performance… I also wanted you to know that

your performance drew one of the largest audiences for a Women’s
Studies sponsored event. Many of us have continued to talk about
your performance for long after your departure from Gettysburg. We
especially enjoyed your warmth and your sense of humor.”—Joyce
Sprague, Women’s Studies, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg,
PA.

“[Carolyn Gage’s] workshop, sponsored by the Alliance for Sexual

Diversity, was both theatrical and theoretical. Her use of classical
female archetypes to describe ongoing issues facing women was
especially clear and powerful… She was entertaining and
empowering to many young women on our campus who, a month
later, are still talking about her.”—Naomi Paisley, Information and
Referral Counselor, Women’s Center, University of Southern
Maine.

“… a tremendous experience for the students. Ms. Gage made such

a positive impact on the students that her ‘voice’ can still be heard
echoing in the voices of the students who were fortunate enough to
have spent time with her.” —Carolyn Lewis, Professor of Theatre,
Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA.

“We invited Carolyn Gage to perform her play, The Second Coming
of Joan of Arc here at UVA—she was amazing. She really
challenges women and men to rethink a whole range of issues, from
popular historical accounts of Joan’s story to how rape figures into
the oppression of women—and lesbians, specifically—throughout
history. She is a completely lovely person and easy to work with.” —

viii
Claire N. Kaplan, Coordinator, Sexual Assault Education, Univ.
of Virginia.

“… The undisputed queen of startling one-acts.” —Victoria K.

Brownworth, Pulitzer Prize nominee, author of Too Queer.

“Gage’s particular brilliance lies in her skill at juxtaposing lesbian

reality with our collective herstoric imagination as a people...
Lesbian writers, theorists, and professors—in large numbers at
ECLF [East Coast Lesbian Festival]—were absolutely transported
by the academic significance of Gage’s work.” —Bonnie Morris,
Senior Associate at the Center for Women and Policy Studies
and 5-year staff member Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

“I am constantly amazed at Carolyn’s ability to make complex social

issues not only accessible but also irresistibly fascinating.” —R.J.
McComish, Literary Manager of the Portland Stage Company,
Portland, Maine.

“Gage’s The Second Coming of Joan of Arc really is that—an

entirely fresh look at Joan. Who knew she had a lesbian lover, and
her cross dressing is what really got her in trouble?! Gage presents
her as a queer role model and hero for all ages—a fantastic and
surprising believable re-visioning of lesbian history.” —Marie
Cartier, performance artist and author, Baby, You Are My
Religion and founder, Dandelion Warrior Movement.

“No playwright has created as amazing a pantheon of historical

lesbian characters as Carolyn Gage. Her book, Monologues and
Scenes for Lesbian Actors, provides a sumptuous feast of
possibilities for both seasoned and budding lesbian performers to
use portraying a full range of emotion and political perspectives.
Carolyn Gage is a national lesbian treasure.” —Rosemary Keefe
Curb, editor of Amazon All Stars : 13 Lesbian Plays.

“I’ve long been intrigued and entertained by the originality of

Carolyn Gage’s work. Simply no one is writing about these subjects
with such insight and humor.” —Mariah Burton Nelson, author,
We Are All Athletes, international women’s sports authority.

“Rarely in my life have I left a play, or any work of art, feeling like my
life was truly better for it… The plays were hilarious, harrowing,
exhilarating, and affirming.” —The Spectrum, Buffalo, NY.

ix
“Taking in a Gage play is like getting a combined dose of Karl Marx,
Betty Friedan and triple espresso. She broadcasts insight on power
and powerlessness with energetic zip, laying good groundwork for
directors and actors who would attempt production of them.” —
WNYQ News, Buffalo, NY.

“… strong-minded, bighearted storytelling...” —Chicago Review,

Chicago.
BIOGRAPHY

Carolyn Gage is a lesbian-feminist playwright, performer,

director, and activist. The author of seven books on lesbian
theatre and fifty-five 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. Her collection of plays The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays won
the 2008 Lambda Literary Award in Drama, the top LGBT
book award in the US. Portland Magazine named Gage one
the “Ten Most Intriguing People in Maine” in 2009, and in
2010, she was named one of Portland’s “Most Influential” by
the Portland Phoenix.

Gage tours internationally in her award-winning, one-woman

play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, offering
workshops and lectures on lesbian theatre. In 2008, her new
musical about Babe Didrikson was given concert readings in
both Phoenix and Minneapolis, and her play The Countess
and the Lesbians premiered at the Dublin International Gay
Theatre Festival, where it was reviewed by The Irish Times
and sold out the run. In 2008, two collections of her plays
were published: Nine Short Plays and The Second Coming
of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays. In 2009, a revised and
expanded version of her collection of Monologues and
Scenes for Lesbian Actors was published, along with her
anthology The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales.

In 2004, 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

x
won the Lesbian Theatre Award from Curve Magazine, and a
$150,000 documentary on the play premiered at the
Frameline International Film Festival in San Francisco. 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. The
University of Oregon has acquired her personal papers for
their Special Collections Archive.

In 2008, Gage lectured at Tisch School of the Arts at New

York University, and she has been a Guest Lecturer at Bates
College in Maine. 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 2005, she won the national Lynda Hart Memorial
Grant from the Astraea Foundation. In 2010, she spent three
months as a Artist-in-Residence at the Wurlitzer Foundation
in Taos, New Mexico.

One of the most prolific feminist playwrights in the world,

Carolyn Gage is a dynamic speaker and a powerful role
model.

xi
xii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE-WOMAN SHOWS

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC.................................... 1

Award-winning one-woman show. A lesbian Joan returns with
an impassioned message for contemporary audiences. An
electrifying evening of theatre. Show has toured internationally,
been featured on NPR, and received first-class production in
Brazil, where it grossed top box office in Rio and Sao Paolo.
LA RÉSURRECTION DE JEANNE D’ARC ...................................... 4
A lively and contemporary French translation of The Second
Coming of Joan of Arc, by bilingual actress Stephanie Sullivan.
ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ HА ЖАНА Д’АРК ................................ 4
Bulgarian translation by Victoria Koleva of The Second Coming
of Joan of Arc.
THE LAST READING OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN ....................... 4
Captivating evening with one of the greatest actresses of the
nineteenth century. Charlotte Cushman, a large butch woman,
made a name for herself in “breeches parts,” and treats the
audience to excerpts from her Hamlet, Romeo, and Cardinal
Wolsey—as well as scenes and other monologues from her
repertoire. National award for “best play about a lesbian
historical figure.”

DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS
AMY LOWELL: IN HER OWN WORDS............................................ 7
A platform reading by the famous Imagist herself, including the
erotic love poems written for her beloved partner Ada Dwyer.
Also includes diary entries, observations on writing poetry,
rebuttals to critics, and her passionate tribute to the actress
Eleanora Duse.
DEEP HAVEN ................................................................................... 8
A dramatic adaptation of the lesbian writings of beloved 19th-
century New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Including
excerpts form her novels, diaries, letters, and poems. For two
(or four) women.

xiii
EXTRAVAGANT LOVE: THE LIFE OF VIOLETTE LEDUC .............9
An avant-garde odyssey into the vivid and often terrifying world
of lesbian Parisian author Violette LeDuc. Play encompasses
themes of abortion, lesbian prostitution, self-hatred, and
maternal incest. Not for the faint-hearted!

BRETT REMEMBERS .....................................................................10

A dramatic adaptation of the autobiographical writings of Taos
painter Dorothy Brett. In the play, 70-year-old Brett attempts to
gain closure with her Younger Self about her passionate
attachment to D.H. Lawrence during his New Mexico years. A
play for two women.
I HAVE COME TO SHOW YOU DEATH .........................................11
th
Dramatic adaptations of the writings of four 19 -century, New
England lesbian writers, on the subject of lesbians and dying.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Brown, Mary
Wilkins Freeman.

SPEAK FULLY THE ONE AWFUL WORD .....................................12

Dramatic adaptation of Lady Byron Vindicated, Harriet Beecher
Stowe's courageous exposé of Lord Byron's incestuous
relationship with his sister and his abuse of Lady Byron.

MUSICALS

THE AMAZON ALL-STARS ............................................................13

A box office home run! Musical comedy about a lesbian
softball team with a player who is really out in left field.
Fantasy numbers include the Miss Butch Universe Pageant, a
lesbian Star Trek, and the lesbian World Series. Show has
broken box office records in three theatres! Full score and
DVD available.
LEADING LADIES ...........................................................................15
Sparkling gem of a cabaret musical! Six leading ladies take
stage with musical numbers celebrating the turning points in
their respective careers. Cast includes Sarah Bernhardt,
Eleanora Duse, and Laurette Taylor. A special treat for
theatre lovers! Lead sheets and CD.

xiv
BABE: AN OLYMPIAN MUSICAL.................................................. 17
Big, brassy, full-cast mainstage musical about the greatest
woman athlete in history, Babe Didrikson! Babe’s struggle for
acceptance pits her against the standards of compulsory
heterosexuality. Numbers include a high school dance, a
choreographed women’s basketball game, and a pajama
party on the Olympic train. Lead sheets, CD, and DVD
available.
WOMEN ON THE LAND ................................................................. 19
Small-cast lesbian musical about the culture clash between
the urban leather scene and the country dykes on a land
collective in Oregon. “Vampire Lesbians From Hell” meet the
goddess worshiper in a showdown of values on the night of
Beltane. Score currently not available.
HOW TO WRITE A COUNTRY-WESTERN SONG ........................ 20
A five-woman “concert with a plot.” Two sets of lovers, both
former bandmates, struggle with recovery on the eve of a
concert. Show combines country-western, punk rock, hip hop,
gospel, and blues... using a concert stage for the set. CD
available.

FULL -LENGTH PLAYS

SAPPHO IN LOVE .......................................................................... 22

A Lesbian midsummer night’s dream with the goddesses of
celibacy, love, and marriage competing for Sappho’s attention
amid poetry contests, meteor showers, lessons on lesbian
love-making, romantic trysting, mix-ups and disguises. Wet
and wild romantic comedy!
THE ANASTASIA TRIALS IN THE COURT OF WOMEN.............. 24
A play with intense audience participation! Engrossing,
controversial courtroom drama, where the audience must
serve as judge and jury, deciding motions and verdict, in a
case against the five women who betrayed the Grand
Duchess Anastasia Romanov, the last surviving daughter of
the Tsar of Russia. Complex ethical questions on a set of
folding chairs.
THE SPINDLE ................................................................................. 26

xv
 A children’s theatre play for adults! As thirteen-year old Doko
struggles to rescue her best friend the Princess Beauty from
the curse that says she will be pricked by a spindle before her
sixteenth birthday, the adults in the play grapple with the
denial and superstition that hold the kingdom in a tyrant’s
thrall.
UGLY DUCKLINGS .........................................................................28
Two counselors at a summer camp struggle with their love
against a backdrop of homophobia. Scenes with the campers
depict with chilling accuracy the cruelty of girls towards those
they perceive as outsiders. Powerful lesbian drama!
THANATRON...................................................................................31
This is a rollicking farce about the world’s most dysfunctional
family, a doctor with a penchant for assisted suicide, and a
lesbian housekeeper with a crush on her employer. An over-
the-top comedy about leaving, being left, and what it takes to
stay.
ESTHER AND VASHTI ....................................................................32
A romantic drama set against a backdrop of war in ancient
Persia. A young Hebrew woman and her former lover, the
Queen of Persia, struggle against their personal and political
differences to form an alliance against a common enemy.
STIGMATA.......................................................................................33
th
A tragedy in five-acts about the 16 century, Italian nun,
Benedetta Carlini, whose sexual relationship with another nun
became the subject of a trial by the Inquisition.
COMING ABOUT .............................................................................35
Award-winning full-length drama about the disintegration of
the traditional roles in marriage between men and women. A
wedding in the country is hit by a hurricane figuratively and
literally, and the guests undergo a sea change.
THE GODDESS TOUR ....................................................................35
It’s a dark and stormy night at a remote inn on the Burren of
Western Ireland, as six American women -- strangers to each
other (or are they?) -- gather for a tour of ancient goddess
sites. A murder mystery exploring potentially deadly mother-
daughter dyads, played out amid ghostly sightings of lost

xvi
 children and pre-Celtic rituals involving various aspects of the
goddess.

ONE-ACT PLAYS
MASON-DIXON............................................................................... 38
Separated for thirty years, a white woman attempts to recruit
her former slave to return to the South to work as a Union spy
in the Confederate White House. Issues of race, class, and
gender explode as the women confront their lesbian girlhood
and shared history of sexual abuse.
JANE ADDAMS AND THE DEVIL BABY....................................... 39
Hull House, rumored to be sheltering a “devil baby,” is
besieged by emigrants clamoring to see the child with horns
and hooves. Jane Addams locks horns with an elderly Irish
woman, in an attempt to understand the strange obsession
that has gripped Chicago.
LOUISA MAY INCEST .................................................................... 40
The writing of Little Women is interrupted when the character
Jo March and her famous creator cannot agree on the
ending. The struggle for control of the book becomes deadly
when Jo accuses Louisa of repressed lesbian desires and
incest memories.
BATTERED ON BROADWAY ........................................................ 41
Farcical romp that takes a backwards look at the misogyny of
Broadway’s musicals through the eyes of the characters
themselves... twenty years later!
CALAMITY JANE SENDS A MESSAGE TO HER DAUGHTER.... 42
Fifteen-minute comic monologue by the real Calamity Jane -
spittoon, whiskey, and all!
COOKIN’ WITH TYPHOID MARY................................................... 43
Half-hour dramatic monologue by the notorious typhoid
carrier who refused to admit the existence of germs. Her side
of the story.
ARTEMISIA AND HILDEGARD...................................................... 44
Two of the most powerful women artists in history discuss
their work on an explosive arts panel about survival strategies
for women artists.

xvii
HARRIET TUBMAN VISITS A THERAPIST....................................46
Harriet Tubman, suspected of planning an escape, has been
sent to the therapist, another African-American woman, for an
evaluation. Radical activism meets one-day-at-a-time
therapism. Published by Samuel French, presented at
Louisville Juneteenth Festival, winner of Off-Off Broadway
Festival.
ENTR’ACTE .....................................................................................48
Eva Le Gallienne has checked herself into a private hospital
the night she was raped backstage during her Broadway run
of Liliom. She has sent for her former girlfriend Mimsey,
whom she has not seen since Mimsey’s marriage ten months
earlier. A tour-de-force for a young actor, running a gamut of
dissociative states of a survivor of sexual abuse.
THE PARMACHENE BELLE...........................................................50
“Fly Rod” Crosby, a lesbian Maine hunting guide from the late
th
19 century, shares secrets about fly-fishing as she indulges
in her romantic fantasies about her friend Annie Oakley.
THE PELE CHANT ..........................................................................51
A ninety-two-year-old Native Hawaiian woman struggles with
the last request of her adoptive mother, Queen Liliuokalani,
the last queen of Hawai’i. Succeeding in her quest, she
overturns the paradigm of Western history, exposing its
inherently colonial agenda.
THE DRUM LESSON.......................................................................52
A one-act for five women drummers, in which much of the
dialogue is conveyed via the drumming.
THE RULES OF THE PLAYGROUND ............................................53
Six mothers of middle-school children come together for a
special training on playground violence. Focusing on
perfecting the rules of the playground to eliminate inequality,
the women, literally, turn a blind eye to the real cause of
violence. A chilling interrogation into the ways women teach
each other to enable male violence.
THE EVIL THAT MEN DO: THE STORY OF THALIDOMIDE.........55
Fast-paced radio drama, suitable for stage production. The
conspiracy of the German drug manufacturers and the FDA

xviii
 unfolds like a murder mystery, as Dr. Frances Kelsey,
suspecting birth defects, stalls for time against mounting
pressures to license sale of “the sleeping pill of the century.”
A LABOR PLAY.............................................................................. 56
Kafka-esque one-act about a multi-national corporation in the
business of selling babies. “Business as usual” comes to a
halt when one of the workers strikes for control of the
distribution of manufactured goods. In other words, she wants
to keep the baby.
HETEROSEXUALS ANONYMOUS ................................................ 57
A playful send-up of the 12-step movement. Five women in
recovery from their addictions to men, convene at their weekly
meeting. The format includes personal testimonies and the
reading of the 12 Steps of HA.
RADICALS ...................................................................................... 58
A one-act about the women in the anti-war movement of the
Sixties. Sexual tensions fuse with political agendas, as the
women cross mine fields of repressed emotion, and the action
builds to a violent climax, as the war comes home.
THE BOUNDARY TRIAL OF JOHN PROCTOR ............................ 58
A one-act featuring the notorious anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s
Crucible, and the women he exploited. John Proctor, finding
himself in the boundary lands of patriarchy after his execution,
encounters a second trial—this time by the women. Proctor,
who does not believe in witches, scrambles desperately for
context as he is tested by his ex-wife, his mistress, a formerly
enslaved Caribbean woman, the town baglady, the town
bluestocking, and the town matriarch.
THE LADIES’ ROOM ...................................................................... 59
A five-minute play about two lesbian teenagers in a ladies'
room at a shopping mall. The butch has just been mistaken
for a man, and mall security is on the way. Her girlfriend,
because of her own history,is conflicted about offering
support.
PATRICIDE ..................................................................................... 60
A one-minute monologue by a woman of any age, ethnicity,
race, orientation, physical ability, class background—in which
she telephones and confronts her father on incest.

xix
THE P.E. TEACHER ........................................................................61
A one-act about misogyny, racism, and homophobia in the
schools. A new teacher is hired to replace a lesbian teacher
who resigned under suspicious circumstances. When a
former lover turns up on staff, it becomes evident that the
scapegoating is a cover for the school’s institutionalized
violence against women and girls.
BITE MY THUMB .............................................................................61
A “skirmish in one-act.” Two “gangs” from contemporary rival
productions of Romeo and Juliet meet in an Off-Off Broadway
alley to rumble, sixteenth-century style. Lots of cross-dressed
knee-flexing and gender-bending!
THE POORLY-WRITTEN PLAY FESTIVAL....................................63
Just possibly the worst one-act play ever written! A committee
of play readers meet in the Green Room to select the plays
for a Festival of Poorly-Written Plays. In the course of the
meeting, they violate every tenet of good playwriting in a kind
of “Actor’s Nightmare” for playwrights. Riotously funny.
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE ............................................................64
Ostensibly arguing about The Taming of the Shrew, a lesbian
couple come to grips with their own marital struggles around
the issue of sex.
THE GAGE AND MR. COMSTOCK ................................................65
A monologue by feminist foremother and Suffragist, Matilda
Joslyn Gage, in which she sets the bait for Anthony Comstock
to ban her book, Woman, Church and State, a comprehensive
exposé of the historical misogyny of the christian church.
‘TIL THE FAT LADY SINGS ............................................................66
A play with music for two women in one-act. A fat woman in
her 20’s is in the hospital awaiting surgery for a gastric bypass
operation she believes necessary for her dream of singing
opera professionally. Her partner is against the surgery, and
as the patient goes under sedation, she finds herself and her
partner in a series of bizarre dreams where her situation
incorporates elements of operas by Wagner, Gluck, Verdi,
Mozart, and Puccini.

xx
THE A-MAZING YAMASHITA AND THE GOLDDIGGERS OF
2008................................................................................................. 68
“The transnational, postmodern magic show of the millennia!”
The A-Mazing Yamashita promises to levitate a woman, cut a
woman in two, and disappear a hundred thousand women—
all through the wizardry of modern pharmaceuticals, the
presto-chango of sexual com-modification, and the wonders
of the Great Cabinet of GATT.
THE COUNTESS AND THE LESBIANS ........................................ 69
Three lesbian actors are rehearsing an historical play about
Countess Markiewicz and the aftermath of her participation in
the Easter Week Rising in Dublin. The play is about her
political differences with her sister, who was a pacifist. As the
women take up the issues of the play, the power dynamics of
their own lesbian relationships are called into question.
SOUVENIRS FROM EDEN ............................................................. 71
The ghost of lesbian poet Renée Vivien returns to a pivotal
memory from the summer of 1900, when she was in Bar
Harbor (“Eden”), Maine, with her lover Natalie Barney. She
wrestles with scenarios of traumatic memories in an attempt
to find closure.
BLACK EYE .................................................................................... 72
Subtitled “a knockout in nine minutes,” this short play packs a
punch. The year is 1953, and Amanda is a 13-year-old
tomboy who has been sent to the principal’s office for fighting
the boys who have been lesbian-baiting her. When the
principal, who is in the closet, moves to expel her, Amanda’s
lesbian P.E. teacher shows that she is just as willing to fight
as her student. A taut play, filled with surprises.
HERMENEUTIC CIRCLEJERK ...................................................... 73
A farcical satire on the founding of postmodernism by two
philosophers with a public history of pro-pedophilia activism.
Is the “deconstruction of childhood” a coincidental by-product
of of post-structural theory, or something more sinister: the
raison d'être of a pernicioius philosophy?

xxi
LACE CURTAIN IRISH ....................................................................74
Thirty-five years after the infamous Fall River ax murders, an
Irish woman, working in her kitchen in Anaconda, Montana,
opens a newspaper to read about the death of the alleged
murderer, Lizzie Borden. The woman is Bridget Sullivan, the
Borden's former maid. A gripping solo one-act that turns
history on its head!

