Carolyn Gage
Encyclopedia
Carolyn Gage is an American
playwright
, actor and theatrical director. She is also an activist on lesbian
and feminist issues. Gage was a Guest Lecturer at Bates College
in 1998-99. The author of five books on lesbian theatre and fifty plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history. The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (Outskirts Press, 2008) was named the national winner of the 2008 Lambda Literary Award
in Drama.
Gage tours internationally in her one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, a play which has been featured on National Public Radio. In 2008, her collection of one-acts, Nine Short Plays was published, along with a collection of her historical plays, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays. In 2009, she premiered her new musical, Babe: An Olympic Musical in Phoenix
and also workshopped it in Minneapolis.
Gage's play, Ugly Ducklings, was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for the prestigious ATCA/ Steinberg New Play Award, an award with given annually for the best new play produced outside New York. It won a 2004 Lesbian Theatre Award from Curve
magazine, and a $150,000 documentary on the play premiered in 2005 at the Frameline International Film Festival
in San Francisco. In 2004, The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women was named national finalist for the Jane Chambers Award given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
in the Juneteenth
Festival of African American plays. It was a national winner of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, and is included in Random House's anthology Under 30: Plays for a New Generation. Gage's musical, The Amazon All-Stars is the first lesbian
full book musical ever published by a mainstream play publisher. Published by Applause Books, it is the title work of an anthology of lesbian plays that was a national finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
. Her manual on lesbian theatre production, Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play, was published by Scarecrow Press. Gage also wrote Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, the first collection of its kind in the world. The University of Oregon
has acquired her personal papers for their Special Collections Archive.
Gage's work has been endorsed by Andrea Dworkin
, Mary Daly
, Phyllis Chesler
, Diana E.H. Russell, Jewelle Gomez
and John Stoltenberg
. Gage was named contributing editor to the national feminist quarterly On The Issues. Gage has also been published in the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, Trivia, Sinister Wisdom
, Lesbian Ethics, The Lesbian Review of Books, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review and Lambda Book Report. Gage has written the first meditation book for feminist activists, Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
, actor and theatrical director. She is also an activist on lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
and feminist issues. Gage was a Guest Lecturer at Bates College
Bates College
Bates College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college located in Lewiston, Maine, in the United States. and was most recently ranked 21st in the nation in the 2011 US News Best Liberal Arts Colleges rankings. The college was founded in 1855 by abolitionists...
in 1998-99. The author of five books on lesbian theatre and fifty plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history. The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (Outskirts Press, 2008) was named the national winner of the 2008 Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...
in Drama.
Gage tours internationally in her one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, a play which has been featured on National Public Radio. In 2008, her collection of one-acts, Nine Short Plays was published, along with a collection of her historical plays, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays. In 2009, she premiered her new musical, Babe: An Olympic Musical in Phoenix
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
and also workshopped it in Minneapolis.
Gage's play, Ugly Ducklings, was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for the prestigious ATCA/ Steinberg New Play Award, an award with given annually for the best new play produced outside New York. It won a 2004 Lesbian Theatre Award from Curve
Curve (magazine)
Curve is a lesbian magazine in the United States. It covers news, politics, social issues, and includes celebrity interviews and stories on entertainment, pop culture, style, travel, and a website that hosts an internet forum focusing on lesbian issues, active since 2000.The magazine was first...
magazine, and a $150,000 documentary on the play premiered in 2005 at the Frameline International Film Festival
Frameline Film Festival
Frameline is a nonprofit media arts organization that produces the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the oldest film festival devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programming currently in existence...
in San Francisco. In 2004, The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women was named national finalist for the Jane Chambers Award given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Works
Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist, was presented at Actors Theatre of LouisvilleActors Theatre of Louisville
Actors Theatre of Louisville is a performing arts theater located in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. It was founded in 1964 by Louisville native Ewel Cornett, local producer Richard Block and actor Ken Jenkins of Scrubs fame, and was designated the "State Theater of Kentucky" in 1974. It is run as a...
in the Juneteenth
Juneteenth
Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is a holiday in the United States honoring African American heritage by commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. State of Texas in 1865...
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
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
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
Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...
. Her manual on lesbian theatre production, Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play, was published by Scarecrow Press. Gage also wrote Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors, the first collection of its kind in the world. The University of Oregon
University of Oregon
-Colleges and schools:The University of Oregon is organized into eight schools and colleges—six professional schools and colleges, an Arts and Sciences College and an Honors College.- School of Architecture and Allied Arts :...
has acquired her personal papers for their Special Collections Archive.
Gage's work has been endorsed by Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....
, Mary Daly
Mary Daly
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution, for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male...
, Phyllis Chesler
Phyllis Chesler
Phyllis Chesler is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island...
, Diana E.H. Russell, Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez is an American author, poet, critic and playwright. She lived and worked in New York City for twenty-two years working in public television, theatre as well as philanthropy before relocating to the West Coast...
and John Stoltenberg
John Stoltenberg
John Stoltenberg is an American radical feminist activist, scholar, author, and magazine editor. He is the managing editor of AARP The Magazine, a bimonthly publication of the United States-based advocacy group AARP , a position he has held since 2004.Stoltenberg was life partner to Andrea Dworkin...
. Gage was named contributing editor to the national feminist quarterly On The Issues. Gage has also been published in the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, Trivia, Sinister Wisdom
Sinister Wisdom
Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural, lesbian literary & art journal by and for lesbians. The magazine is the oldest surviving lesbian literary journal; now more than 30 years in print...
, Lesbian Ethics, The Lesbian Review of Books, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review and Lambda Book Report. Gage has written the first meditation book for feminist activists, Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy.
Books
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (2008), a collection of Gage's historical plays that was the national winner of the 2008 Lambda Literary AwardLambda Literary AwardLambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...
in Drama. - Nine Short Plays, a collection of nine of Gage's best short plays.
- The Spindle and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales, a collection of four short stories and one full-length play.
- Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play, a manual on lesbianLesbianLesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
theatre production. - Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival, thirteen sermons on evangelical radical feminismRadical feminismRadical feminism is a current theoretical perspective within feminism that focuses on the theory of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on an assumption that "male supremacy" oppresses women...
. - Supplemental Sermons for A Lesbian Tent Revival
- Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors: Revised and Expanded (2009)
- Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy, a book of meditations on feminist activism.
- Black Eye and Other Short Plays
- Three Comedies
- The Triple Goddess: Three Plays
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays (Herbooks, Inc. 1994)
- The Gaia Papers: In Search of a Science of Gaia
Plays
- Second Coming of Joan of Arc, a one-woman show in which Joan of ArcJoan of ArcSaint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...
speaks to contemporary audiences, - Ugly Ducklings, about blossoming lesbian love and homophobiaHomophobiaHomophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
at a girls' summer camp, - The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women, an audience participation courtroom drama presenting the trial of five women who betrayed the Anastasia RomanovGrand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of RussiaGrand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia, and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna....
of RussiaRussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, - Thanatron, a dysfunctional familyDysfunctional familyA dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
comedy - The Amazon All-Stars is a musical, the first lesbian full-book musical published by a mainstream publisher
- The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Gold-diggers of 2008 (One-act play)
- The Amazon All-stars (Musical)
- Amy Lowell: in Her Own Words (One-woman show)
- The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women (Full-length play)
- Artemisia and Hildegarde (One-act play)
- Babe:An Olympian Musical (Musical)
- Battered on Broadway (One-act play)
- Bite My Thumb (One-act play)
- Blackeye (10-minute play)
- The Boundary Trial of John Proctor (One-act play)
- Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (One-act play)
- Coming About (Full-length play)
- Cookin' with Typhoid Mary (One-act play)
- The Countess and the Lesbians (One-act play)
- The Drum Lesson (One-act play)
- Entr'acte (One-act play)
- Esther and Vashti (Full-length play)
- The Evil That Men Do: the Story of Thalidomide (One-act play)
- Extravagant Love: the Life of Violette LeDuc (One-woman show)
- The Goddess Tour (Full-length play)
- Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist (One-act play)
- Heterosexuals Anonymous (One-act play)
- Jane Addams and the Devil Baby (One-act play)
- A Labor Play (One-act play)
- The Ladies' Room (Five-minute play)
- The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman (One-woman show)
- Leading Ladies (Musical)
- Louisa May Incest (One-act play)
- Mason-dixon (One-act play)
- The Obligatory Scene (One-act play)
- The Parmachene Belle (One-act play)
- Patricide (One-act play)
- The P.E. Teacher (One-act play)
- The Pele Chant (One-act play)
- The Poorly-Written Play Festival (One-act play)
- Radicals (One-act play)
- The Rules of the Playground (One-act play)
- Sappho in Love (Full-length play)
- The Second Coming of Joan of Arc (One-woman show)
- Souvenirs of Eden (One-act play)
- The Spindle (Full-length play)
- Stigmata (Full-length play)
- Thanatron (Full-length play)
- Ugly Ducklings (Full-length play)
- Women on the Land (Musical)
Awards
- 2009 Residency, Wurlitzer Foundation, Taos, New MexicoTaos, New MexicoTaos is a town in Taos County in the north-central region of New Mexico, incorporated in 1934. As of the 2000 census, its population was 4,700. Other nearby communities include Ranchos de Taos, Cañon, Taos Canyon, Ranchitos, and El Prado. The town is close to Taos Pueblo, the Native American...