BOOKS
THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND SELECTED
PLAYS [2009] ..................................................................................76
A new collection of Gage’s one- and two-woman plays,
including The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, The Last
Reading of Charlotte Cushman, The Parmachene Belle,
Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter, Cookin’
with Typhoid Mary, Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist,
Artemisia and Hildegard.
NINE SHORT PLAYS ......................................................................77
A collection of Gage’s best short plays: The Obligatory
Scene, Bite My Thumb, The Rules of the Playground, The
Pele Chant, Patricide, Entr’acte or The Night Eva Le
Gallienne Was Raped, Jane Addams and the Devil Baby,
Louisa May Incest, and Battered on Broadway.
THREE COMEDIES .........................................................................78
A collection of three award-winning, full-length comedies: The
Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women, Sappho in Love, and
Thanatron.
THE TRIPLE GODDESS..................................................................79
A collection of three full-length dramas: The Goddess Tour,
Ugly Ducklings, and Esther and Vashti.
BLACK EYE AND OTHER SHORT PLAYS....................................80
A collection of ten short plays: Black Eye, The Ladies Room,
Conversation on a Strange Planet, The A-Mazing Yamashita
and the Gold Diggers of 2011, The Rules of the Playground,
The Boundary Trial of John Proctor, The Evil That Men Do:
The Story of Thalidomide, A Labor Play, Heterosexuals
Anonymous, The P.E. Teacher, The Gage and Mr. Comstock.

xxii
TAKE STAGE! ................................................................................ 81
A complete manual for the lesbian who wants to produce or
direct lesbian theatre. Everything you need to know from
selecting the script to striking the set. Chapters on money, on
organizing volunteers, on multi-culturalism, on publicity, on
rehearsing. Written with the values and needs of our
community in mind. An invaluable resource for every amateur
theatre!

SCENES AND MONOLOGUES FOR LESBIAN ACTORS:

REVISED AND EXPANDED ........................................................... 83
The first ever scene and monologue book written for lesbian
actors! Over thirty-two monologues and over sixty scenes
from twenty of Gage’s most popular plays.. Some of the roles
are written specifically for African American, Hispanic, Latina,
and Anglo actors, but most are not specific for race or
ethnicity.

THE SPINDLE AND OTHER LESBIAN FAIRY TALES ................. 85

A collection of four short stories and one full-length about
lesbian princesses, woman-princes, goddesses, and fairy
godmothers! Magic, mystery, romance… with a radical politic!
LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW .................................................. 86
A feminist meditation book written with a light touch, but a
deep politic. In the words of feminist philosopher Mary Daly, “
It is a work of burning, uncompromising vision and daring... a
beacon of hope in these chilling times of compromise, timidity
and apparent defeat. This book is Pure Fire.”
THE GAIA PAPERS........................................................................ 88
The Gaia Papers explore the age-old question of evil through
a lens of radical feminist metaphysics, applying principles of
a radical spirituality to challenge the reality of gendered
violence.
13 PROPOSITIONS FOR REWIRING THE LESBIAN BRAIN ....... 88
A thirty-six page booklet that is an "electricians manual" for
reprogramming key concepts about human relationships.
THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND OTHER PLAYS
[1994] .............................................................................................. 89

xxiii
 Gage’s award-winning classic, plus six of her one-acts:
Mason-Dixon, Jane Addams and the Devil Baby, Louisa May
Incest, Battered on Broadway, Calamity Jane Sends a
Message to Her Daughter, and Cookin’ with Typhoid Mary.
SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL ...............................90
Thirteen of “Sister Carolyn’s” most popular sermons from her
notoriously funny, radically feminist Lesbian Tent Revival.
SUPPLEMENTAL SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL .92
Thirteen of “Sister Carolyn’s” most popular sermons from her
notoriously funny

BIRTH OF A LESBIAN ....................................................................92

A “science fiction autobiography” in which the author creates
a parable for understanding her childhood experiences.

ADAPTATIONS

A WOMAN’S BOOK OF HEALING .................................................93

An adaption of the Christian Science textbook, Science and
Health with Key to the Scriptures, for use by those who are
seeking a metaphysical system of healing with an emphasis
on right relation and connection with the natural world, where
a higher power is metaphorically referenced as female.

CD’s AND DVD’S

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC [CD]..........................94

An audio recording of Gage’s performance in her lesbian
classic, at the Institute of Musical Arts in Bodega, California.
UGLY DUCKLINGS: THE DOCUMENTARY [DVD] .......................94
Documentary film produced by Hardy Girls Healthy Women,
based on Gage’s play Ugly Ducklings. Film contains excerpts
from the play, with interviews by members of the cast. Project
designed to prevent LGBT youth suicide and bullying.

xxiv
 ONE-WOMAN PLAYS

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC

A One-Woman Play
• 2009, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second
Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays)
• 2009, translated into French, publication pending.
• Featured interview for “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” Public
Radio International.
• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and
Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.
• 2009, Gozo Creative Club, Malta.
• 2007, Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival.
• 2007, Excerpts performed at the European Union Festival in
Berlin, sponsored by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts
with the Embassy of Malta.
• First-class production in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janiero, Brazil,
featuring Christiane Torloni (Portuguese language translation).
Teatro FAAP.
• Featured in Girlfriends Magazine, San Francisco.
• Featured performance at Lesbian/Gay Pre-Conference, Assoc.
for Theatre in Higher Education, Wash., DC.
• Featured performance at U.K. Women’s Studies Conference,
Belfast, N. Ireland.
• Invited to the World Summit for Economic Sustainability,
Johannesburg.
• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks,
Santa Cruz, CA,)
• Oregon Playwrights Award, Oregon Institute of Literary Arts.
• Featured on the cover of national feminist magazine, On the
Issues, New York.
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books and Feminist Bookstore
News.
• Performed in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Madison, San Francisco,
Portland, Los Angeles, Toronto, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City,
Boston, Chicago, Denver, Northampton, Malta, Cork, Listowel,
Rochester. West Coast Womyn’s Music Festival, East Coast
Lesbian Festival, National Lesbian Conference, Women’s
Ordination Conference, National Women’s Studies Conference,

1
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

National Women’s Music Festival, Women’s Week in

Provincetown.
• Performed at University of Oregon at Eugene, University of
Virginia, University of New England, University of Connecticut at
Stamford and at Storrs, University of Colorado at Boulder,
University of Utah, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Hollins
University, Gettysburg College, Colorado College, Bloomsberg
University, St. Cloud University, SUNY Cortland, Kalamazoo
College, Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska at
Lincoln, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, St. Joseph’s University,
Philadelphia, PA, Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst, Univ. of
Maine, Farmington. Stetson Univ., Pacific University, University
of Southern Mississippi.
• Recording nationally distributed by Goldenrod Music.
• Written up in Washington Blade (DC), Windy City Times
(Chicago), off our backs (Washington, DC).

“… unparalleled, far superior to George Bernard Shaw’s... The

Second Coming of Joan of Arc is high art and revolutionary
theatre combined.”—Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and
Madness and Mothers on Trial.

“Joan of Arc has never been made more real to me, not in the
movies, not on stage. This is the woman, not the myth…
Brava!”—Z. Budapest, author of The Grandmother of Time.

“… passion, humor, rage, insight, regret… This play works on

many levels - layers and layers and layers… a highly intelligent
piece of work which always remains accessible… an emotional,
moving, exciting experience...” —From the Flames, Nottingham,
England.

“… passionate, witty. Let this Joan be one of your voices.” —

Feminist Bookstore News, San Francisco.

“… gripping re-exploration of a legendary figure…” —Sing Out!

“… a tour de force performance by US writer/actor Carolyn

Gage. Here the true story of Jeanne Romée, the young peasant
girl who liberated France, is brought to us in a contemporary
setting, to explore how 500 years later things have changed for
women in society. It is a flawless performance, delivered with
passion, indignation, some humour, connection, opinion and
power...” —Gay Community News, Ireland.

2
 ONE-WOMAN PLAYS

“Carolyn Gage is a powerful writer who comprehends her

character… exhilarating… held my attention fully.” —We the
People, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… wickedly funny and devastatingly on target...” —Women’s

Voices, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… a girl-power epic… Gage is at her best here, as almost

every line is scorchingly insightful.” —The Spectrum, Buffalo,
NY.

Joan of Arc led an army to victory at seventeen. At eighteen, she

arranged the coronation of a king. At nineteen, she went up against
the entire Catholic church… and lost. Her trial lasted five months,
and the testimony by witnesses was carefully transcribed by
notaries. Twenty years after her death, a new trial was authorized,
and again detailed records were kept. There was testimony by her
childhood playmates, by her parents, by the women who slept with
her, by the soldiers who served under her, by the priests who
confessed her, by those who witnessed and administered her
torture. She is the most thoroughly documented figure of the
fifteenth century. So why do the myths about the simpleminded
peasant girl, the pious virgin, still pervade the history books?

Joan was anorectic. She was a teenage runaway. She had an

incestuous, alcoholic father. She loved women. She died for her
right to wear men’s clothing. She was defiant, irreverent, more
clever than her judges, unrepentant, and unfailingly true to her own
visions.

In The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, Joan returns to share her

story with contemporary women. She tells her experiences with the
highest levels of church, state, and military, and unmasks the brutal
misogyny behind male institutions.

One woman
70 minutes (90 w/intermission)
Single set

3
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

LA RÉSURRECTION DE JEANNE D’ARC

A French Translation
• 2010, Village Scene Productions, Montreal, Canada.
Orleans

A lively and contemporary translation of The Second Coming of

Joan of Arc by bilingual actress Stephanie Sullivan.

ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ HА ЖАНА Д’АРК

Bulgarian translation by Victoria Koleva of The Second

Coming of Joan of Arc.

THE LAST READING OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN

A One-Woman Show

• 2010, Break the Mold Productions, Marigny Theatre, New

Orleans.
• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second
Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays)
• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and
Selected Plays,Outskirts Press, CO.
• Bakehouse Theatre production in Adelaide, Australia, starring
Jacqy Phillips.
• Published in Performing Autobiography, ed. Lynn Miller,
Univ. of
Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.
• Featured in Girlfriends Magazine, San Francisco.
• Excerpted, Alleyway Theatre, Buffalo, NY.
• Featured performance, Women’s Theatre Festival, Eugene, OR.
• Featured performance, QueerFest, Los Angeles.
• Featured performance, Nat’l Women’s Music Festival,
Bloomington.

4
 ONE-WOMAN PLAYS

• National Winner of $3000 Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation

Grant.
• Excerpts featured at the Sisters on Stage Lesbian Theatre
Conference, NYC.
• Broadcast on QTV, Santa Cruz, CA.

“A tour de force… Magnificent… beautifully crafted script...”—

Advertiser, Adelaide, Australia.

“Electrifying… enormously entertaining, absorbing, and

brutally honest… Anger, pride, frustration, flair, narcissism,
nastiness, grandeur, passion, indomitable skill, jealousy, razor-
edged revenge and ultimately heart...” —Sunday Mail, Adelaide,
Australia.

“I almost never review something that a viewer can't see –

such a show that's played only a few performances and closed.
There are exceptions, however. Last week, at the Marigny
Theater, I saw a one-woman show, The Last Reading of
Charlotte Cushman, that is simply extraordinary… moving,
poignant, terribly theatrical and funny as hell… superbly
structured… a showcase for a strong, dynamic actress…”—
David Cuthbert, WYES-TV, PBS affiliate station, New Orleans.

“Never have I heard such raves from so many of our festi-

goers… clearly the highlight of the… National Women’s Music
Festival!”—-Mary Byrne, producer National Women’s Music
Festival, Bloomington.

“… nearly flawless in its appeal and execution… [Gage’s]

Charlotte brought an appetite to the audience they didn’t even
know they had… the audience reluctantly left the theatre...” —
The Slant, Marin County, CA.

“… flawless… a smashing performance...”—We the People,

Sonoma County, CA.

“… unabashedly lesbian, unabashedly theatrical...”—The Maui

News, HI.

The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman is a moving one-woman

show about the greatest American actress of the nineteenth
century. Charlotte Cushman, a large butch woman, was very “out”

5
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

about her lesbianism, cross-dressing to play men’s roles and

referring to her partner as “my wife.”

The play opens with an announcement that the performance will be

canceled, but Charlotte, outraged that such a decision has been
made without consulting her, charges on to countermand the order.
Cushman, struggling desperately against breast cancer, insists on
performing—and, taking up the challenge of her condition, devotes
the evening to the subject of death in the theatre. Having played
many roles which require dying, Charlotte regales the audience with
moving—and sometimes hilarious—scenes from Macbeth, Hamlet,
Oliver Twist, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VIII, and the
notoriously bad melodrama, Guy Mannering.

Interspersed with her monologues are anecdotes about other

actors, her family, and about the romantic intrigues of the lesbian
community of American emigrees who were living in Rome in the
mid-1800’s. This community included Harriet Hosmer and Emma
Stebbins, both sculptors of international reputation.

At the opening of the second act, Charlotte shares with us an

unusual bet she has made with her lover, who is watching from the
wings. Later, as she performs her most famous “breeches part,” the
role of Romeo, the play takes a surprising turn to reveal the woman
behind the mask.

The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman is a treat for lesbians, for

women’s history students, for theatre history buffs, and for fans of
Shakespeare! But it is Charlotte Cushman’s profoundly human
struggle against a terminal illness which makes the play an
unforgettable experience.

One woman (plus one very brief walk-on part)

90 minutes
Single set (platform reading)

6
 DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS

AMY LOWELL: IN HER OWN WORDS

A Reading

This is a poetry reading by the famous Imagist poet herself. The

reading is interlaced with tormented confessions from Lowell’s diary
as a teenager, observations on the art of writing poetry, her version
of the historic rupture with Ezra Pound, witty rebuttals to her critics,
and her notorious demonstration of how to unwrap a cigar as if one
were undressing a woman!

More than half the evening is given to the actual reading of Lowell’s
works, including her poem “The Sisters,” about Sappho, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson; “A Fairy Tale,” an expose of
her fall from grace as a child when she realized the fate in store for
an “ugly, fat” girl; “The Bath,” her aggressive and sensuous
celebration of her body and its pleasures; and many of the erotic
love poems written to her partner, the actress Ada Dwyer.

Lowell, who did not begin her life work until she was almost forty,
waged a tactically brilliant, militant campaign against fat phobia,
against ageism, and against the stereotypes of passive female
sexuality and sentimental artistic expression. She paid a high price
for her rebellion, however, and after her death, her many enemies
saw to it that she was treated patronizingly, if at all, in the historical
record.

Not a play in the traditional sense, Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words is
nonetheless a compelling piece of living history, as well as a
stimulating evening of lesbian poetry. Where biographers and
critical essayists have attempted to consider Lowell on a continuum
with the other two poets (both males) of her famous family—or to
locate her among the lesser poets of her day, this theatre piece
places her squarely in the tradition of pagan lesbian artists, a
tradition with which Lowell strongly identified in both her life and in
her work.

One woman
60 minutes
Single set (platform reading)

7
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

DEEP HAVEN
A Dramatic Adaptation
th
Deep Haven takes the audience through the life of 19 century
Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett, beginning with her tomboy
childhood and ending with her touching final communications with
her life partner Annie Fields.

The text of the play is adapted from Jewett’s novels and letters, as
well as from the poems and diary entries of her juvenilia.

Apparently, Jewett’s father, a country doctor, identified that his

daughter, from a very early age, was destined for a different life
than the traditional New England wife and mother. He consciously
set out to prepare her for an independent life, and in the play,
Jewett shares his theories about rearing a gender-deviant daughter
in citing A Country Doctor.

Jewett’s frustrated love affairs with young women are chronicled in

the empassioned poems she writes, attempting to persuade them to
stay to true to her. In fact, their abandonment of her in favor of
heterosexual marriage was probably less about fickleness of heart
and more about wanting children as well as economic security.

It was not until Jewett met Annie Fields, a widower and

philanthropist, that she found her love and her longing for security
reciprocated. Seeking approval for their unorthodox union, both
women attended séances to communicate with the spirits of
Jewett’s dead father and Fields’ dead husband.

This was the era of the Boston Marriage, before the sexologists of
the next century would begin to pathologize same-sex orientation.
The openness and sweetness of the two women’s letters testifies to
an era more tolerant than the twentieth century. This contrast is
foreshadowed by lesbian novelist Willa Cather’s exchanges with
Jewett toward the end of Jewett’s life. Jewett challenged Cather, a
rising novelist, about her needing to adopt a male voice for her
narration.

Cather, speaking for a new generation of lesbians who will be called

“inverts” by the sexologists and treated like freaks of nature,
responds, “It’s always hard to write about the things that are near to
your heart, from a kind of instinct of self-preservation you distrust

8
 DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS

them and disguise them.”

Illuminating the lesbian challenges and joys of her life, Deep Haven
pays tribute to the deeply matriarchal and woman-loving stories and
novels of one of Maine’s most beloved daughters.

Four women (can be done with two)

Single set
30 minutes

EXTRAVAGANT LOVE: THE LIFE OF VIOLETTE LEDUC

A Dramatic Adaptation

Extravagant Love is the story of Parisian writer Violette LeDuc.

Using narrative excerpts from LeDuc’s works, the play tells a

passionate story of a lesbian struggling with her disturbing
memories of a narcissistic, incestuous mother whom she both
adored and hated. Against a backdrop of Parisian fashion salons,
decadent hotels, and garish street carnivals, LeDuc unfolds her
story of her search for female autonomy.

In the first act, LeDuc reenacts her obsession with Parisian high
fashion—an obsession complicated by her strong identification with
the male gender. She relives an episode of shoplifting, as well as
the horrifying betrayal of her lesbian lover by an act of prostitution.

In the second act, LeDuc takes us back to her first lesbian

experience in a girls’ dormitory of a Parisian boarding school. This
scene was fictionalized in her lesbian erotic novel, Therese and
Isabelle, and in the ‘60’s became the basis of an erotic film of the
same name.

LeDuc narrates in dramatic tableaux the events surrounding her

illegal abortion, and in doing so, she uncovers the primal trauma
behind her gender confusion and misogyny: child sexual abuse at
the hands of her mother.

Breaking the silence about one of society’s deepest taboos,

Extravagant Love takes its audiences on an unforgettable odyssey

9
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

into a lesbian world of passionate tenderness and devastating

betrayal.

Production rights must be negotiated individually with the agent for

the author’s estate.

One woman
One hour
Single set

BRETT REMEMBERS

A Dramatic Adaptation
In this play, Taos painter Dorothy Brett, 73, is entertaining us in her
1956 studio, when her reminiscences are interrupted by the ghost of
her younger self as she was in 1924, when she first accompanied
D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to New Mexico with the plan of
establishing a spiritual and artistic community.

“Younger Brett” is hopelessly and obsessively in love with

Lawrence, and her soliloquies are addressed to the object of her
adoration. She continually attempts to uncover the mysterious
painting on the easel, which is a copy of a painting Brett destroyed
thirty years earlier.

Brett’s memories include the “Bloomsberries” who gathered

themselves at the estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell during World War
I, as well as Tony and Mabel Dodge Luhan, at whose invitation the
Lawrences had come to New Mexico. She shares more personal
memories of her adult-onset deafness and the incident of childhood
sexual molestation to which she attributes her lifelong sexual
reticence.

Younger Brett continues to interrupt the narrative with her more

immediate and emotionally raw memories of Lawrence during the
years at the Ranch.

Finally Brett breaks her silence about the tragic night when
Lawrence attempted unsuccessfully to make love to her. This
memory unveils the mystery of the painting, and Brett is finally able

10
 DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS

to make peace with herself, inviting the Younger Brett to collaborate

on the finishing of the painting.

2 woman
50 minutes
Single set

I HAVE COME TO SHOW YOU DEATH

Scenes on Lesbians and Dying by 19th Century, New

England Women Writers

I Have Come to Show You Death is collection of dramatic

th
adaptations of works by four 19 century New England writers, all of
whom appear to have been in Boston Marriages and whose writings
celebrate intimacy between women and negative appraisals of the
effects of heterosexual marriage on women.

Three are adaptations of short stories dealing with the death of a

lesbian life partner. The fourth adaptation is taken from a novel, and
it explores the meaning of life for two young lesbians.

Two Friends by Mary Wilkins Freeman. The impending death of

one woman drives her partner into desperate denial and the
confession of an old betrayal.

Since I Died by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. A woman who has

recently died attempts and fails to communicate with her lesbian life
partner, who is unable to see her.

There and Here by Alice Brown. A woman receives a ghostly

visitation from her former beloved companion, and together they
revisit scenes from their childhood. At dawn she receives news that
her friend has died overseas.

Scene from Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett. Two young

women, ending their summer of independence in a Maine fishing
village, share an intimate evening, musing on the mystery of life.

Five women: Two young, three middle-aged

Multiple sets
60 minutes.

11
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

SPEAK FULLY THE ONE AWFUL WORD

A Dramatic Adaptation of Lady Byron Vindicated by

Harriet Beecher Stowe

That “one awful word” was “incest,” and Harriet Beecher Stowe was
referring to Lord Byron’s incestuous relations with his half-sister, as
witnessed by Byron’s wife.

Late in her life, Stowe had befriended Annabella Byron, a woman

with a lively interest in social justice, including abolition, who
engaged in many philanthropic pursuits. During one of their visits,
Lady Byron shared the story of her traumatic engagement,
honeymoon, and brief marital co-habitation with the infamous poet.
After Lady Byron’s death and the publication of a memoir by Byron’s
last mistress, Stowe published a rebuttal to the slanderous attacks
on her friend, as well as the details of Byron’s abuses. Stowe was
as vilified for writing this book as she had been lionized for writing
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

By 1870, Lord Byron was a romantic and literary icon on two

continents, and the myth of the frigid and puritanical wife who had
abandoned this martyred genius was an essential part of the
legend. Speak Fully the One Awful Word is a one-woman dramatic
adaptation that captures the passion of Stowe in defending her
friend, as well as her radical framing of incest as an oppression, and
domestic violence as a human rights violation. She specifically
repudiated the prevailing Christian ethos that encouraged wives to
suffer in silence for the sake of protecting the family.

Stowe’s courage in confronting incest, and her willingness to

sacrifice her own reputation to defend that of a dead friend, shine
like beacons on a world that still invests in doctrines of “false
memory syndrome.”

2 women, 1 man
Single Set
40 minutes

12
 MUSICALS

THE AMAZON ALL-STARS

A Lesbian Musical

Music by Sue Carney

Sample of songs at
www.myspace.com/theamazonallstars

• 2007, Stage Q (reading), Madison and Upstart Productions,

Colo. Springs.
• Dorothy’s Place, Highgate Hill, Queensland, Australia.
• Actors Community Theatre, Santa Cruz, CA.
• Tribad Productions, Petaluma, CA
• NTM Productions, Ashland, OR and Corvallis, OR.
• Title play for Amazon All Stars: 13 Lesbian Plays (edited by
Rosemary Keefe Curb, Applause Books, NYC, named national
finalist Lambda Literary Award.
• Musical highlights showcased at Sisters on Stage Lesbian
Theatre
Conference, NYC.
• First lesbian musical to be licensed and published by a
mainstream play publisher!

“… rollicking, fun piece that does touch on some serious

issues… The audience was in stitches for most of the play and
the rafters rang with applause.”—Santa Cruz Sentinel, CA.

“… delightful foot-tapping, arm-in-arm down the streets, sing-

at-the-top-of-your-lungs stuff… The Amazon All-Stars is ours.
It’s good, it’s fun… Lesbians need to see this show, to laugh
and cry with it, to love it...” —Lee Lynch, lesbian author and
nationally syndicated columnist.

“sexy, raucous… a real crowd-pleaser… ” —We the People,

Santa Rosa, CA.

13
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

“This is a sparkling, funny play...” —The Lithiagraph, Ashland,

OR.

“… a great show...” —Women’s Voices, Santa Rosa, CA.

“… delightfully funny and sweet musical… With enlightening

musical numbers by Sue Carney and humor abounding, [we]
are drawn into the lives of these women as players and as
people.” —Lambda Book Report, Washington, DC.

The Amazon All-Stars is a zany musical comedy about a women’s

softball team. Kelly, the left fielder, is truly “out in left field,”
preferring her fantasies to reality. This makes for some great
lesbian-style Walter Mitty scenes. When Jan, the new short stop,
decides to test her sexual prowess with Kelly, both women are
brought to a crisis about the way they see themselves and the
world. Amid various subplots and subterfuges, team spirit triumphs,
and everybody’s a winner. Who could resist “Come Out for the
Team,” “When Women Do It to Each Other,” or “Ya Gotta Get Under
the Glove”?

The Amazon All-Stars is written in the genre of the “naive musical”

of the 1930’s, but it’s anything but simple! The nine members of the
team are all fully developed with distinct personalities and
motivations. Also, there are three subplots, all presenting aspects of
denial in lesbian community and relationships: sorority politics in
collectives, alcohol abuse, infidelity, and the mistaking of sex for
intimacy.

The leads in the play, Jan and Kelly, are both ingenues, but their
relationship touches on the deeper issue of exploitation of women
who suffer syndromes from child sexual abuse. The secondary
relationship of the play is between an older couple with an eight-
year history. This relationship mirrors Jan and Kelly’s dilemma, but
with more depth, adding resonance to the central plot.

The lesbian empowerment fantasies encompass several areas of

our oppression and invisibility: sports, popular music, TV and film,
and families of birth. And the use of the Leather Woman provides a
“picture frame” device for the show, enhancing the theatricality of
the work and allowing women’s communities to showcase a local
band.

14
 MUSICALS

The three ball players who “triple up” for additional fantasy chorus
roles, have parts written for them which allow them to play their own
alter-egos in the fantasy numbers. For example, Ursula, the high
school player, is the teenage bass player in the nightmare
sequence. Later, in another fantasy, she is Mary Richland, a former
high school friend who betrayed Kelly and turned straight. The
audience experiences a consistency of character through these
sequences, which adds coherence to the plot and helps anchor the
fantasy scenes in the realities of the ball players.

The numbers are all highly recognizable parodies of specific types

of popular music: the sleazy Stones rock-and-roll number, the fifties
ballad, the “womyn’s music” take-off. The lyrics range from
sophisticatedly cynical (“When Women Do It to Each Other”) to
sublimely ridiculous (“Under the Glove”).

The Amazon All-Stars takes a lightweight tradition and sets dramatic

precedent with a thoughtful and multidimensional treatment of
lesbian community.

Twelve women
Two hours
Three sets

LEADING LADIES
A Cabaret Musical Revue
Music by Teresa Wilhelmi
Sample of songs at
www.myspace.com/leadingladiesthemusical

• Staged reading, Music in a Box, the Dramatists Guild, NYC.

• First Place, Musical Theatre, Seattle New Plays Buffet, juried by
Civic Light Opera.
• National Finalist, Aggie Players Playwriting Competition, Texas
A & M University.

15
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Leading Ladies is a sparkling all-women cabaret musical

incorporating seven separate historical vignettes onto a single set, a
backstage dressing room.

At the opening of the play, Mary, a young actor tortured by doubts

about her ability, debates whether or not she should abandon her
career in “The Voice of My Critics.” The dressing room comes alive
with ghosts of famous women actors, and one by one they reenact
critical moments in their own careers, when they had to confront
fear and doubt:

SARAH SIDDONS, fired from Drury Lane, realizes her

meteoric rise to fame was only the payoff for David
Garrick’s sexual exploitation of her. She resolves to play the
provinces until she can make it back to London by herself.
She belts out “When the Show Is Over,” the strip song to
end all strip songs.

CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN, laughed off the stage for being

fat, determines not to give in to humiliation with her
inspirational “Audience of One.”

ELEANORA DUSE, pregnant and abandoned by her lover

at the time of her big theatre break, pulls herself together so
the show can go on. The Stage Manager joins her for a
theatrical soft-shoe duet, “Improvise!”

SARAH BERNHARDT, rejected by French audiences who

have not forgiven her for deserting the national theatre,
turns the tables on Bastille Day at the Paris Opera.
Thumbing her nose at traditional proprieties, she sings, “I
Know What Pleases the People,” a song which gives her
the opportunity to reprise a half dozen of her best on-stage
dying effects.

MINNIE FISKE, the longest holdout against the notorious

Syndicate, rallies her troupe to give up their New York run
when she learns that the theatre where they are playing is
“all sold out.” Her loyal company joins her in the gospel
stomp, “All Sold Out” - but not before their rambunctious
rendition in three-part Sweet-Adeline harmony of “An
Actress Needs a Home.”

16
 MUSICALS

LAURETTE TAYLOR, after fifteen years without work,

overcomes the stigma of alcoholism to stage a risky
comeback in an unknown vehicle --- The Glass Menagerie.
Putting on “a little more rouge to hide all the blue,” she sings
a compelling torch song to “The Old Ingenue.”

Finally, Mary, with the help of the crusty stage manager and the
feisty older actor Edith, reaches a resolution to her dilemma: She
will stay.

A note about the music: The fourteen musical numbers run the
gamut from bump-and-grind to gospel stomp, from three-part
harmonies to piano bar blues. Cabaret numbers with the emphasis
on entertainment.

Six women
Two hours
Single set

BABE: AN OLYMPIAN MUSICAL

Score by Andrea Jill Higgins

Sample of songs at
www.myspace.com/babeanolympicmusical
Video clips at
http://www.youtube.com/user/BabeTheMusical

• 2008, workshopped by Arizona Women’s Theatre Co.

(Phoenix) and Theatre Unbound (Minneapolis)
• Excerpt, Manhattan Monologue Slam, NYC.
• Excerpted in More Monologues for Women, By Women, ed.
by Tori Haring-Smith, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.
• Winner, Walden Writers Fellowship, Lewis and Clark
College, OR.

“Jill Higgins’s music, with Gage’s lyrics, fulfills musical

theater’s aim of driving the plot while having real substance.
This very entertaining play has humor, drama, and a wonderful
lesbian love story built around the larger-than-life (and very

17
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

American) character of Babe Didrikson. Girls who love sports

and women of all ages who aspire to greatness will be inspired.
Taking the risk to focus on a butch lesbian woman, Carolyn
Gage has given us all a gift of female courage and tenacity…”
—Twin Cities Daily Planet, MN.

This is a major new musical and a milestone in musical theatre. It’s

a play about women athletes, about world class competition, about
mothers and sisters, and about the bisexual woman who broke all
the rules to become the “Athlete of the Century”— Babe Didrikson.

The play traces Babe’s career from high school basketball star, to
Olympic gold medalist in track, to vaudevillian sideshow, to first
woman on the professional golf circuit. Her struggles for athletic
achievement parallel her personal struggles for recognition and
acceptance by her mother and sister. Babe’s sexual orientation
emerges against a backdrop of feminine stereotypes and
heterosexist constraints.

This musical celebrates the woman athlete at the same time it

explores the darker themes of how women denied opportunities for
professional advancement can sabotage each other, passing on
poisonous conditioning from one generation to another. Babe’s
founding of the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association is depicted as
the crowning achievement of both her personal and her professional
struggle.

The show is a big, brassy, full-cast, mainstage musical, featuring a

high school gymnasium dance and beauty pageant, a
choreographed jazz interpretation of a women’s basketball game, a
pajama party on the Olympic train, a tango at the country club, and
one of the most stunning love duets in musical theatre. Numbers
include “Let the Boys Lead the Dance,” “Olympic Gold,” “Readin’ the
Green,” and Babe’s theme song, “Winning Makes Up for It All.”

Eight women, eight men (can double several roles)

Men and women’s choruses
Two hours
Multiple sets

18
 MUSICALS

WOMEN ON THE LAND

A Lesbian Musical
• Awarded $7000 grant from City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs
for Production.

Women on the Land contrasts the world of the Los Angeles film
studio with the rural environment of a lesbian land collective in
southern Oregon, and points up the choices lesbian artists are
forced to make between selling our art and protecting our vision.
The show also provides a retrospective of lesbian culture in the
early 70’s, with the attendant witch hunts and “political correctness”
wars.

Stevie, who produces lesbian erotic videos in Los Angeles, finds

that her protégé and lover, Damian, is becoming impatient to make
a “real” lesbian film. Dialogue breaks down over the question of
money for the project, and just then Catherine, Stevie’s old lover
from fifteen years ago shows up on the scene. Catherine lives at
Herland, a lesbian land collective she and Stevie founded in the
70’s. Damian, determined to find the women who don’t care about
money, accompanies Catherine back to Herland. Stevie pursues
her, and is in turn pursued by a leather porno star bucking for the
role of lesbian vampire in the next film.

The second act opens at Herland, in the middle of a severe drought.

Tempers flair and cultural and ideological sparks fly as the Los
Angeles leather scene invades the kingdom of Oregon country
dykes. Magic is abroad on the night of Hallowmas, and the women
discover in themselves the common lesbian values that have been
lost in both worlds.

This musical has something for everyone: The opening rock video
number from the infamous “Lesbian Vampires From Hell,” the
sexual auction at the notorious Ladyfingers Bar, the potluck-western
dance “Country Dish,” and playful “Denim and Flannel Rag.”

Six women, one twelve-year old girl

Chorus of women
Two hours
Multiple sets

19
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

HOW TO WRITE A COUNTRY-WESTERN SONG

A Concert with a Plot
Score by Christa Hillhouse (formerly of 4 Non
Blondes) and Kitty Rose
Sample of songs at
www.myspace.com/howtowriteacountrywesternsong

This is a five-women musical featuring gospel, rock, country, hip-

hop, and folk music. It is written for the women’s music festivals,
intended to be cast with performers from the women’s music
community, and requiring no set except a concert stage. The play
ends with a twenty-minute concert.

This is a play about love, recovery, and music in the women’s music
community. The plot revolves around two couples, an older one and
a younger one, who have histories as bandmates.

Country-western singer Trish attempts to lead the audience in a

workshop about writing country-western songs. She is repeatedly
interrupted by her former partner/bandmate/ rock star Carson. Trish,
remembering Carson’s years of active addiction, rejects her
attempts to reconcile.

Meanwhile, a band on Trish’s label is scheduled to record their

second CD at Carson’s studio. The two very young musicians,
Nikita and Jay, have broken up as lovers, but are attempting to
continue on as a band. Nikki is an active addict and Jay is struggling
with early recovery. Their collaboration breaks down as Nikki uses
sex to derail Jay’s recovery.

Sonya, a veteran activist from the Black Freedom Movement and

member of an all-women, African American, a cappella group,
shows up in time to remind the women of their history. Jay, drunk,
insults Sonya’s gospel music, recounting an angry episode where
she was expelled from her church when she came out as lesbian.

Back in the studio, Nikki has stolen money from Jay and attempts to
seduce Carson, who has busted her. Trish overhears their
encounter, stunned to see Carson not only turn Nikki down, but

20
 MUSICALS

evict her from the studio. Trish sings a song, “The Prison of My
Mind,” in which she shifts the focus from judging her former partner
to noticing how her resentments have impeded her own growth over
the years.

Carson, Sonya, Trish, and Jay come together for a final concert. Jay
resolves her conflict over a “higher power” and shares it with the
audience in “Believe in the Women Who Believe.” Trish makes
amends to Carson for her self-righteousness and finally gets to sing
her country-western song. The concert ends with a celebration of
diversity, recovery and women’s music.

2 African American women, 3 women of any race

Single set (a concert stage)
90 minutes.

21
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

SAPPHO IN LOVE
A Lesbian Midsummer Night’s Dream

• 2010 Stage Q, Madison, WI.

• Published in Three Comedies, Gage Press.
• 2008, Lambda Players, Sacramento.
• Sister Act, Cambridge, UK and Eressos Women’s Festival,
Greece.
• Venus Theatre, Washington, DC (staged reading).
• Staged reading, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Act I).
• Bailiwick Theatre, Chicago.
• Winner Best Stageplay, Moondance International Women’s
Film Festival, Boulder, CO.

“Gage's script romps along with sexy smarts and lubricious

hilarity… filled with memorable lines and saucy double-
entendres.”—The Isthmus, Madison, WI.

“… hardly a minute goes by that the theater does not fill up

with laughter… entertaining and wildly pleasing to the
audience.”—Badger Herald, Madison, WI.

“… Sappho in Love disproves the old canard about lesbians

lacking a sense of humor… These are some funny, funny
lesbians.”—Sacramento News and Reviews, CA.

“… delicious… sweet, funny, moving, tender… eminently

playable… richly imagined, perfectly conceived piece...” —
John Stoltenberg, author and activist.

The following are audience remarks from the public website

www.seeaplay.com/productionsReviewsSapphoLP.htm:

“I caught this show last night at their sold out opening and
laughed until my sides hurt. Seriously, the whole audience was
howling. If you’re in the mood for a great comedy on a weekend
night to help beat the heat, this is the one to see. By which I

22
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

mean I expect this show to sell out fast if last night’s audience
has any say in the matter… THE smash hit of the summer.”

Sappho In Love was a fast moving, funny take on classical

Greek comedies. I am not a lesbian, nor was the person I went
with, yet we enjoyed it very much. I will probably take some
other friends to see this...”

“… Sappho in Love was not what I expected it to be. It was a

fun, sassy show that had the audience laughing throughout.”

“My partner and I were looking for a romantic date night

activity and happened upon this phenomenal play! Touching,
funny, gregarious—well worth the money! For anyone who
enjoys the theater, Sappho in Love is one of the most side-
splitting two hours you can have! Hysterical, sweet and just a
little different! See the play and tell your friends!”

“I thought this play was so funny. I laughed the entire time. I

am telling everyone not to miss it. Good job Lambda. One of
your best!”

“I watched Sappho on Friday the 18th and must have laughed

every twenty seconds for two hours. This play is unique, well-
produced, and you shouldn’t miss it… The play is charming,
energizing, and I’m so happy to have seen it!”

“You don’t have to be a Lesbian to enjoy the machinations of

the three goddesses of love as they plot and scheme to win
control of Lesbos and eventually The World! This show is a
total romp.”

Sappho in Love is a riotous romp across the slippery terrain of

Lesbian romance, as the goddesses on Olympus come down to
earth to recruit among Sappho and her followers.

Artemis, the Goddess of Lesbian Celibacy, and Hera, the Goddess

of Monogamy, join forces to challenge Aphrodite, the Goddess of
Lust, for her hegemony on Lesbos. Sappho, the great poet and
teacher on the island, is a devotee of Aphrodite, and because of
this, her school has become a center for the cult of lesbian sexuality
and romantic love. Artemis, denouncing Aphrodite’s use of her
intoxicating nectar to attract followers, vows to found a rival school
on Lesbos where young girls will be weaned away from Sappho’s

23
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

decadent teachings to learn the more sober arts of wilderness

survival.

But Artemis underestimates the power of lesbian seduction, when

Aphrodite sends Persuasion, her handmaiden, to enroll in outdoor
school—and when the Goddess of Celibacy finds herself entangled
with the Slave of Desire, she discovers that freedom without
intimacy can be as meaningless as intimacy without freedom.

Meanwhile… Sappho herself is experiencing girl trouble when her

longsuffering partner, fed up with Sappho’s infidelities, begins to
date another woman. Add to the midsummer mix-up, the arrival of a
new student who can’t wait to taste the pleasures of Lesbian life,
and the painful trials of a student whose best friend is on the eve of
leaving the island to marry a soldier.

Sapphic poetry abounds amid meteor showers, midsummer eve

trysts, masquerades and melodramas—all overseen by the
benevolent trio of lesbian “deae ex machina!” Throw in a rowdy
troupe of soaking-wet naiads and it all adds up to a tasty dish of
lesbian comedy. In the end, the couples sort themselves out, for
better or worse, and Hera pronounces her blessings on a new
matriarchal order.

10 women, 1 little girl, unspecified number of chorus members

2 hours
Multiple sets

THE ANASTASIA TRIALS IN THE COURT OF WOMEN

An Interactive Drama in Two Acts

• 2009, published in Three Comedies, Gage Press.

• Theatre Unbound, Minneapolis.
• Theatre Ventoux, Fresno, CA.
• Little Hibiscus Productions, NYC
• Columba University, New Zealand
• Echo Theatre (reading), Dallas, TX.
• Women’s Theatre Project, Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
• Catholic University, Georgetown and Belmont University,
TN.

24
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

• Venus Theatre, Washington, DC.

• Boston College, Boston.
• Iowa Women’s Correctional Institution, Mitchellville.
(Abridged)
• Productions in Portland, Maine; Allentown, PA, Washington,
DC, and Boston.
• National finalist, Jane Chambers Award, Association for
Theatre in Higher Education.
• Published by Samuel French, Inc., NYC.
• Subject of feature article in The Washington Post

“Carolyn Gage’s raucous, multilayered script explores issues

of empathy, loyalty, and betrayal among women...” —The
Washington Post.

“Verdict: An unexpected delight… ” —Miami Herald, FL.

“… farcical humor, imaginative plot twists, and just pure

theatrical fun...” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Ft. Lauderdale.

“… powerful new play… thoughtfully written...” —San Diego

Lesbian Press, CA.

“… fascinating and complex play…”—Fresno Beehive.com

“The Anastasia Trials is many things—farce, social history,

debate play, agitprop, audience-participation melodrama,
satire… makes the head reel!” —San Diego Union-Tribune.

“I am constantly amazed at Carolyn’s ability to make complex

social issues not only accessible but also irresistibly
fascinating… the play… [The Anastasia Trials ] touched us,
made us laugh and gripped us in a white-knuckle intensity
usually found only in Hitchcock films.” —R.J. McComish,
Literary Manager of the Portland Stage Company, Portland, Maine.

“… fabulously interesting, brilliantly thought-provoking and

exquisitely funny… masterpiece of feminist theater...” —off our
backs, Washington, DC.

The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women makes theatre history

with an interactive courtroom drama that engages the audience to
serve as both judge and jury. The play is shaped by the audience

25
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

decisions to overrule or sustain the attorneys’ motions, and every

night’s audience sees a different play.

The Anastasia Trials is a farcical, but profoundly engaging excursion

into the hidden world of ethics for women who are both survivors
and perpetrators of abuse toward women. The format is a play-
within-a-play, where a radical feminist theatre company comes
together in order to perform a courtroom drama.

In presenting the play, the Emma Goldman Theatre Brigade has

instituted a new system to insure equal opportunity for the actors: a
lottery. As the women assemble to draw their roles from the hat for
the evening’s performance, sisterhood is put to the test. The
performance itself is a conspiracy trial against five women accused
of denying a woman her identity. The plaintiff is none other than
Anastasia Romanov, sole survivor of the massacre of the Russian
imperial family in 1918. The audience is required to serve as judge
and jury for the case, providing both rulings on the motions and the
final verdict.

The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women requires intense

audience participation, and the question of women betraying women
is called for every member of the audience.

Nine women
Two hours
Single set (nine folding chairs)

THE SPINDLE
A Drama in Two Acts
• 2009, published in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales.
• Staged reading at the Kennedy Center by Venus Theatre,
Washington, DC.
• Finalist, John Gassner New Play Festival, Stony Brook Univ.,
NY.
• Staged reading, Messenger Theatre, at HERE, NYC.
• Semi-finalist, Mill Mountain New Play Competition, Roanoke,
VA.

26
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

“This play is simply brilliant—in its construct, its characters

and its dialogue.”—Sacramento Art and Entertainment Examiner.

“Carolyn Gage’s The Spindle is a brilliant, courageous and

important “adult retelling” of Sleeping Beauty, in which
Beauty’s hundred-years’ sleep is her amnesia from incest. In
reading it (in just reading it!) I saw what is not possible to put
into words alone. Like Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, the
disconnects we witness on stage could not have been told as
well in another genre. Our hypnosis from grasping what we’ve
seen all our lives in our own terrible crises, but which are
taboo, the-never-put-in-words, the never said, is shattered.
Sleeping Beauty/The Spindle is one of the fairy tales we must
wake up from (it’s been a lot more than a hundred years). Gage
is regularly hailed as one of the best lesbian playwrights in
America, but I want to say—if she will allow this and I
understand and accept if she won’t—simply one of our best
playwrights.”—Sharon Doubiago, My Father’s Love, Portrait of the
Poet as a Young Girl; Love on the Streets, Selected and New
Poems.

"Carolyn Gage offers readers important insight and

representations in the powerful stories and imagery provided
in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales. The collection
meets the challenge of creating lesbian fairy tales that look
unflinchingly at the world but are still imaginative, creative, and
magical. Readers will enjoy these stories in all their complexity
and bravery." Rain and Thunder, Northampton, MA.

A radical retelling of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” The Spindle

exploits the conventions of children’s theatre to give adult audiences
a child’s-eye-view of incest and its effects on the survivors.

The Princess Beauty has been kept from the knowledge of a curse
which decrees she must be pricked by a spindle before her
sixteenth birthday and fall asleep for a hundred years. She has
been best friends from childhood with Doko, the cook’s helper in the
palace kitchen, and the two girls have plans to renovate a gypsy
wagon and travel about the kingdom with a puppet theatre after
Beauty’s sixteenth birthday.

The plans are disrupted when Beauty’s godfather shows up

unexpectedly at the birthday banquet with a “gift” which, according
to the perpetrator, will empower her as an adult. The Queen, torn

27
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

between a desire to protect her daughter and a need to neutralize

her as a potential rival, reveals a family secret, which sets the stage
for Beauty’s pricking.

Meanwhile, Doko’s three godmothers wrestle among themselves

with their various strategies for dealing with the pricking curse.
Betheen practices denial in the name of acting grownup; Andrea
relies on her prowess in the martial arts to confront her fears; and
the third godmother, Mary, surrounds herself with ritual and magical
charms. It is Doko’s marionette (played by an actor) who alone
knows the truth. She carries Doko’s traumatic memories of her
childhood, and it is she who has witnessed the events on the night
of Beauty’s sixteenth birthday. But the puppet is mute and can only
communicate through acts of sabotage.

When Doko attempts to rouse Beauty from her spindle-induced

trance, she becomes a target for a bewildering array of
homophobic, morning-after behaviors, and the godmothers fare no
better in their attempts to break through the Queen’s alcoholic
narcissism.

The final showdown takes place in the perpetrator’s pornographic

gallery, where the forces of good meet the forces of evil in an old-
fashioned, knock-down-drag-out, chandelier-swinging, skull-
cracking free-for-all. The moral of the story is that life is not a fairy
tale, and the price of empowerment is coming out of denial, as Doko
and her godmothers discover.

The juxtaposition of standard children’s theatre conventions in The

Spindle with what is usually considered adult subject matter
accentuates the archetypal horror that lies under the surface of so
many “normal” childhoods.

9 women, 2 girls, unspecified extras

Multiple sets times
2 hours

UGLY DUCKLINGS
A Lesbian Drama

28
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

• 2009, published in The Triple Goddess: Three Plays, Gage

Press.
• University of Maine at Machias (staged reading), and University
of West Virginia (reading).
• $150,000 documentary, Ugly Ducklings: The Documentary
produced and premiered at the Frameline International Gay and
Lesbian Film Festival in San Francisco
• Stage Q, Madison, WI.
• Hardy Girls Healthy Women at Colby College, Waterville, ME.
• National nominee, American Theatre Critics Association
Steinberg New Play Award. (Best New Play of the Year Outside
NYC)
• Curve Magazine, National Lesbian Theatre Award.
• Honorable Mention, “Best New Play in Metro DC,” Metro
Weekly Review
• World premiere, Venus Theatre, Washington, DC.
• Published in At Play: An Anthology of Maine Drama, Levant
Heritage Library, Levant, ME.
• Made in Maine, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance
(reading), Bangor.
• Workshop production, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine.
• Second Place, Celebration Theatre’s New Play Competition,
LA.
“If it is possible that a piece of theatre can be both gritty and
sublime at the same time, then Venus Theatre has achieved it
in their world premiere production of Carolyn Gage’s Ugly
Ducklings.” —Metro Weekly Review, Washington, DC.
“… deserves a central place in the lesbian feminist literary
canon...” —off our backs, Washington, DC.
“… refreshingly well told tale that while raising all the issues
that this anti-homophobic company and playwright want to
raise, does so with an admirable restraint, avoiding the obvious
traps of sensationalism and titillation and striking an admirable
balance of theatricality and realism.” —Potomac Stages,
Washington, DC.

“… a play about coming of age and homophobia and how

people deal with emerging understandings about sexuality. It’s
a tough, tough, tough topic, and it’s handled here with a great
deal of raw energy, but also with a great deal of subtlety… a
very, very nice piece… definitely worth seeing.” —Peter Fay for
WAMU (NPR affiliate station), Washington, DC.

29
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

“Radically redefining beauty… Ugly Ducklings reveals how

notions of homosexuality can shatter the souls of girls and
women… an impressive work… a brutally honest examination
of what it means to be a young lesbian...” —The Washington
Blade, Washington, DC.

“Funny, poignant, unpredictable… very well-written.

Educational without being preachy. Engaging. Absorbing.
Sweet.” —Mariah Burton-Nelson, Athlete, Speaker, Author of Are
We Winning Yet?

“… like the best drama, Gage’s play is filled to bursting with

sharp-edged double meaning and irony… accessible and
engaging format, with the social consciousness of Ibsen and
Shaw...” —Assunta Kent, Phd., from introduction to At Play:
An Anthology of Maine Drama.

Ugly Ducklings picks up where Tea and Sympathy and The

Children’s Hour left off. Set in a girls’ summer camp, the play
explores the dynamics of homophobia in a same-sex environment.

A gothic thriller, Ugly Ducklings examines the unhealthy turns that

relationships between girls can take when they are not allowed their
natural expression. The so-called “Ophelia Syndrome” comes alive
as the cabin of younger girls, their self-esteem still reinforced by the
primacy of their relationships, comes into contact with the older girls
who have begun to turn against themselves and each other in their
attempts to conform to the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality.

Angie, a middle-class college student, is falling in love with another

counselor at the camp, Renée, who is a working-class “out” lesbian.
Against this backdrop of intense homophobia, the young women
struggle with their feelings for each other and the problems of
defining themselves in a society that insists they be invisible. The
camp legend about a monster in the lake parallels the adult phobias
about lesbianism, and, confronted with an attempted child suicide,
campers and counselors are compelled to face their worst fears in
the microcosmic world of the summer camp.

Ugly Ducklings breaks ranks with male-centered queer drama in

foregrounding the experience of women and girls who are survivors
of sexual violence and shattering romantic and sentimental
conventions about the “gentle sex.”

30
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

Nine girls, five women

Two hours
Single set

THANATRON
A Comedy in Two Acts

• 2009, published in Three Comedies, Gage Press.

• Reading by invitation, at Pen and Brush Club, NYC.
• Named one of the “Best Productions of 2003,” The Portland
Phoenix, Portland, ME.
• Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME.

This is a rollicking farce about the world’s most dysfunctional family,

a doctor with a penchant for assisted suicide, and a lesbian
housekeeper with a crush on her employer. An over-the-top comedy
about leaving, being left, and what it takes to stay.

The play opens a few hours before Molly Hawthorne’s assisted-

suicide, going-away party. Molly, a depressed, middle-class
housewife, has become distressed by what she perceives as a loss
of memory that has impaired her ability to function as a perfect wife
and mother. Convinced that suicide is an empowering choice, she
encounters a snag in her plans when she attempts to recruit her
lesbian housekeeper to bartend for the party.

Dani, an Italian butch, is appalled by Molly’s project and disgusted

with her family for supporting it. She teams up with Caitlin, the ten-
year-old, tomgirl daughter, to sabotage Thanatron, the notorious
“death machine” for the doctor-assisted suicide.

Thanatron relies on a sodium pentathol intervenous drip to render

the “patient” drowsy enough to trigger the lethal chemical that will
stop the heart. When the sodium pentathol dose is altered, Molly
finds that, instead of losing consciousness, she is regaining her
memories—including memories of repressed childhood trauma.

31
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

A satiric commentary on a culture that would rather see its women

dead than telling the truth, Thanatron deconstructs the social
machinery that makes death an appealing alternative for the old, the
disabled, the single, and the lesbian.

Five women, five men, one girl, and a variable number of adult
extras
Single set
Two hours

ESTHER AND VASHTI

A Drama in Two Acts

• 2009, published in The Triple Goddess: Three Plays, Gage

Press.
• Reading, Provincetown Players, Provincetown, MA.

A radical feminist retelling of the traditional Purim story from the

Bible—a retelling that foregrounds the part of the story that is
glossed over in the patriarchal text, namely, the sexual colonization
of women.

Esther, a radical Jewish lesbian living in exile, and Vashti, a Persian

woman of privilege, were lovers. Complying with her family’s
expectations, Vashti has married the king of Persia, but Esther
cannot interpret this as anything except a betrayal and an
abandonment. When Vashti encourages a Persian captain to court
Esther, Esther is outraged and goes to the palace to confront her
former girlfriend.

The ambitious vice-chancellor Haman has been stirring up anti-

Semitic sentiment among the officers of the Persian army, in order
to use a massacre of the Jews to divert attention from his usurpation
of the throne.

In the meantime, during Esther’s visit to the harem, the king is

holding a banquet for his officers—a banquet that features the rape
of one of the women from the harem. Vashti is shocked and terrified
when she discovers that she has been called to “dance” for the

32
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

officers. Esther engineers her escape from the palace, and the two
women go underground, hiding in the homes of Jewish women.

Esther is discovered by Haman during a roundup of eligible virgins

as candidates for queenship. Vashti, knowing that Esther could
never submit to sexual violation, goes to the palace to die with her
lover. The play reaches its dramatic climax when the plight of the
two women coincides with the palace takeover by the army, a revolt
of the harem women, and a daring rescue attempt by Jewish
vigilante women, led by Esther’s young cousin.

Esther and Vashti attempt to avert the impending massacre of the

Jews by issuing an edict granting the Jews permission to arm and
defend themselves against their enemies. This mandate for self-
defense is ritualized in the final scene, when the Jewish women and
the harem women join together to commemorate the anniversary of
their victory and to pledge themselves to the defense of their
daughters and each other.

This is a fast-paced, high-action drama where the love story of two

women of different cultures and class backgrounds plays itself out
against a backdrop of anti-Semitism and the sexual colonization of
women.

Thirteen women, eight men, two teenaged girls (unspecified of male

and female extras)
Two hours
Multiple sets

STIGMATA
A Tragedy in Five Acts

Based on a true story, Stigmata is a five-act tragedy about the

th
extraordinary life of the 16 century, Italian nun, Benedetta Carlini.

Benedetta, raised like a son by her father, is caught acting out

sexual tableaux with her girlfriends. Fearful of the consequences of
Benedetta’s precocious sexuality, her mother incarcerates her in a
convent when Benedetta begins to menstruate.

33
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

The Abbess, whose enlightened policies have kept the convent from
becoming enclosed, makes Benedetta her assistant, and the two
women fall in love with each other. On the eve of the move to a
large convent, Benedetta confronts the Abbess on this love, and the
Abbess suffers a heart attack and dies. Benedetta, without the
protection of the Abbess, faces demotion to a convent servant
position. In an attempt to counter this, she stages a miracle in the
middle of the procession to the new convent, receiving the stigmata
(spontaneous bleeding of the hands and feet, in imitation of Jesus’
wounds) in front of the entire town of Pescia.

On the strength of this miracle, Benedetta becomes the new

abbess. She moves for immediate enclosure of the convent and
adoption of the draconian Rules of Saint Augustine. With the
approval of the old-fashioned, misogynist confessor of the convent,
Father Ricordati, she introduces Church-sanctioned, sado-
masochistic practices, including whipping, in order to punish her
critics and consolidate her power. She seduces a gullible young nun
by convincing her that it is the will of God for the girl to have sex
with an angel named Splenditello, who will come and occupy
Benedetta’s body for the duration of the sex act.

Benedetta organizes a public wedding between herself and Jesus.

The town provost, realizing that things have gone too far, orders
Ricordati to stop the wedding. When Ricordati tries to confront
Benedetta, she stages a miracle that sets Ricordati up for blackmail.
At the height of the wedding spectacle, the provost confronts
Benedetta with the charges against her. She manages to hold her
own, until the victim of her seduction steps forward with her story.
Placed under arrest, Benedetta curses the town and promises that
God will send the plague to punish them.

Fifteen years later, when the plague is once again ravishing Italy,
the townspeople storm the convent, demanding the release of
Benedetta, who has been imprisoned all these years. Benedetta
defies her tormentors, including her mother, dying with a vision of
her beloved Abbess. At her death, she manifests authentic
stigmata. The provost and the new abbess decide to parade
Benedetta’s body through the town in order to appease the crowd—
knowing that this concession to popular ignorance and superstition,
will result in mass contagion of the plague.

Ten women, two men, unspecified number of extras

34
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

Three hours
Multiple sets

COMING ABOUT
A Three-Act Play About Changing Roles in Marriage

• National Finalist, Maude Adams Playwriting Award, Stephens

College, MO.
• Winner, New Plays in Progress, Portland State Univ., OR.
• Nominee, Oregon Playwrights Award, Oregon Institute of
Literary Arts.

Coming About is a play which looks at the dramatic change in the

institution of marriage over the last forty years. Kay, in her early
thirties, is married to a man over twice her age. Finally confronting
the facts about their age discrepancies, she begins to move toward
establishing her own life.

The play opens at the wedding reception for a neighbor, and the
presence of Kay’s husband’s grown children, the question of
inheritance, and her mother’s bitter reminders about her own
marriage turn the festive weekend into a pressure cooker of gender
roles. The wedding gives way to a hurricane, and the five couples in
the play undergo a sea change before the night is over as the
women come to terms with their loss of identity in marriage.

Six women, three men

Two hour
Single set

THE GODDESS TOUR

A Murder Mystery in Two Acts

• 2009, published in The Triple Goddess: Three Plays

• 2009 Maine Playwrights Festival, Acorn Productions, Portland.
• 2008 Ohio State University, (reading), Columbus, OH.
• 2007 Thorny Theatre, Palm Springs

35
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• 2007 Venus Theatre (reading), Laurel, MD.

“… a mix of comedy, drama, murder-mystery and a whole lot of

fun… ” —Talk, Palm Springs, CA.

Dr. Lorraine Livingstone leads women’s tours to ancient, sacred

sites of goddess worship. She and five members of her tour are
gathering at an inn on the Burren of Western Ireland for a tour of
Celtic sites. The guests include a feuding lesbian couple on their
way to China to adopt a baby, a celebrated author of best-selling
murder mysteries, a frivolous divorcée, and a mysterious last-minute
arrival.

It’s February 2, Imbolc—the Celtic celebration that marks the end of

winter and the beginning of spring. It’s also the season when,
according to legend, the Greek earth-mother goddess Demeter
emerges from the Underworld with her rescued daughter
Persephone. The theme of lost daughters haunts the inn and its
inhabitants, as mysterious voices and artifacts point to the murder of
a girl-child, and each of the guests admits to some form of betrayal
of the sacred mother-daughter bond.

Lorraine is haunted by the memory of the out-of-wedlock child she

was forced to relinquish at sixteen. The divorcée laments her failure
to fight harder for the custody of her children. The lesbian partners,
still bedeviled with the demons of their own childhoods, debate the
wisdom of becoming mothers.

The inn harbors a secret that is shared by the mysterious innkeeper

Bridie and her nemesis, the author. Their history unfolds as a
backdrop to the secret history between Lorraine and her mysterious
latecomer.

This is a murder mystery with all the classic ingredients: the dark
and stormy night, the remote location , the strangers at the inn with
their mysterious pasts, the ghostly intrusions, the attempted murder,
and the obligatory gathering of the guests in the parlor for the final
dénouement.

What sets The Goddess Tour apart from the genre is the depth of
exploration of the potentially murderous dyad of mothers and
daughters, pitted against each other in a struggle for survival in a
corporate, capitalist, colonialist world. Celtic ritual and goddess lore
are interwoven with sacred imagery of gestation and birth, as these

36
 FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

are counterposed with legacies of violence against women and

children, the brutal history of Ireland’s colonization, and the horrors
of slavery on the American continent. Class and race divisions
inform discussions of adoption, with a pervasive critique of
“globalization” and its impact on motherhood. A good, old-fashioned
murder mystery that packs a feminist punch.

7 women
Single set
2 hours

37
 ONE-ACT PLAYS
MASON-DIXON
A One-Act for Two Women

• Fourth Annual Juneteenth Festival, Univ. of Louisville, KY.

• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc.,
Santa Cruz, CA)
• Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama
Festival.
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.
• Winner, Portland State University’s New Voices
Competition, OR.

“… extremely powerful piece… Gage takes on race issues,

feminism, incest… stunning… ” —The Vanguard, Portland, OR.

“… complex and painful subtleties of racism...” —Lithiagraph,

Ashland, OR.

Mason-Dixon explores the complex relationship between a Black

woman and a white woman, who loved each other as children, were
separated at puberty, and who find themselves at mid-life divided by
race, class, and politics.

As a plantation owner’s daughter, Elizabeth was “given” an

enslaved child, Mary, who was her same age. The two girls grew up
together, loving each other as sisters and sharing their resources. At
puberty, Elizabeth was sent to a private boarding school, and it was
thirty years before she was to see Mary again, by then a free
woman teaching in a Black school in Philadelphia.

When the play opens, Elizabeth is demanding that Mary recognize

their former friendship. Mary, now an angry Black separatist, is not
so eager to reclaim the past. Elizabeth has become a spy for the
Union army, and in what she sees as the ultimate gesture of
reconciliation, offers Mary the “opportunity” to gather intelligence by
working as a maid at the Confederate White House.

38
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

Mary, repudiating Elizabeth’s claims of sisterhood, reveals that she

was sexually molested by Elizabeth’s father. She is shocked to
discover that Elizabeth was also his victim. The women struggle
with issues of race, class, and gender oppression as they alternately
challenge and deny the great love they once had for each other.
The play is based on the true story of Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary
Bowser.

2 women
35 minutes
Single set

JANE ADDAMS AND THE DEVIL BABY

A One-Act Play

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, (HerBooks,
Inc., Santa Cruz, CA)
• Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama
Festival.
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.
• Second Place, Political Plays, Seattle New Plays Buffet.

In 1912, Jane Addams was witness to a strange phenomenon, as

thousands of immigrants flocked to Hull House in response to the
rumor that there was a “Devil Baby” there. The Devil Baby was
supposedly an infant with hooves, horns, and tail. According to folk
myths, this incarnation of the devil was the result of a drunken
husband’s curse that he’d rather see a devil in the house than
another baby.

In this one-act, Jane confronts an elderly Irish woman who has

broken into Hull House with the single-minded intention of gaining
access to the Devil Baby. The woman is not to be deterred, and
Jane matches wits with her in her attempt to find an explanation for
this strange obsession which seems to have taken possession of
half Chicago.

39
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

A radical confrontation between the sensibilities of a nineteenth

century emigrant wife and mother, and a modern American lesbian
of independent means.

Three women
20 minutes
Single set

LOUISA MAY INCEST

A One-Act for Two Women

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• Provincetown Fringe Festival, Women’s Week, Provincetown,
MA.
• Featured at National Women’s Music Festival, Muncie, IN.
• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks,
Inc., Santa Cruz, CA)
• Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama
Festival.
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.
• Published in Lesbian Culture (edited by Penelope and Wolfe,
Crossing Press, Freedom, CA,).
• Published in Trivia, Amherst, MA.

“… crackled with energy and glowed with warmth… illustrated

all that is the best about theatre.” —-The Maui News, HI.

“… an overlay of brilliantly ironic humor on the utterly serious

issues with which it deals.” —Lithiagraph, Ashland, OR.

“Watching Jo confront Louisa, the audience’s collective belief

marked a new point in taking ourselves seriously as people
with a herstory; as creators and receivers of lesbian mysticism
and art. Lesbian writers, theorists, and professors—in large
numbers at ECLF [East Coast Lesbian Festival]—were
absolutely transported by the academic significance of Gage’s
work.” —Introduction by Bonnie Morris in Amazon All Stars:
Thirteen Lesbian Plays (New York: Applause Books, 1996),

40
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

Louisa May Alcott has locked her alter-ego, Jo March, out of her
study in order to finish Little Women alone. Jo manages to break in.
She confronts Louisa about her desire to end their collaboration.
Louisa admits her intention to have Jo burn all her writing and marry
the aging and self-righteous Professor at the end of the book.

Jo knows her author better than Louisa knows herself, and she
begins to uncover Louisa’s true motives in violating her own
creation. When Jo introduces evidence of Bronson Alcott’s child
molesting and Louisa’s lesbianism, the conflict between Jo and
Louisa becomes a life-and-death struggle for control of the book.

Two women
30 minutes
Single set

BATTERED ON BROADWAY
A Vendetta in One Act

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• Maine Association of Community Theatres Conference, Auburn,
ME. (staged reading)
• National Women’s Music Festival, Muncie, IN.
• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks,
Inc., Santa Cruz, CA).
• Finalist, San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama
Festival.
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books.

“… shockingly fresh and compelling...” —Women’s Voices,

Santa Rosa, CA.

“… daring iconoclasm...” —The Lithiagraph, Ashland, OR.

Nellie Forbush of South Pacific is in Mame’s Manhattan penthouse

to host a benefit luncheon for a Broadway Battered Women’s
Shelter. Her guests include Bess of Porgy and Bess, Julie Jordan of
Carousel, Sally Bowles of Cabaret, Mei Li from Flower Drum Song,
Maria from West Side Story, and Aldonza from Man of La Mancha.

41
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

These women, most of them now in their sixties, look back in horror
on their various onstage rapes, batterings, and partnerings with
inferior men.

Orphan Annie puts in an unexpected appearance and is outraged to

discover that Daddy Warbucks has donated the money to buy the
building for the shelter. She tells Nellie that when the reporters
arrive, she will expose him as a child molester. Nellie is concerned
that this will jeopardize the project. She threatens to have Annie
arrested if she doesn’t leave. Sally Bowles intervenes, and Annie is
in for a surprise when the nun reveals her secret identity and
initiates Annie into the mysteries of an underground men-killing
vigilante group.

Battered on Broadway is a theatrical tour-de-force, combining the

farcical romp of comic strip characters with the conventions of an
old-fashioned murder mystery in a plot which not only rewrites the
history of musicals from a woman’s point of view, but which also
tackles the most divisive social issue of the 90’s: violence toward
women. A play with many layers!

Ten women
35 minutes
Single set

CALAMITY JANE SENDS A MESSAGE TO HER DAUGHTER

A Monologue

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second

Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays).
• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and
Selected Plays.
• 2007, International Center for Women Playwrights Readings,
Dramatists Guild, Time Square.
• 2007, Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, Ireland
• 2006, Maine Association of Community Theatre State
Conference, Bath. (Cauldron & Labrys Production).
• Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC.
• Winner, Boston Theatre Slam, Boston Playwrights Theatre.

42
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• Provincetown Fringe Festival, Women’s Week, Provincetown,

MA.
• Winner, Festival of Ten, State University of New York,
Brockport.
• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks, Inc.,
Santa Cruz, CA,)
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.
• Winner, New Voices Competition Portland State Univ., OR.
• Featured at Sisters on Stage Lesbian Theatre Conference,
NYC.

“… lyric prose lines to die for...” —The Lesbian Review of Books,

Altadena, CA.

“… wondrous… ” —Asbury Park Press, NJ.

This work is based on the real Calamity Jane. Vulgar, debauched,

and raunchy, Jane is considered a freak by women and a laughing
stock by men. Without the strictures of compulsory heterosexuality,
she might have had the freedom to live the life of a roughrider
without having to pass as a man. She might have been given the
place in history which was accorded to her sidekick, James Butler
Hickok. And she might have found a way to satisfy her frustrated
desire for acceptance by women.

Jane is a butch woman who had the misfortune to be born in an era

before lesbian culture. She is a feisty woman with a keen sense of
humor, who has kept herself going with a number of destructive
myths which are familiar to all of us.

One woman
15 minutes
Single set

COOKIN’ WITH TYPHOID MARY

A Culinary Monologue

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second

Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays).

43
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and

Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.
• “Women, Health, and Representations” Conference, Maine
Women Writers Collection, University of New England,
Westbrook, ME.
• Provincetown Fringe Festival, Women’s Week,
Provincetown, MA.
• City of Cleveland Health Department sponsors a tour and a
video of the play.
• National Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards in Drama (The
Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays, HerBooks,
Inc., Santa Cruz, CA)
• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.
• Excerpted in Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health,
Judith Leavitt (Beacon Press, Boston).

“… blood-curdling, side-splitting… out of the mouths of full-

blown characters who can mount a stage and own it.” —The
Lesbian Review of Books, Altadena, CA.

Mary Mallon, dubbed “Typhoid Mary” by a hostile press, never

admitted that she was a typhoid carrier. Her persistent refusal to
defer to medical experts infuriated George Soper, a sanitation
engineer for New York City. He built his career on tracking down
Mary and incarcerating her. In this monologue, Mary speaks for
herself. An Irish emigrant, she traces the story of her persecution
back to the Potato Famine, all the while eyeing and chopping
potatoes for the stew pot in the kitchen of the mysterious institution
where she cooks.

Mary’s version of events is both humorous and chilling. She resists

a theory of germs that would indict her for murder, when half of
Ireland starved to death before the indifferent eyes of the world.

One woman
25 minutes
Single set

ARTEMISIA AND HILDEGARD

An Exorcism in One Act

44
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second

Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays).
• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and
Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.
• 2009 Columba College, New Zealand.
• Women in Washington Theatre, Washington, DC. (staged
reading)
• Cauldron & Labrys Productions, Portland, ME.
• Featured performance, National Women’s Music Festival,
Muncie, IN.
• Staged reading, Maine Women’s Studies Conference,
Augusta, ME.
• Winner, Playwrights Festival, Actors Theatre, Santa Rosa,
CA.

“… threatened the status quo like Thelma and Louise… a truly

remarkable play… ” —We the People, Santa Rosa, CA.

Artemisia and Hildegard is a complex and powerful two-woman

show, featuring two of the most famous women artists in history,
together on an explosive arts panel about survival strategies for
women artists.

Hildegard Von Bingen, German abbess from the 12th century, and
Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian baroque painter from the 17th century,
have been scheduled as guest speakers on a panel titled, “Women
Artists: Strategies for Survival.” As the women display slides of their
work, the sparks begin to fly. Confronted with conflicting
philosophies, each woman attempts to take control of the evening’s
agenda.

Hildegard, whose art is multi-disciplinary and created in an all-

women collective environment, has strong words for the woman
who does her art for hire. Likewise, Artemisia, who struggled hard to
achieve the same status and independent income as her male
contemporaries, has a lot to say about the so-called virtues of
poverty and humility. She resents the accusation from women that
she is “just like a man,” because of her commercial success.

But the debate takes a personal turn when the women are pressed
to defend their positions. Both women are compelled to reveal
secrets of their childhood, secrets which have shaped their
strategies for survival. Hildegard’s parents banished her to a

45
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

convent at the age of eight, where she was walled up for ten years
in a cell, a form of extreme religious renunciation she “practiced” as
an anchoress. Her rationalization of this trauma into a form of
spiritual blessing requires an elaborate mythology about a mystical
calling and special relationship to the deity.

Artemisia was raped at sixteen by her father’s colleague who had

been hired to give her lessons on perspective. Her possessive and
covertly incestuous father exposed her to a humiliating public trial,
which involved an examination of her vagina and the administration
of torture to determine if she were telling the truth. Artemisia has
devoted her life to downplaying the role of gender in her life and in
her art.

As the women struggle to justify their choices, choices which

invalidate each other’s work, they find themselves exposing the
contradictions in their own lives. The panel ends on a dramatic high
note, as the audience is recruited in the debate about strategy for
women artists in patriarchy.

Two women
One hour
Single set (podium)

HARRIET TUBMAN VISITS A THERAPIST

A One-Act for Two Women

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second

Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays).
• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and
Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.
• Unity Players Ensemble, Hollywood, CA. (A Black Trilogy 2006).
• Published in Under 30: Plays for a New Generation, Vintage
Books, NYC.
• Douglass Theatre, Macon, GA.
• Bailiwick Theatre, Chicago.
• Ladyfest Midwest, Chicago.
• Juneteenth Festival, sponsored by Actors Theatre of Louisville,
KY.

46
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• Featured performance at National Women’s Music Festival,

Muncie, IN.
• Published in Off-Off Broadway Festival Plays, Twenty-Third
Series, Samuel French, Inc., NYC.
• Staged reading, Martin Luther King Day, Bates College,
Lewiston, ME.
• Reading at Howard University, Washington, DC, funded by Ford
Foundation grant (national leadership conference for historically
Black colleges)
• National Winner, Off-Off Broadway Original Short Play Festival,
sponsored by Samuel French, NYC.
• Winner, Festival of One-Acts, Love Creek Productions, NYC.
• Nat’l Winner, Perishable Theatre Women’s Playwriting Festival,
Providence, RI

“… marked with originality and cleverness as well as

thoughtfulness in both conception and execution... In a time in
our society when slavery and its sustaining effects are never
acknowledged and outright denied, it is good to read a
contemporary version of the classic freedom fighter— Harriet
Tubman.” —Aishah Rahman, playwright and Associate Professor
in Brown University’s Creative Writing Program.

“The discussion [following the play]… lasted well over an hour,

a record for such events at the theatre.”—Vanessa Gilbert,
Perishable Theatre, Providence, RI.

“The play has the power of anger.” —The Providence Journal, RI.

“… a satirical, funny and yet poignant and serious look at the

abuse black women took in those days, with some interesting
comparisons to today.” —The Warwick Beacon, RI.

“vivid and evocative… ” —The Providence Phoenix, RI.

“Arthur’s performance [as Tubman] was so powerful and raw

that the audience literally could not stop cheering and clapping
at the end.” —Our Weekly.Com, Los Angeles.

“Playwright-editors Lane and Shengold have assembled five

full-length plays, 11 shorter plays, and excerpts from four
plays, all written for actors under 30… Jessica Goldberg’s
Refuge, Jenny Lyn Bader’s None of the Above, and Carolyn
Gage’s Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist are all standouts…

47
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

fresh and gripping…” —Library Journal, reviewing Under Thirty:

Plays for a New Generation (Vintage)

Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist is a gripping confrontation

between two women who share the same oppression, but whose
definitions of survival are in direct conflict.

Harriet Tubman, suspected of planning an escape on the

Underground Railroad, has been sent to the Therapist for an
evaluation. The Therapist, another African American woman, warns
Harriet about the dangers of radical action. Harriet accuses the
Therapist of colluding with the enemy in the guise of practicing
therapeutic intervention.

As the Therapist attempts to convince Harriet of the benefits of

accepting the things she cannot change and learning to live one day
at a time, Harriet uncovers the Therapist’s secret - a secret which
will give her access to the information she needs.

The plot takes a sudden twist during one of Harriet’s spells of

sleeping sickness, and in resisting the suggestions which justify the
Therapist’s ideology, Harriet discovers a source of spiritual support
rooted in her own activism.

Two women
20 minutes
Single set

ENTR’ACTE
OR THE NIGHT EVE LE GALLIENNE WAS RAPED
A One-Act Play

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• Stage Q (reading), National Women’s Music Festival, Madison.
• State University of New York, Potsdam.
• Produced in Beyond the L-Word: An Evening of Lesbian
Theatre, Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME.
• 2004, Third-Place Winner, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation
Short Fiction One-Act Play Competition.
• Pandora’s Box Theatre, Buffalo, NY.

48
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• Looking Glass Theatre, NYC.

• Love Creek Productions, NYC.

In October 1923, Eva Le Gallienne was raped in her dressing room

during the Broadway run of Liliom, a play in which she performed
the role of Julie Jordan, the battered girlfriend of an abusive,
alcoholic carousel operator.

Entr’acte takes place in the private sanitarium on the night of the

rape, after Eva has checked herself in. In a state of post-traumatic
hyper-arousal, she waits for a “friend” to arrive.

The friend is Mimsey Benson, Eva’s former lover and fellow-actor,

who left her ten months earlier for the security of a heterosexual
marriage. Eva has not seen Mimsey since the breakup.

In this charged environment, the two women confront their feelings

for each other, and Mimsey, who had lost her identity in her former
relationship with Eva, walks a tightrope between compassion for the
young women and the detachment necessary to protect herself from
Eva’s overwhelming neediness.

This play is a tour-de-force for a young actor (Eva is twenty-three).

In the space of the thirty-minute drama, Eva runs a gamut of
extreme dissociative states as she moves through denial,
bargaining, rage, and grief to finally arrive at acceptance of her
losses. Making rapid transitions, she is alternately the abandoned
lover, the imperious Broadway star, the enraged child, the dazzling
performer, the terrified victim, the skillful seductress, and the
visionary entrepreneur who will go on to found the Civic Repertory
Theatre.

The interpersonal drama of the two women is punctuated by

interactions with two of the nurses on the staff, one of them an
adoring fan of Eva’s and the other a hard-nosed pragmatist.
Balancing between the two poles represented by the nurses, Eva
and Mimsey struggle to create a new relationship toward each other
and toward their art.

Four women
Thirty minutes
Single set

49
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

THE PARMACHENE BELLE

A One-Woman, One-Act Play

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, (The Second

Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays).
• 2008, Published in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and
Selected Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.
• 2009, Black Hills Equality Pride Festival, Rapid City, SD.
• 2009, Maine Association of Community Theatres Conference,
Auburn, ME.
• 2007, Published in The Harbor Journal, Cozy Harbor Press,
Southport, ME.
• National Women’s Music Festival, Univ. of Illinois, Normal,
IL.
• Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC.
• Off-Broadway performance, Bleecker Street Theatre, NYC.
• New England Academy of Theatre One-Act Play Festival,
New Haven, CT.
• Published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly,
Binghamton, NY.
• Finalist, Maine Playwrights Award, Acorn Acting School,
Portland, ME.
• Excerpted in Still More Monologues for Women, By Women,
ed. by Tori Haring- Smith (Heinemann Books, Portsmouth,
NH.)
th
Cornelia Crosby, a 19 century lesbian, was the first licensed
hunting guide in Maine. Six feet tall and known as “Fly Rod,” she led
fishing and hunting expeditions for wealthy vacationers in the
Rangeley Lake district.

The play opens on the day that Fly Rod, who has been sidelined to
a hospital bed in Portland with a serious knee injury, is scheduled
for surgery. She may, in fact, never walk again. This prognosis
poses a threat not only to her livelihood, but also to her plans to
rendez-vous with Annie Oakley in New York at the annual
Sportsman’s Exhibition. Having listened to the stories of Annie’s
sexual abuse as a child, Fly Rod has become obsessed with
“rescuing” her.

Hoping to lure Annie away from the Wild West Show, Fly Rod
proposes to teach Annie the art of fly-fishing. Explaining the

50
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

difference between “imitations,” the flies designed to replicate actual

species of insects and “fancies,” the flies that make no attempt to
resemble anything except themselves, Fly Rod notes that she and
Annie are “fancies”—like the Parmachene Belle. It is her dream to
wean Annie away from her obsessive practice with guns.

Fly Rod’s optimistic fantasizing is disrupted when she opens a gift

that Annie has sent her. It is an arrow case that belonged to the
famous Indian warrior Sitting Bull. Disturbed by the potential
meaning of the gift, Fly Rod reflects on the death of Sitting Bull, who
was killed for his participation in the Ghost Dance, a form of ecstatic
trance-dancing believed to bring back the buffalo and get rid of the
white man.

Outcasts, misfits, and survivors—Annie, Fly Rod, and Sitting Bull all
struggled to invent ways to continue in the face of shattered dreams
and hopeless prospects. Fly Rod, in her monologue, wrestles with
her fears and negotiates the fine line between faith and denial as
she constructs a system of belief that will hold some possibility of
happiness for her, a lesbian in a heterosexual man’s world.

1 woman
35 minutes
Single set

THE PELE CHANT

A Civilized Conversation in One Act

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• Semi-finalist, Eileen Heckart Senior Drama Competition, the
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research
Institute, Ohio State University.
• National Finalist, Association for Theatre in Higher
Education One-Act Competition.

“Mahalo nui for your play. It is splendid, clever, and sets the
characters in an imaginary world that is, nevertheless, quite
believable. The mark of superb craftsmanship…! Ku’e,

51
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

ku’e,ku’e! [Resist, resist, resist!] — Haunani-Kay Trask, leader of

the Hawai’ian Sovereignty Movement.

The play opens in 1969, with Dr. Evelyn Bateman, a white college
professor, interviewing Miss Lydia Aholo, a ninety-two-year-old
Native Hawaiian. Miss Aholo is the hanai (“adoptive”) daughter of
Queen Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawai’i. Dr. Bateman is
preparing to write the first Western biography sympathetic to the
Queen, detailing her overthrow by the US government.

During the course of the interview, Miss Aholo reveals that the
Queen entrusted her with a mission before her death. She asked
her adoptive daughter to answer the question that tormented her at
the end of her life: “What did I do that was so wrong that I should
lose my country for my dear people?”

Dr. Bateman is shocked by the question, insisting that the Queen

was a helpless victim of a colonial effort that had its beginnings
before she was even born. Dr. Bateman is adamant that the Queen
could have done nothing to change the course of history. Miss
Aholo is equally insistent that there is an answer to the Queen’s
question and that the future for Native people depends on an
understanding of this answer.

As the Western liberal historian and the Native woman struggle with
the metaphysics of language, colonization, and victimization, their
collaboration begins to unravel. When Dr. Bateman recounts an
anecdote about a visit to Queen by three Native kahunas, or
priestesses, urging her to join them in an act of civil disobedience
involving the recitation of the Pele Chant, Lydia finds the answer to
the Queen’s question—and with it, the secret of spiritual
decolonization.

Two women
Single set
Thirty minutes

THE DRUM LESSON

A One-Act For Women Drummers

52
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• Gabriola Players, British Columbia.

• Published in Sinister Wisdom, Sebastopol, CA.
• Luna Sea Women’s Performance Space, San Francisco.

This one-act for five women drummers explores the dramatic uses
of the language of the drum.

In the play, the drum teacher Aisha has lost control of her class:
One student is improvising with no attention to the directives from
the teacher; another student who keeps losing her rhythm has
voluntarily moved herself out of the circle; a third student has not
even unpacked her drum.

Confronted with the lack of unity in the class, Aisha explains that the
only way she knows how to teach is through the drum: It teaches
her and it teaches through her. As tensions among the students
escalate, one of the drummers breaks into chaotic drumming. At
first, this is perceived as an act of aggression, but it quickly
becomes evident that something more serious is happening. When
the student fails to resond to attempts at verbal or physical
intervention, Aisha tries to reach her via the drum.

Her initial attempts at “call-and-response” are rebuffed, but slowly

the teacher manages to establish a dialogue with her runaway
student. As Aisha “drums her down from the ledge,” the other
students, chastened by this lesson in alternative language, rejoin
the circle.

Five women who can drum

Single set
Twenty minutes

THE RULES OF THE PLAYGROUND

An Anti-War Play in One Act

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.
• Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
• Published by Femspec: An Interdisciplinary Feminist
Journal, Cleveland, Heights, OH.

53
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• Produced by Code Pink in Lafayette Park, across from the

White House, Washington, DC..
• Maine Women’s Studies Conference, Portland, ME.
(reading)
• Stockyards Theatre, Chicago (reading).

“To introduce the futility of a nation state and ethnic-based

separation in such a simple and effective way is brilliant...” —
Laura Lampela, co-editor of Femspec, Vol. 5.

Five women, all mothers, have gathered in a classroom of their

children’s middle school to take part in an experimental, new
program designed to eliminate playground violence. Experts from
international “think tanks” and peacekeeping forces are training the
women on how to analyze playground dynamics in order to detect
the class, ethnic, and racial inequalities among the children that are,
in theory, the sources of conflict. On the chalkboard, there is a
diagram of the playground, which has been divided up into “safety
zones” in accordance with sophisticated formulas intended to
balance out these inqualities. The program’s focus is emphatically
on confronting social imbalances, not individual behaviors, and, to
facilitate this focus, the women have been forbidden to look out the
window at the playground. In fact, the blinds are shut.

As the women enter the classroom to wait for the trainer, they
register varying degrees of discomfort and distrust. Evidently
something traumatic has happened a week earlier, at the first
session of the training, but, because of the injunction against
focusing on individual behavior – and especially against “male-
bashing,” they are reluctant to talk about it.

An enthusiastic newcomer joins the group, excited to have found a

school for her daughter where the problem of violence is being so
openly addressed. Her enthusiasm changes to confusion as she
learns that the program prohibits any form of disciplining of the
children, insisting that all conflict be resolved through the rules of
the playground.

As the newcomer’s concerns escalate, the women’s self-censorship

begins to break down, and it is revealed that, a week earlier, one
child was shot on the playground and another was raped. The
newcomer reacts with disbelief and then alarm, as the sounds of
gunfire and screaming are heard from the playground. She is
intercepted as she attempts to raise the blinds, and flees the room,

54
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

accusing the other women of being insane. After she leaves, the
mother of the raped girl begins to question the absence of a gender
analysis amid all the sophisticated formulas for equality on the
chalkboard. She calls for a division of the playground that would
provide a safety zone for girls. This proposal is met with hysterical
denial, and the play ends with the women whose losses have been
the greatest joining forces to close the partially-opened blinds and to
reinforce the attention to the rules of the playground.

This is a scathing social satire, along the lines of Shirley Jackson’s

electrifying short story “The Lottery.” The Rules of the Playground
demonstrates how the everyday social conditioning of women is
exploited as a means of enabling the perpetuation of male violence.
Women’s collective failure to identify war as an unacceptable
expression of male aggression, and our acceptance of it along
male-identified terms of “political expedience,” is depicted as
nothing less than complicity—a complicity that renders us victims
and betrayers.

Six women
Single set
Twenty-five minutes

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO: THE STORY OF THALIDOMIDE

A One-Act For Radio Or Stage

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

• Broadcast on KRCL radio, Salt Lake City, UT.

This one-act was originally written as a radio play, but it can also be
produced as a stage drama.

The Evil That Men Do (title taken from a Shakespeare play) is the
story of Dr. Frances (“Frankie”) Kelsey’s fight to keep thalidomide
out of America. The play traces the development of her friendship
with Dr. Barbara Moulton, who resigned from the FDA and was
testifying against the agency’s corruption at the time when Frances
was hired. In her courageous act of befriending a whistle-blower,
Frances was laying the foundation for her subsequent battles with
the drug companies.

55
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

The play unveils the conspiracy between the German

manufacturers, the American distributor, and the officials in the FDA
to pressure Frances to issue a license for “the sleeping pill of the
century.” Frances plays for time against the good-old-boy network,
while the horrifying evidence mounts that thalidomide, prescribed as
a cure for morning sickness, causes severe birth defects.

Since 1960, the date of the thalidomide “scare” in this country,

companies whose products are designed for women have continued
to follow dangerous and deceptive practices. In 1991, a Texas jury
awarded $33 million in damages to the parents of a child born with
birth defects as a result of taking Bendectin, an anti-nausea drug,
which had been on the market since the 1950’s with no testing for
its effect on human fetuses.

Nestle persisted in promoting their infant formulas in Third World

countries, despite the proof that it was responsible for infant
malnutrition, disease, and death. Proctor and Gamble engaged in
an extensive cover-up of the fact that their Rely tampon was
responsible for toxic shock syndrome, even after the deaths of
many women. And A.H. Robbins dragged its heels for more than a
decade, fighting settlement awards for victims of their deadly

Dalkon Shield IUD, a birth control device that has left women sterile,
crippled, and dead. The most recent example of the medical
exploitation of women has been the scandal over the use of
untested silicon breast implants.

The Evil That Men Do is an old, old story—but one which points a
moral for a happier ending.

Three women, eight men

Thirty minutes
Single set

A LABOR PLAY
A One-Act Propaganda Piece

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays

56
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• Published in Sinister Wisdom, Sebastopol, CA.

A Labor Play is a satirical piece about what might happen if

surrogate mothers become a commodity in the corporate world. The
two chief executive officers are concerned about the bad publicity
which might result from a worker’s desire to gain control over the
distribution of the goods. (The mother has decided to keep the
baby.)

The collision of male dominance with the women’s value system is

violent, and the scenario, in light of the “Baby M” case, might not be
as far-fetched as it seems.

One woman, two men

Fifteen minutes
Single set

HETEROSEXUALS ANONYMOUS
A Twelve-Step Spoof

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

• Published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Vol. II,
Harrington Park Press, Binghamton, NY.

Five women come together for a regular meeting of Heterosexuals

Anonymous, an organization designed to help women overcome
their unmanageable addictions to men. The women share their
experiences of automatically deferring to men, of battering, of rape,
of sex discrimination, and of inability to relate to the males in their
own families.

The women, having admitted that they were powerless over their
addiction to men, work through the steps of the program towards
recovery. The steps include Step Two: “Believing that a power
greater than men can restore us to sanity” and Step Four: “Making a
searching and fearless moral inventory of all the men in our lives,
including fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.”

A lighthearted spoof, the play nevertheless points up the political

analysis which is lacking in tradition 12-Step programs, a lack which

57
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

often leads women to believe personal growth is possible without

social change.

Five women
Twenty minutes
Single set

RADICALS
A One-Act About Women in the Anti-War Movement

Radicals is a play about straight women during the late sixties. The
play illustrates the damaging effects of compulsory heterosexuality
on women who must express affection for each other through each
other’s boyfriends. An explosive play, examining the roots of
violence between women.

In Radicals, two women live together; one is an activist in the anti-

war movement, and the other is apolitical - but paying all the bills.
The women’s inability to communicate their feelings for each other
leads them towards increasingly destructive and competitive roles.
Finally, Margo invites a fugitive radical, wanted for killing a
policeman in Miami, to stay in their apartment. Sexual and political
tensions become entangled, and the war comes home.

The play moves swiftly as a political thriller for a close ensemble

group. The idealistic rhetoric of the characters stands in stark
contrast to their day-to-day choices. Radicals interweaves the
personal with the political, never losing sight of the fact that these
self-styled radicals are no more respectful of the life around them
than the “enemy” they oppose.

Two women, two men

Forty-five minutes
Single set

THE BOUNDARY TRIAL OF JOHN PROCTOR

A One-Act Play

58
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

The Boundary Trial of John Proctor takes up where Arthur Miller’s

Crucible leaves off. This play opens with Miller’s anti-hero stumbling
into the boundary lands where women’s lives are lived, a territory so
marginal to patriarchy that it has escaped by Proctor and his
creator’s awareness.

The women accused of witchcraft in Miller’s play are assembled in a

sewing circle. We meet Elizabeth, Proctor’s pregnant wife, and
Abigail, the employee he sexually exploited. We also meet Tituba,
the formerly enslaved Carribean housekeeper; Sarah, the town
baglady; Martha, the intellectual; and Rebecca, the town matriarch.

The women are assembled to make baby clothes for Elizabeth’s

child. They ask John Proctor to join their circle and take up the
knitting. Balking at “women’s work,” John discovers that he is unable
to assert his male supremacist values in the Boundary of women’s
existence. He is as marginal here as the women were in his world,
and his discovery that witches are real results in an explosive
verdict.

Six women, one man

Thirty minutes
Single set (bare stage)

THE LADIES’ ROOM

A Play in Six Minutes

• 2010, “Best of Fest” in Girl Play: Second Annual Lesbian Play

Festival, Women’s Theatre Project, Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.
• 2009, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
• 2009, article published in On the Issues about the play.
• 2009, (reading), Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

The scene is just outside a ladies’ room in a shopping mall. Rae, a a

seventeen-year-old butch, has just been misidentified as a man,
and a woman has gone to report her to mall security. Rae,

59
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

humiliated and insulted, is hurling insults. Her girlfriend, Nicole, is

oddly unsupportive.

When Nicole discloses the reasons for her silence, Rae is

overwhelmed emotionally, and she makes a surprising choice when
her accuser returns.

Two teenaged girls

Six minutes
Single set (bare stage)

PATRICIDE
A Play in One Minute

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• Evening of Lesbian Theatre, Cork Arts Theatre, Ireland
(reading).
• Victim to Survivor: Mythologies,” Dallas County Sexual Assault
Coalition, Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas.
• Java Theatre, Providence, RI and Boston.
• “Picking Up the Pieces,” University of North Dakota.
• 10th Annual International Women’s Playwriting Festival,
Perishable Theatre, Providence, RI
• Stageworks, Tampa, FL.
• Published in Night of 1,000 Playwrights, Rain City Projects,
Seattle.

Patricide is a one-minute monologue by a woman of any age, race,

ethnicity, physical ability, sexual orientation, or class background—
who telephones her father and confronts him with her memory of his
sexual abuse of her.

More than a novelty piece, this monologue provides actors with the
opportunity to run an intense gauntlet of peak emotions in the space
of sixty seconds: panic, terror, disorientation, relief, euphoria.

One woman
One minute
Bare or elaborate set, with telephone

60
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

THE P.E. TEACHER

A One-Act Play

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

The P.E. Teacher is a suspenseful thriller exploring the interface of

misogyny, racism, and homophobia in the public schools.

Dana Willets, an African American lesbian, has just been hired to

teach P.E. classes at Rosa Parks Middle School. She is replacing
another lesbian teacher who resigned suddenly in mid-term under
mysterious circumstances. Dana’s attempts to discover the reason
for this resignation are frustrated by the vice principal, who lectures
her on the need to be a team player.

Dana recognizes the English teacher Anne, who is white, as a

former lover from college, and as she presses her for information
about the P.E. teacher, Anne becomes increasingly nervous and
uncommunicative. An African American girl is assaulted in the halls
by male students, and the school nurse, guidance counselor, and
vice principal engage in a cover-up of the incident, focusing their
attention on the attitude of the victim.

As information about the P.E. teacher’s resignation begins to

surface, Anne is scapegoated for her recent breakdown, and a gun
that was concealed in the sofa of the lounge resurfaces in the
violent resolution of the drama.

Five women, one man, two girls

Thirty minutes
Single set

BITE MY THUMB
A Skirmish in One Act

• 2009, Published in Sinister Wisdom, Issue 76, Sebastopol, CA.

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

61
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

• Optioned by CottonLover Films, Indianapolis, IN.

• Produced in Beyond the L-Word: An Evening of Lesbian
Theatre, Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME. (staged reading)
• Produced by the School of International Migration and Ethnic
Studies, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden.

“… a great success… the most popular and attended play… we

even had to add two extra performances to meet the demand.”
—Matilda Marshall, Malmö University, Sweden.

Two “gangs” from rival Off-Off Broadway productions of Romeo and

Juliet meet in an alley to rumble, sixteenth-century style. Female-to-
male transgender meets lesbian cross-dressing, and lesbian butch
squares off against male machismo in this swashbuckling gender-
bender!

A male “Romeo” from a traditional production shows up at the stage

door of an all-women theatre company, challenging their “Romeo” to
come out and fight like a man. The fact that this cross-dressing,
female Romeo has stolen his former girlfriend by offering her the
role of Juliet only fans the flames of his indignation. When Juliet’s
Nurse, a lesbian butch, takes up his challenge, however, Romeo
finds himself outclassed in the martial arts. On the brink of
surrender, he is rescued by his own masked “Mercutio,” who takes
on the Nurse in a dazzling display of sword-fighting techniques.

In another surprise twist, “Mercutio” is unmasked, revealing his

identity as a transgender male. Accused of being a woman by his
former buddy, he is also attacked by the lesbian butch for alleged
lesbo-phobia. Meanwhile, the female “Romeo,” threatened by the
butch’s superior fighting skills attempts to put her back in her place
as a character actor. The butch, however, joins forces with the
transgender actor, with the result that both find themselves expelled
from their respective companies.

Having pronounced a plague on both their houses, the butch

launches into a tender coda about the unsung heroism of those who
renounce traditionally assigned gender roles. She and the
transgender male commit themselves to the creation of a new kind
of theatre that can support their stories.

Two males, three females, one transgender male

Thirty minutes
Single set

62
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

THE POORLY-WRITTEN PLAY FESTIVAL

Just Possibly the Worst One-Act Play Ever Written

• Winner, Maine Literary Award in Drama, Maine Writers and

Publishers Alliance.
• 2009, International Cringe Festival, New York Artists, NYC.
• Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, NYC
(Acorn Productions of Maine).
• Maine Festival of One-Act Plays, Acorn Productions,
Portland, Maine
• Finalist, George P. Kernodle One-Act Competition, Univ. of
Arkansas.
• Open Book Players, Gardiner, ME. (reading)

“Absolutely the BEST of the "insider" plays about

(community) theatre we have read. A satire exposing
whilst exemplifying all the elements of bad
playwriting.”—International CringeFest, NYC.

Five members of a play selection committee have gathered in the

Green Room to choose the plays for their Festival of Poorly-Written
Plays. The artistic director begins with a review of the more common
criteria for a bad play: blatant exposition and contrived names for
the characters. He then suggests that they all go around the table
and introduce themselves and say a little something about
themselves—blatant exposition if ever there was. As he calls on
Hedda, the literary manager, and Mrs. Bracknell, the benefactress, it
becomes obvious that the folks around the table all have contrived
names.

And so it goes—the committee enacts every broken rule of

playwriting in the course of their wrangling over their selections of
bad plays. These broken rules include the use of asides, characters
who unaccountably reverse their positions, overly-complicated
relationship histories, unrealistic set requirements, mysterious
strangers, phony disguises, implausible explanations, significant
action that takes place offstage, reference to scenes that have been
cut from the script, and the setting up of the expectations of the
audience only to disappoint them.

63
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

This is a hilarious “actors nightmare” for playwrights, guaranteed to

delight audiences, whose attempts to follow the action are
constantly frustrated by the dramaturgical liberties of this “poorly-
written” play. The incoherencies and inconsistencies build to a
frantic climax, as the artistic director, faced with a plethora of plot
difficulties, resorts to the cheesiest playwriting device of all.

Three females, three males

Seventeen minutes
Single set

THE OBLIGATORY SCENE

A One-Act Play for Two Women

• 2008, Published in Nine Short Plays, Outskirts Press, CO.

• Stage Q (reading), National Women’s Music Festival,
Madison.
• Adapted as a comic book by Katie Diamond, Portland, ME.
• Evening of Lesbian Theatre, Cork Arts Theatre, Ireland.
• Produced in Beyond the L-Word: An Evening of Lesbian
Theatre, Cauldron & Labrys, Portland, ME. (staged reading)
• Published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly,
Binghamton, NY.
• Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Hart, MI. (reading)

Ostensibly arguing about The Taming of the Shrew, a lesbian

couple come to grips with their own marital struggles and break their
deadlock around the issue of sex.

Vivey and Dru are both graduate students, living together in a

committed relationship. Vivey’s distress over being assigned to
direct a scene from Taming of the Shrew triggers an argument with
her partner about the sexual politics of the play. Dru makes the case
that the play is subversive, with Petrucchio exaggerating his gender
role in order to mock it. Vivey resists this interpretation until Dru
cites the dialogue describing the wedding night, where it is apparent
that Petrucchio does not have sex with Katharine. On the contrary,
he delivers a mocking lecture on abstinence.

64
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

On the strength of this argument, Vivey accepts that the play might
indeed be about a companionate, or even “passing” marriage. She
redirects the conversation to address the lack of sex in their own
relationship. Dru, a survivor of child sexual abuse, is reluctant to
discuss the subject.

As the argument escalates, the two agree to role-play an exercise in

which Dru plays an alien from another planet, describing her
experience. The exercise, set up to pathologize Dru, backfires on
Vivey, and she discovers that she is more accurately the alien from
another planet. Dru’s experiences are universal and pandemic
among women, and Dru’s insistence on incorporating that
understanding into her practice of intimacy shatters Vivey’s
complacency and self-righteousness.

Deeply in love, but deeply self-assertive, both women struggle to

avoid playing out the traditional “obligatory scene” of a break-up or a
sexual stalemate. The ending of the play points to a radical
transformation the holds the promise of healing for both.

Two females
Twenty minutes
Single set

THE GAGE AND MR. COMSTOCK

A Ten-Minute Monologue

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

• “Voices of Vashon,” WQHK904, Vashon Island, WA.
• Venus Theatre, (staged reading) Washington, DC.
• Winner, Got Theatre? Project, Syracuse, NY.

Formidable editor, author and Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, 67,

lies in bed ripping up congratulatory notes from her well-wishers
about the recent publication of her lifework, Woman, Church, and
State.

Her book, an impeccably-researched, comprehensive indictment of

the historical misogyny of the christian church, is intended to start a
revolution, and Gage is distressed by the polite responses from
those who already share her views. In an attempt to stir controversy,

65
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

she has sent a copy to a conservative member of the local school

board, donating the book to the school library. She expresses her
frustration that she has received no response.

After a mini-lecture on the custom of “throwing down the gage,” she

vents her frustration about the fact that challenges by women are so
seldom taken seriously. Gage’s exhaustion changes to exhilaration
when she comes across a letter from Anthony Comstock, the
notorious author of the national “Comstock Laws” that banned birth
control and instituted strict censorship in arts and literature.
Apparently, the school board member sent the book to him, and he
has written to Gage threatening to press criminal charges against
anyone who attempts to place the book in the hands of children.

Gage is delighted. She exposes the hypocrisy of Mr. Comstock and

tells the appalling story of his persecution of Ann Lohman, a woman
who was incarcerated for having performed abortions, and whom he
pursued after her release, entrapping her in the sale of
contraceptives to undercover agents. Lohman, unable to face the
humiliation and trauma of a second incarceration slit her own throat
the morning she was to appear in court for the second trial. Gage
scores Comstock for his callous indifference to Lohman’s death, a
direct result of his persecution of her.

Gage is delighted that Mr. Comstock has taken up her challenge

and she gleefully anticipates the prospect of escalating the
controversy surrounding her book, noting that, if all goes as she
plans, Woman, Church and State should make it onto the Pope’s list
of banned books.

One female
Ten minutes
Single set

‘TIL THE FAT LADY SINGS

A Play with Music in One Act

Music by Andrea Jill Higgins (and Puccini, Verdi,

Mozart, Wagner, and Gluck)

66
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

Sample of songs at
www.myspace.com/tilthefatladysings

• Staged reading, Ohio State University, Columbus (directed by

Christopher Purdy) for International Center for Women
Playwrights Annual Retreat.
• Maine Short Play Festival, Acorn Productions, Portland, ME.

Sara, a young woman in her early 30’s, lies in a hospital bed,

waiting to be taken down to surgery for a gastric bypass operation.
Sara weighs more than 250 pounds, and she is convinced that,
without the surgery, she will never be able to realize her ambition to
become a professional opera singer. Her years of training and
graduate school will have been wasted.

Sara’s partner, Gillian, is opposed to the surgery, and when she

shows up in the hospital room, an argument ensues. Realizing that
their conflict is causing Sara distress, Gillian apologizes and asks
Sara to sing “Vissi d’arte,” a favorite aria by Puccini. When a nurse
arrives to administer a sedative, however, Gillian renews her
opposition and exits.

Under sedation, Sara experiences a series of dreams which

incorporate elements of well-known operas with concerns about the
impending surgery and her experiences with fat oppression. The
dream sequences include a comic interlude as a Rheinemaiden, an
encounter with the “Ghost of Callas Past,” a confrontation with a Met
director who insists on a graphically realistic finale of La Traviata, a
duet with Papageno, confusion between Madame Butterfly’s hari-
kari and gastric bypass surgery, and a scene from Gluck’s Orfeo ed
Euridice in which Gillian plays the tormented troubadour on a
mission to retrieve his love from the Underworld—a mission which
must be achieved without turning and looking back at her.

At this point, Sara wakes up, but she is still confused by the drugs.
Mistaking Gillian for Orfeo, she insists that Gillian not look at her,
because that is the only way to lead her out of hell. Gillian
expresses a concern that perhaps Sara’s immersion in operas that
reflect morbid male fantasies might be coloring Sara’s perceptions.
She points out that what is making life hell for Sara is not the way
she sees Sara, but the way other people see her. She challenges
Sara to give a voice to her body, instead of trying to give a body to
her voice.

67
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Sara considers the suggestion and the play ends with her singing
the aria, “This Body Is My Song,” a radical love song between a diva
and her body.

Two female opera singers (soprano and contralto), one non-singing,

walk-on role
Thirty minutes
Single set

THE A-MAZING YAMASHITA AND THE GOLDDIGGERS OF 2008

A Transnational, Postmodern Magic Show for the Millennium

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.

• Staged reading, Venus Theatre, Laurel, MD.
• Acorn Productions, Portland, ME (reading).

Yamashita is a female magician, who promises us an evening of

entertainment, where she will personally escort her audience
“through the secret tunnels and nubiferous passageways of a post-
colonialist, global economic maze, more hidden than King
Solomon’s Tomb, more baffling than the riddle of the Sphinx and
more impenetrable than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”

In fact, her Assistant has run away, and the A-Mazing Yamashita is
compelled to recruit volunteers from the audience for her classic
acts of levitating a woman, sawing a woman in half, and causing a
woman to vanish in a magic cabinet, the Cabinet of GATT (yes, as
in “General Agreements on Tariff and Trade”).

In the course of her highly unorthodox magic, the Assistant returns

via the Cabinet, to warn the audience that Yamashita is actually
trafficking the women who volunteer for her magic acts. Yamashita,
assuring the audience that this is all part of the act, produces a
young Thai woman who has “chosen” to prostitute herself,
illustrating the “magic” of GATT in generating market conditions that
support the disappearing of women. Entering the Cabinet herself,
Yamashita manages to convince the Stage Manager that there is no
need for intervention. To reassure the audience, she calls on a

68
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

Professor who responds to audience concerns with postmodern

“deconstructions” of all their questions.

When her Assistant takes matters into her own hands, telephoning
the police, Yamashita must disappear them all and then undertake
the mass hypnosis of her entire audience. Explaining how the
synaptic association of inequality with sexual arousal will eliminate
any sense of discomfort about the evening, and, in fact, greatly
enhance the audience’s ability to participate in the new global
economy, Yamashita announces her intention to achieve this effect
via displays of pornographic imagery. At this point, the Stage
Manager pulls the electrical plug and the fate of the evening lies in
the hands of the audience.

The real trick is to apply the lessons learned to the economic

sleight-of-hand that globally erases women’s productivity,
disappears over a hundred million women and girls a year, and
commodifies the culture via increasing dissemination of
pornography.

Seven women
One man
Two teenaged girls, one Asian
Three adults, any gender
Thirty minutes
Single set

THE COUNTESS AND THE LESBIANS

A One-Act for Three Women

• Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival, Ireland.

• Ballindoon Productions, Liberty Hall, Dublin.
• St. Lawrence Arts Center, Portland, ME (Cauldron & Labrys).
• Maine Association of Community Theatres Conference, Dover-
Foxcroft.
• TOSOS (reading), NYC.

“… an intelligent and witty look at the parallels between the

Irish struggle and the struggle for gay rights… As the play
unfolds, tensions between the characters surface not only

69
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

because of the tricky love-triangle, but also due to the more

contentious and telling political sympathies and views of the
women… cleverly written and lucid… ” [Five-star rating] —
The Metro, Dublin, Ireland.

“… a spirited dramatization of women’s involvement in the

Easter Rising… The historical elements of the play are
intriguing… engaging a broader narrative of feminist history.”
—Irish Times, Dublin.

“Michael Collins meets The L-word? As unlikely as this

sounds, Carolyn Gage’s provocative new one-act, The
Countess and the Lesbians, pulls it off beautifully, while still
managing to be that brave and sometimes daunting thing, an
intellectual play about political issues… the graceful pacing,
creative characterisations, and flashing good humour of this
highly intelligent script means that it’s entertaining instead of
polemic, a rousing good piece of theatre with a thoughtful
message… an important play and a highly satisfying piece of
theatre in its own right.” —Queer ID, Dublin.

“… some great one liners and wonderful comic construction

peppered throughout a solid feminist argument that few could
fault about recognition and identity… professional, perfectly-
pitched and thought-provoking… The Countess and the
Lesbians is a fascinating deconstruction of a time of Irish
heroism, posing questions you’ll be talking about for days
afterwards.”—Gaelick, [online magazine], Ireland.

“If Countess Markiewicz is sometimes overlooked, Eva is

completely ignored in history. Before we did the play I had
never heard of Eva Gore-Booth, but these women, these
lesbians are part of our history and I think that the full houses
prove that people are willing to re-educate themselves.” —Gina
Costigan, Ballindoon Productions, Dublin.

Kathleen is directing a play about Countess Constance Markiewicz,

after her arrest for her participation in the Easter Rising. The play is
based on the writings by the Countess, by her sister Eva Gore-
Booth, and by her sister’s life companion Esther Roper.

Kathleen’s partner Grace is performing the role of Eva, while

Kathleen plays the Countess. Their real-life relationship mirrors the
dynamic between the sisters: Grace, who despises conflict, plays a

70
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

supporting role to Kathleen, who is multi-talented and very

ambitious. Nan, playing the role of Esther is in love with Grace, and
she becomes increasingly aggressive in challenging Kathleen’s
directorial and dramaturgical choices.

When Kathleen fires Nan from the play, Grace produces excerpts
from a play by Eva Gore-Booth, The Death of Fionavar, and
requests that they do a reading of them. In the play, Eva has used a
tale from Irish mythology to illustrate her political differences with
her sister. Fionavar, the Queen’s daughter, is so upset by the sight
of bloody corpses, she falls dead—even though her mother was the
supposed victor.

As the women wrestle with their pride and their options, they make a
radical choice to continue to cling to the wreck of the rehearsal
process until there is some light. The play, like the love of Ireland
among the historical characters, is a thing that unites them and that
transcends their ego, and as they continue to inhabit the characters,
the actors discover that the script becomes a vehicle for expressing
and transforming their emotions. As the template for their former
relationships is shattered, they use the Irish play as a temporary
structure from which they can begin the process of rebuilding.

Three women
One hour
Single set

SOUVENIRS FROM EDEN

A One-Act Play

• 2009, St. Lawrence Arts Center, Portland, ME.

Souvenirs from Eden is a play about a survivor struggling to make

peace with memories of betrayal and abandonment. In the play, the
ghost of the lesbian poet Renée Vivien returns to a memory of her
summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, (then named “Eden”) in 1900, when
she was the guest of her lover Natalie Barney, who would later
become a celebrated salonist. Both women were very young and
very wealthy.

71
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Renée’s attempt to revisit the memory in order to gain closure is

disrupted by both Natalie and the Stage Manager. The Stage
Manager manipulates props and impersonates a dangerous visitor
from Renée’s past, and Natalie perpetually goes “off script,” refusing
to allow Renée to demonize her.

The memory continues to recycle, as Renée imposes different

endings on it. Finally, the deeper betrayal by her mother surfaces,
and Renée is offered an authentic opportunity to gain closure.
Instead, she escalates her blaming of Natalie, and Natalie responds
by appropriating the narrative. She describes her first lesbian crush
in Eden, and the innocence of her memory antagonizes Renée who
fails to recognize it as the key to closure and healing. Natalie walks
out, as Renée resorts to her familiar abuse of sedatives and alcohol.
The memory starts to loop again, unassimilated and inassimilable.

Three women
Single set
25 minutes

BLACK EYE
A Knockout in Nine Minutes

• 2010, Pace University, NYC.

• 2009, Published in Black Eye and Other Short Plays.
• 2009, Women’s Theatre Project, Ft. Lauderdale.
• Art of the Play, Kennebunk, ME.

The year is 1953 and the setting is a middle-school principal’s office

and the waiting area outside the door. Amanda, a thirteen-year-old
tomboy, is waiting disconsolately on a bench. She sports a brand
new black eye, and has apparently been fighting.

Her P.E. teacher, Miss Marshall, has been summoned to a

consultation about the incident with the principal. On the way to his
office, she checks in with Amanda, and the audience understands
that she has been coaching the girl on her fighting skills.

72
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

The principal, Mr. Kent, is expelling Amanda and is hoping that Miss
Marshall will be willing to convey the news to both Amanda and to
her mother, as Miss Marshall is the girl’s favorite teacher. Miss
Marshall is angered by the decision, arguing that the fight was
provoked by the boys’ homophobic harassment.

When Mr. Kent attempts to terminate the meeting, Miss Marshall

admits that she has taught the girl how to defend herself, and she
informs him that she believes in fighting. She threatens to “out” Mr.
Kent to the school board if he follows through on the expulsion. Mr.
Kent is confident that she will not do this, as he knows that she is
also in a same-sex relationship. Miss Marshall manages to trump
his ace, however, and he agrees not to expel Amanda.

Leaving the office, Miss Marshall has a final, triumphant and

subversive interaction with her student.

A woman, a girl, and a man

Single set
Nine minutes

HERMENEUTIC CIRCLEJERK

A Postmodern Exposé

• 20210, Venus Theatre, Laurel, MD. (reading)

The play opens in a café in Paris, in 1977. Michel-Henri, a middle-

aged academic, sits at a small table with a bottle of wine. Jacques-
Pierre, his colleague, rushes in with the news that the Parliament
has just rejected a petition they both signed, to abolish the age of
consent and decriminalize “consenting” relations between adults
and children. Jacques-Pierre is distraught, blaming Michel-Henri for
having persuaded him to sign it.

Michel-Henri argues that it was the right thing to do, and that he,
Michel-Henri, can no longer settle for a life of shame and hiding, but
must take a public stand for who he is. Jacques-Pierre, drinking
heavily, begins to agree with him, becoming more and more

73
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

inappropriate as the evening wears on.

Agreeing with Jacques-Pierre that the rejection of the petition has

left them both vulnerable, Michel-Henri hits on the idea of founding
a new philosophy that will confuse people and undermine the moral
objections to pedophilia. He appeals to Jacques-Pierre to help him
create a special language of obfuscation for the movement.

Jacques-Pierre refuses, telling Michel-Henri he intends to repair his

reputation by saying that Michel-Henri made him sign the petition.
At this point, their interaction moves into a perpetration scenario,
with Michel-Henri overriding Jacques-Pierre’ protests and Jacques-
Pierre becoming more and more submissive. The play ends with his
capitulation, and postmodernism is founded.

Two adult males, one adult woman of color (narrator)

Single set
20 minutes

LACE CURTAIN IRISH

A ONE-WOMAN, ONE-ACT

Thirty-five years after the infamous Fall River ax murders, a 61-

year-old Irish woman, working in her kitchen in Anaconda, Montana,
opens a newspaper to read about the death of the alleged
murderer, Lizzie Borden. The woman is Bridget Sullivan, the
Borden’s former maid.

As she reads the article, Bridget shares with the audience her rage
toward her former employer’s daughter, whom she believes
attempted to frame her for the murders. She has been haunted by a
recurring, mysterious dream that begins with lace curtains and
believes she was a witness, but that she has blocked the memory.

Drinking heavily, she shares with us what she remembers of that

fateful day: how, in spite of being sick with food poisoning on the
hottest day of the year, Mrs. Borden had still ordered her to wash all
the windows in the house.

74
 ONE-ACT PLAYS

As she speaks, Bridget is stretching lace curtains on blocking

frames. The frames have small pins around the edges for attaching
the lace, and Bridget, in her anger, keeps pricking her fingers and
staining the margins with blood.

After the trial, Lizzie sent Bridget a substantial amount of money,

with the condition that she leave the US and return permanently to
Ireland. Bridget believes Lizzie must have seen her face at the
window, and that the offer was an attempt to buy her silence.
Bridget brags about returning under another name to Anaconda,
Montana, a prosperous mining town run by Irish immigrants.

Declaring that Lizzie was a “tommy” (a lesbian), Bridget accuses her

of courting her with kindness, in an attempt to set her up for the
murders. Bridget’s childhood with fourteen siblings was a harsh one,
and, wanting to escape her mother’s fate, she has emigrated with a
dream of having an independent life.

Holding up a frame of lace, she is surprised by the sudden retrieval

of a memory from the day of the murders. Approaching the parlor
window, she did not witness the murder, but saw instead the
reflection of her own face, resembling the face of her mother. This
memory triggers a string of other memories that contradict her
version of events for that day. Increasingly confused, Bridget begins
to realize the true identity of the murderer and understand that the
woman she has demonized for thirty-five years nearly sacrificed her
life in order to save Bridget.

One woman
Single set
30 minutes

75
 BOOKS
THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND SELECTED
PLAYS [2009]

• 2008, Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama.

• Published by Outskirts Press, CO.
• “Self-Published Book-Review-of-the-Week,”
http://selfpublishingadvice.wordpress.com

“… an exciting page-turner that is at once challenging and

informative… inventive and thought-provoking take on
women’s lives.”—HerStoria, Wallasey, UK.

“… penetrating, gutsy and often painfully funny.”—John

Manderino, playwright and author.

This is a brand new collection of Gage’s best historical plays,

including the award-winning title work, a play that has been
performed around the world for more than two decades.

In Artemisia and Hildegard, Gage explores the tensions between

assimilation and separatism in the explosive encounter on an
academic arts panel between 17th century baroque painter
Artemisia Gentileschi and 12th century abbess Hildegard von
Bingen. She revisits this theme in her widely-produced play, Harriet
Tubman Visits a Therapist. Tubman, suspected of planning an
escape, has been sent to the Therapist, another African-American
woman, for an evaluation. Radical activism meets one-day-at-a-time
therapism in this play that won the Off-Off Broadway Festival and
was produced at the Louisville Juneteenth Festival.

The one-woman plays include The Last Reading of Charlotte

Cushman, a full-length play about the l9th century performer whose
lesbian affairs were a dramatic as her cross-dressed roles on the
stage. The Parmachene Belle is a one-woman show about Cornelia
Crosby, a 19th century Maine hunting guide with a crush on Annie
Oakley, who was a survivor of torture and child sexual abuse. This
is a play about outcasts, misfits, and survivors—Crosby, Oakley,
and Sitting Bull—who all struggled to invent ways to continue in the
face of shattered dreams and hopeless prospects.

76
 BOOKS

The other plays include Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her

Daughter and Cookin’ with Typhoid Mary.

NINE SHORT PLAYS

• Published by Outskirts Press, CO.

“As Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in

America, the book 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.

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.

77
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

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.

THREE COMEDIES

A collection of three award-winning, full-length comedies.

The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women: A farcical,

audience-interactive courtroom drama, where the audience must
serve as judge and jury in a case against the five women who
betrayed the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, the last surviving
daughter of the Tsar of Russia. Complex ethical questions on a set
of folding chairs.

Sappho in Love: A lesbian “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with the

goddesses of celibacy, love, and marriage competing for Sappho’s
attention amid poetry contests, meteor showers, lessons on lesbian

78
 BOOKS

love-making, romantic trysting, mix-ups and disguises. Wet and wild

romantic comedy!

Thanatron: A rollicking farce about the world’s most dysfunctional

family, a doctor with a penchant for assisted suicide, and a lesbian
housekeeper with a crush on her employer. An over-the-top comedy
about leaving, being left, and what it takes to stay.

THE TRIPLE GODDESS

A collection of three full-length dramas:

The Goddess Tour: It’s a dark and stormy night at a remote inn on
the Burren of Western Ireland, as six American women -- strangers
to each other (or are they?)—gather for a tour of ancient goddess
sites. A murder mystery exploring potentially deadly mother-
daughter dyads, played out amid ghostly sightings of lost children
and pre-Celtic rituals involving various aspects of the goddess

Ugly Ducklings: Two counselors at a summer camp struggle with

their love against a backdrop of homophobia. Scenes with the
campers depict with chilling accuracy the cruelty of girls towards
those they perceive as outsiders. Powerful lesbian drama!

Esther and Vashti: A romantic drama set against a backdrop of

war in ancient Persia. A young Hebrew woman and her former
lover, the Queen of Persia, struggle against their personal and
political differences to form an alliance against a common enemy.

BLACK EYE AND OTHER SHORT PLAYS

A collection of ten short plays.

Black Eye: Subtitled “a knockout in nine minutes,” this short play

packs a punch. The year is 1953, and Amanda is a 13-year-old
tomboy who has been sent to the principal’s office for fighting the
boys who have been lesbian-baiting her. When the principal, who is
in the closet, moves to expel her, Amanda’s lesbian P.E. teacher
shows that she is just as willing to fight as her student. A taut play,
filled with surprises.

79
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

The Ladies’ Room: A five-minute play about two lesbian teenagers

in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. The butch has just been
mistaken for a man, and mall security is on the way. Her girlfriend,
because of her own history,is conflicted about offering support.

A Conversation on a Foreign Planet:

The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Gold Diggers of 2011: “The

transnational, postmodern magic show of the millennia!” The A-
Mazing Yamashita promises to levitate a woman, cut a woman in
two, and disappear a hundred thousand women—all through the
wizardry of modern pharmaceuticals, the presto-chango of sexual
com-modification, and the wonders of the Great Cabinet of GATT.

The Rules of the Playground: Six mothers of middle-school

children come together for a special training on playground
violence. Focusing on perfecting the rules of the playground to
eliminate inequality, the women, literally, turn a blind eye to the real
cause of violence. A chilling interrogation into the ways women
teach each other to enable male violence.

The Boundary Trial of John Proctor: A one-act featuring the

notorious anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s Crucible, and the women he
exploited. John Proctor, finding himself in the boundary lands of
patriarchy after his execution, encounters a second trial—this time
by the women. Proctor, who does not believe in witches, scrambles
desperately for context as he is tested by his ex-wife, his mistress, a
formerly enslaved Caribbean woman, the town baglady, the town
bluestocking, and the town matriarch.

The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide: Fast-paced

radio drama, suitable for stage production. The conspiracy of the
German drug manufacturers and the FDA unfolds like a murder
mystery, as Dr. Frances Kelsey, suspecting birth defects, stalls for
time against mounting pressures to license sale of “the sleeping pill
of the century.”

A Labor Play: Kafka-esque one-act about a multi-national

corporation in the business of selling babies. “Business as usual”
comes to a halt when one of the workers strikes for control of the
distribution of manufactured goods. In other words, she wants to
keep the baby.

80
 BOOKS

Heterosexuals Anonymous: A playful send-up of the 12-step

movement. Five women in recovery from their addictions to men,
convene at their weekly meeting. The format includes personal
testimonies and the reading of the 12 Steps of HA.

The P.E. Teacher: A one-act about misogyny, racism, and

homophobia in the schools. A new teacher is hired to replace a
lesbian teacher who resigned under suspicious circumstances.
When a former lover turns up on staff, it becomes evident that the
scapegoating is a cover for the school’s institutionalized violence
against women and girls.

The Gage and Mr. Comstock: A monologue by feminist foremother

and Suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, in which she sets the bait for
Anthony Comstock to ban her book, Woman, Church and State, a
comprehensive exposé of the historical misogyny of the christian
church.

TAKE STAGE!
How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play

• Featured in Feminist Bookstore Network Catalogue.

• Reviewed in Lesbian Review of Books, Hilo, HI.
• Published by Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD.

“In Take Stage!, Carolyn Gage has given us an invaluable

resource for producing lesbian theatre in our communities—
brilliant in attention to the details of theatrical production,
uncompromising in its treatment of the human and economic
factors involved, firmly grounded in her experiences as a
playwright, director, and producer, and throughout informed by
a solid, lesbian-centered politic that prioritizes class, race, and
accessibility in specific, practical ways. This book is so full of
information about organizing, fund-raising, and the dynamics
of lesbian groups that any lesbian engaged in grassroots
politics should own at least one copy. WARNING! If you loan it
out, Take Stage! is a book that probably won’t come back!” —
Julia Penelope, co-editor of The Original Coming Out Stories, For
Lesbians Only, and Lesbian Culture: An Anthology.

81
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

“… chock full of new ideas and common sense about

choosing, mounting, publicizing, and surviving the live theatre
experience… cracks open the mysteries of the successful
theatre venture… Most important, the book addresses the
complex underpinnings of accountability, leadership, and
collaboration in the differently structured world of women-run
groups… a real resource guide… concise, readable, and
inspiring.” —The Lesbian Review of Books, Hilo, HI.

“… a kick-ass primer on self-producing, with timelines, sample

press releases, flyers, and every other kind of helpful thing. ...
Her coverage on “victims and victimizers” and the effects of
traumatized people who dissociate and create backstage
“drama” is psychologically spot on. I wish I had read this years
ago. It would have saved me many the headache and “blame
game” in dealing with struggling small groups. It’s a unique
book on producing plays… It just went onto my top shelf.” —
Linda Eisenstein, author of Three the Hard Way and Marla’s
Devotion.

The first comprehensive “how-to” book for lesbians wanting to

produce or direct lesbian theatre. 300 pages of everything you
would ever need to know, from script selection to striking the set,
about putting on a lesbian play.

The author has been the founder and artistic director of three
theatre companies, including a studio art theatre, a large community
theatre, and a radical feminist theatre. She has worked with lesbian
theatre collectives, toured and performed at women’s festivals and
conferences for the last six years, and worked with lesbian
producers all over the country.

Conversational and anecdotal, TAKE STAGE! is written for the

lesbian who has no previous experience with theatre or lesbian
organization. In addition to the chapters on auditioning, rehearsals,
picking the script, booking the space, assembling a staff, etc., the
book also includes special chapters on the unique challenges to
lesbians creating theatre.

TAKE STAGE! includes information on how to challenge the “isms” -

looksism, racism, ageism, ableism, fat phobia, and all the other
prejudices that are entrenched in mainstream theatre. TAKE
STAGE! also looks at co-dependence in women and the problems
this can cause in an organization staffed by volunteers. The author

82
 BOOKS

takes on the class structure and hierarchy that can develop within a
theatre, and she proposes concrete strategies for developing
alternative systems.

The fifty-page appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms,

light plots, budgets, and schedules. A gold mine of practical forms
and charts!

TAKE STAGE! is filled with examples from real lesbian theatre

groups, examples of situations which arose when the structure of
the company was ambiguous, when the roles were poorly defined,
or when the communication was not clear.

SCENES AND MONOLOGUES FOR LESBIAN ACTORS: REVISED

AND EXPANDED
The First Scene Study Book for Lesbians

• Published by Odd Girls Press, Anaheim, CA.

• Second Edition published by Outskirts Press, Parkman, CO.

“No playwright has created as amazing a pantheon of historical

lesbian characters as Carolyn Gage. Her book, Monologues
and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, provides a sumptuous feast of
possibilities for both seasoned and budding lesbian
performers to use portraying a full range of emotion and
political perspectives. Carolyn Gage is a national lesbian
treasure.” —Rosemary Keefe Curb, editor of Amazon All Stars: 13
Lesbian Plays.

“Her dozens of strong, funny, determined characters are a gift

to lesbian actors everywhere... She also has a wicked sense of
humor… ” —Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco.

“… remarkable strength and universality… moving and

courageous… the collection will appeal to a readership beyond
lesbian actors, because through careful research and
deliberation Gage has created many stories of women’s lives.
In her writing, she makes one face truths one might normally
try to avoid.” —Lambda Book Report, Washington, DC.

83
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

“Gage’s imagination and her richness of dialogue are a

wonderful offering to a theatre community that could certainly
use a push in the direction of representing us all on the stage.”
—On the Purple Circuit, Los Angeles.

“Strong contributions such as Gage’s should indeed help

alleviate the long-standing situation of lesbians having to learn
the craft of acting by impersonating heterosexuals…
recommended for libraries supporting drama programs
(schools as well as academic) and public libraries in towns and
cities with community theatre.” —Newsletter of the Theatre
Library Association, NYC.

“… a diversity of roles to stimulate the most adventurous

lesbian performer… this text enables the reader to see the
impressive range of her work as well as to supply a needed
sourcebook for auditions and scene work in one volume.” —
The Lesbian Review of Books, Hilo, HI.

My copy of Carolyn Gage’s Monologues and Scenes for

Lesbian Actors is dog-eared from frequent rereading and
lending it to my sister-poets. In this book, Gage has given
queer women theatre artists more than an array of sincere,
intense, and electrically wit-loaded scenes and monologues.
I’m thinking in particular of those from The Last Coming of
Joan of Arc, The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman, and Ugly
Ducklings. Gage showcases a historical pantheon of lesbian
movers, shakers, and culture-makers, announces a lesbian
playwriting and performance tradition, and locates herself and
her work in both. Gage shouts and sings a confirmation,
invitation, and challenge to the rest of us.” —R.L. Nesvet,
Playwright and Theatre Critic.

Finally! A book for lesbians who are tired of “passing” at auditions

and in acting classes and workshops! Here at last, from one of the
most talented and inventive contemporary playwrights, is a book of
thirty-two monologues and sixty scenes by, for, and about lesbians.
Here are dramatic portrayals of our coming-out stories, our
strategies of resistance, our rescue of survivors of sexual abuse, our
passions, our torture, our triumphs. The settings are historic and
contemporary, ranging from the goddess temples of Lesbos to the
locker rooms of a softball team.

84
 BOOKS

This collection includes scenes with characters taken from lesbian

history: Jane Addams, Charlotte Cushman, Joan of Arc, Calamity
Jane, Sappho, Babe Didrikson, Benedetta Carlini, Renée Vivien,
Natalie Barney, and Eva LeGallienne. It also includes women from
history whose sexual orientation may or may not have been
documented, but whose survival strategies resonate with strategies
of lesbians. These strategies include the separatism of Hildegard
von Bingen, the confrontation of sexual violation in the art of
Artemisia Gentileschi, the liberation struggle of Harriet Tubman, the
repression and denial of Louisa May Alcott, the resistance of Mary
Mallon (“Typhoid Mary”).

The book also includes material from plays protesting the sexual
colonizing of women through the institutions of heterosexism:
prostitution, surrogate motherhood, incest, rape, marriage, and the
“slow-motion violence” of economic and political
disenfranchisement. Two of the plays deal with the historic closeting
of teachers in the school system, and one play specifically confronts
the constrictive gender roles of the traditional canon.

Many of the scenes reflect contemporary lesbian culture with all of

our in-house conflicts and contradictions. These scenes take place
on the ball field of a women’s softball team, on a sound stage for a
lesbian erotic film company, in a cabin on a 1970’s-style lesbian
land collective, at the waterfront of a girls’ summer camp, on the
soundstage of a lesbian concert, in a lesbian nightclub, in the
bedroom.

THE SPINDLE AND OTHER LESBIAN FAIRY TALES

Illustrations by Sudie Rakusin

“Carolyn Gage has created a lasting feminist work in The

Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales, one that shatters
stereotypes, defies hetero-convention and will defy the years
as it becomes a classic in every feminist’s library.”—
Sacramento Arts and Entertainment Examiner.

"Carolyn Gage offers readers important insight and

representations in the powerful stories and imagery provided
in The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales. The collection
meets the challenge of creating lesbian fairy tales that look

85
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

unflinchingly at the world but are still imaginative, creative, and

magical. Readers will enjoy these stories in all their complexity
and bravery." Rain and Thunder, Northampton, MA.

A collection of four short stories and one full-length play about

lesbian princesses, woman-princes, goddesses, and fairy
godmothers! Magic, mystery, romance… with a radical politic!

BECCA AND THE WOMAN PRINCE

A European princess meets an African woman prince in this
romantic, multicultural, feminist fairy tale!
THE PRINCESS OF PAIN
A woman struggling with disability sets out on a ten-goddess
quest for answers.
THE FURIES
Three lesbian surper-heroines debate the wisdom of accepting
a young survivor into their league.
ANDREA AND MEDUSA GET INTIMATE
Two lesbian surper-heroines discover that some of the most
dangerous missions are the ones closest to home.
THE SPINDLE
In this “children's theatre for adults,” a young lesbian sets out to
rescue the princess from the curse of the spindle-pricking on
her sixteenth birthday, only to discover that the entire kingdom
is under the spindle spell!

LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW

Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy

• Published by Common Courage Press, Monroe, ME.

• Named top fifteen books for Feminist Theory study group, off
our backs, Washington, DC.

“I was more deeply moved and ‘sinspired’ by Carolyn Gage’s

new book than by anything else I’ve read in years. Like There’s
No Tomorrow has qualities rarely seen in current “theory.” It is
a work of burning, uncompromising vision and daring… a
beacon of hope in these chilling times of compromise, timidity
and apparent defeat. This book is Pure Fire. It is true and
therefore extreme… a stunning manifestation of Radical
Lesbian Feminist Courage and Genius.” —Mary Daly, Radical

86
 BOOKS

Feminist Philospher and author of Pure Lust, Gyn/Ecology, and

Outercourse.

“Many feminists are brilliant, but how many are wise?

Playwright Carolyn Gage is a radical lesbian feminist who is
wise, as this book demonstrates … uncompromising and
tough-minded, yet inspiring… ” —Carol Anne Douglas, off our
backs, Washington, DC.

“I've had a copy of the manuscript for less than a month, and it
is covered with underlined passages and post it notes. Already,
I find myself referring to it constantly, incorporating it into what
I need to know about the world.”—Elliot, Women’s Books Online.

“I am replete or content. I feel as if I have had a most satisfying

feast. I have been reading this book off and on for about two
weeks, and although I am a quick reader, this is a book to have
by your bedside or your favorite chair to think on as you read
passages as needed.” — Mary Atkins, Uppity Women Magazine.

Like There’s No Tomorrow takes no prisoners. This is a meditation

book that will clear your political sinuses and blow out the cobwebs
of fuzzy “live-and-let-live” thinking. These annotated quotations may
be read as a series of mini-lectures, as inspirational meditations, or
as a Cook’s tour of women’s history.

Hot role models! Sor Ines de la Cruz, Chrystos, Sappho,

Saadawi—and a host of unsung heroines!

Cool strategy! How to lay in for a siege, turn the tables, seize the
offensive.

Suspenseful stories! Donaldina Cameron’s daring rescue of

prostituted Asian girls, Fannie Lou Hamer’s courageous resistance
to police brutality, Lillian Hellman’s defiant stand at the McCarthy
hearings.

Words of wisdom Quotations urging women to hold a grudge,

cherish our anger, cultivate our rage, mind other people’s business,
and live Like There’s No Tomorrow!

These meditations are written with a light touch, but a deep politic.
For the woman who finds “one day at a time” a formula for despair—
finally a meditation book for those in search of radical healing.

87
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

THE GAIA PAPERS

In Search of a Science of Gaia

“I think Gage is onto something here by combining the process

of healing used by Mary Baker Eddy with her radical feminist
activism… The Gaia Papers has the potential to begin a
transformative conversation about spirituality, healing and
women…”—Dr. Deidre Michell, author of Christian Science:
Women, Healing, and the Church.

The Gaia Papers is a fifty-page tract that applies a lens of radical

feminist metaphysic to explore the age-old question of the nature of
evil.

Confronting the gendered nature of violence against women and

children and the patriarchal systems that promote this violence, The
Gaia Papers interrogate the place of “the goddess” in this dismal
cosmogony.

Following a line of metaphysical logic pioneered by Mary Baker

th
Eddy in the 19 century, The Gaia Papers invite the reader to draw
conclusions about the nature of gender based on a radically feminist
spirituality… conclusions that may defy the evidence of the material
senses.

Without falling into the trap of transcendental or enabling

philosophies, The Gaia Papers outline a mode of inquiry intended to
aid the reader in working with the metaphors in which they find
themselves.

13 PROPOSITIONS
FOR REWIRING THE LESBIAN BRAIN

“These 13 Propositions are my "keep it simple stupid" outline.

It is an invitation for me to seriously examine what hasn't been
working. It is the outline I need to begin to re-wire my brain. I
appreciate that they are proposals, not requirements… that the
change and healing is left to me. It is gift…”—V.E.

88
 BOOKS

A thirty-six page “electrician’s manual” for reprogramming key

concepts about intimate relationships.

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC AND OTHER PLAYS

[1994]

• National finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.

• Published by HerBooks, Santa Cruz, CA.

“… a whole women’s theatre tradition in one volume…

wonderful to read—rich, original deeply affirming—and must
be phenomenal to see on stage. The culture of women we have
never had is invented in Carolyn Gage’s brilliant and beautiful
plays.” —Andrea Dworkin, feminist philosopher, activist, author.

“… the toughest, most lesbian/feminist-identified work for

theatre I know… brilliant and daring scripts… ” —John
Stoltenberg, Former Executive Editor, On the Issues.

“Carolyn Gage is a fabulous feminist playwright, and a major

one too. This is great theatre. Gage’s dramatic and lesbian
imagination is utterly original… There is no rhetoric here: only
one swift and pleasurable intake of breath after another…
Women’s mental health would improve, instantly, were they
able to read and see these plays performed.” —Phyllis
Chesler, Author of Women and Madness

This collection of seven of Gage’s most popular one-acts was a

national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. The title work has
been the subject of a National Public Radio feature, and a first-class
production of the play ran for two years in Brazil. The other plays in
the collection include: Mason-Dixon, Jane Addams and the Devil
Baby, Louisa May Incest, Battered on Broadway, Calamity Jane
Sends a Message to Her Daughter, and Cookin’ with Typhoid Mary.

89
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL

• 2007-2010 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

• 2008 National Women’s Music Festival, Normal, IL
• We are 1 Festival in Durham, NC; Deer Creek House in
Roseburg,
OR; Michfest Fundraiser, Natick, MA; Lesbian All-Star Revue,
Portland, ME.
• Women in the Arts Festival, Lansing, MI.
• Curriculum, Women’s Studies course, Flinders Univ., Australia.

“The Lesbian Tent Revival—inspiring, encouraging, truth-

telling, amazing, comedic, must-reading for all Radical
Feminists. I never had so much fun as at the Tent Revivals at
Michigan, being in a crowd of like-minded, laughing, singing,
applauding and shouting-out with Sister Carolyn. She's pure
genius. Buy This Book. You won't be sorry.” —Susan
Wiseheart.

“… by far the best book I've read all year. It may even qualify as
the best feminist book I've read—ever… Each sermon led to
another unique discovery within myself—some sermons forced
me to think about subjects I had never wanted to address,
while other sermons expanded my views on topics I thought I
already knew enough about. Reading Sermons for a Lesbian
Tent Revival was a remarkable journey to undertake, as a
woman and as a reader, and I cannot recommend this book
highly enough. If you are a woman—heterosexual, bisexual or
lesbian—you must buy this book and discover Sister Carolyn's
Sermons for yourself. It's a journey you won't regret taking.
Blessed be!”—N.E. Francis, Sacramento Arts & Entertainment
Examiner.

“Sisters, I have seen the light and felt the spark. Sister
Carolyn's tent revivals have saved my soul from the hellfire of
obfuscation… Hallelujah!”—Amy McLoughlin, Ann Arbor, MI

“The LTR rocked my world! In August at the MWMF my Aussie

mates agreed that The LTR was our highlite and we left wanting
more—much more. Clearly our weary les fem souls needed
saving! Each morning Sister Carolyn delivered a riveting,

90
 BOOKS

inspiring and humourous sermon that made us sit up and

think, laugh, cry.”—Georgina Abrahams, Sydney, Australia

“Sisters! I have been SAVED!”—Callie

“I know that you brought back full circle what … is in danger of

being lost.”—Maria Karpinski

“In these sermons, Sister Carolyn gives voice to women's

experiences - the ones we feel in our gut every day, but don't
have words for. She paints vivid pictures with her words and
illuminates the world in a way that will never leave your mind…
Every woman will be moved by these sermons; every lesbian
will be transformed by them.”—Amy Lewis, Denver, CO

My sister sent me Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival. People

often have a way with words, or a way with ideas, but seldom
both. I read Gynecology, Native Tongue, Cyborg Manifesto etc.
but I can't say I was racked with laughter to balance the agony.
I read your book in one sitting, like a glutton. It was the best
read in years. You rock, Sister:)—Helena Saayaman, Pretoria,
South Africa.

For the first time in print! Thirteen sermons delivered by Sister

Carolyn of the Sacred Synapse at her notorious “Lesbian Tent
Revival.” Reviving the spirit of sisterhood from those heady days of
the early feminist movement, Sister Carolyn revives her flock in a
series of hilarious, radical, rabble-rousing sermons designed to heal
them of “S.I.N.”—the Synaptically Inadequate Networking that has
been imposed on us all by a pornographized, dumbed-down,
corporate, consumerist culture!

These thirteen sermons remind women to resist the disconnection

that, in the words of Sister Robin Morgan, has become
institutionalized by patriarchy. Sister Carolyn urges her congregation
to remember, to synapse, to make the connections between the
environmental crisis, and personal nutrition, and psychiatric health,
and medical misogyny, and social conditioning, and political
awareness. She inspires women to reach back into their own
histories and the histories of their foremothers for strategies that
reinforce connection and weave webs of alliances and support.

Sister Carolyn’s topics range from economics (“The Great Pyramid

Scheme”), to lesbian limerance (“The Real L-Words”), to the

91
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Einstein’s Unified Field theory.

She preaches on the impact of global father-son religions on the
well-being and mental health of women, on techniques that engage
the imagination to counter the effects of internalized oppression,
and on the clinical truth about the clitoris as a tip-of-the-iceberg
metaphor for women’s hidden power.

The Lesbian Tent Revival, held at national women’s festivals, has

been a rousing success, and the publication of these sermons
should help spread the spark of radical feminism across a world
sunk in darkness and disconnection.

SUPPLEMENTAL SERMONS FOR A LESBIAN TENT REVIVAL

A second volume of sermons from the fourth and fifth years of the
Lesbian Tent Revival, with a section in the back of song lyrics. This
volume includes “The LesbianTent Revival Marriage Ceremony” and
“The Lesbian Butch: Hope of the Planet.

BIRTH OF A LESBIAN
A Science Fiction Autobiography

The author has created a fantastic, nightmarish parable as a tool for

understanding the experiences of her childhood.

92
 ADAPTATIONS

A WOMAN’S BOOK OF HEALING

An adaption of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health

with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, for use by those
who are seeking a metaphysical system of healing with an
emphasis on right relation and connection with the natural world,
where a higher power is metaphorically referenced as female.

93
 CATALOG OF PLAYS BY CAROLYN GAGE

CD’S AND DVD’S

THE SECOND COMING OF JOAN OF ARC
[CD]
Audio recording of a live performance of Carolyn Gage in her
award-winning, feminist classic The Second Coming of Joan of Arc.
The recording was made in June Millington’s historic recording
studio in Bodega, California.

UGLY DUCKLINGS: THE DOCUMENTARY

[DVD]
Documentary film by Fawn Yacker, produced by Hardy Girls Healthy
Women of Waterville, Maine. The film contains excerpts from
Gage’s award-winning play Ugly Ducklings, as well as interviews
with Gage and members of the cast. The film is part of a campaign
to prevent LGBT youth suicides and homophobic bullying in the
schools.

94
CD’S AND DVD’S

95