- 2009 National Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays
- Janine C. Rae Cultural Award for the Advancement of Women's Culture (2002)
- National Finalist, Lambda Literary Award in Drama, for The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Other Plays
- Winner, Maine Playwrights Award, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, for The Poorly-Written Play Festival (2007)
- Nominee, Michael MacLiammor Award (Best Female Performer), Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival (2007)
- Nominee, American Theatre Critics Association's annual ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award, for Ugly Ducklings
- Winner, Curve Magazine's National Lesbian Theatre Award, for Ugly Ducklings
- National Finalist, Association for Theatre in Higher Education Jane Chambers Award, for The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women
- National winner, Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, for Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist
- Lynda Hart Memorial Grant, Astraea Lesbian Justice Foundation (2005)
- Thanatron named among "Best Productions of 2003" by the Portland Phoenix in Portland, MainePortland, MainePortland is the largest city in Maine and is the county seat of Cumberland County. The 2010 city population was 66,194, growing 3 percent since the census of 2000...
- Finalist, Maine Playwrights Award for Parmachene Belle (2003)
- National winner, $3000 Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Grant for best play, The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
- Acquisition of personal papers for University of OregonUniversity of Oregon-Colleges and schools:The University of Oregon is organized into eight schools and colleges—six professional schools and colleges, an Arts and Sciences College and an Honors College.- School of Architecture and Allied Arts :...
Special Collections Archive - Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts for The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
- Walden Writer's Fellowship from Lewis & Clark CollegeLewis & Clark CollegeLewis & Clark College is a private institution of higher learning located in Portland, Oregon. Made up of an undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences, a School of Law, and a Graduate School of Education and Counseling. Lewis & Clark is a member of the Annapolis Group of colleges with athletic...
- Oregon Literary Fellowship writer's grant from Oregon Institute of Literary Arts
- Oregon Arts CommissionOregon Arts CommissionThe Oregon Arts Commission is a governor-appointed body of nine commissioners who allocate grants for artists based in the U.S. state of Oregon. It receives the bulk of its funding through the National Endowment for the Arts, the state, and the Oregon Cultural Trust.-History:Established in 1967,...
Individual Artist Grant - National Winner, Nancy Dean Distinguished Playwriting Award
- Eleanor Humes Haney Fund Grant
- New York Open Meadows Foundation Grant
- Maine Arts Commission, Good Idea Grant
- Winner Best Stageplay, Moondance International Film FestivalMoondance International Film FestivalThe Moondance International Film Festival is an independent annual film festival and awards competition that takes place in the fall in Boulder, Colorado...
, Boulder, ColoradoBoulder, ColoradoBoulder is the county seat and most populous city of Boulder County and the 11th most populous city in the U.S. state of Colorado. Boulder is located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of...
, for Sappho in Love - National semi-finalist for the Eileen Heckart Senior Drama Competition, Ohio State UniversityOhio State UniversityThe Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...
, for The Pele Chant - National finalist, George P. Kernodle One-Act Play Competition, University of ArkansasUniversity of ArkansasThe University of Arkansas is a public, co-educational, land-grant, space-grant, research university. It is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a research university with very high research activity. It is the flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System and is located in...
, Poorly-Written Play Festival - National finalist, John Gassner New Play Festival, Stony Brook University (NY) for The Spindle
- National semi-finalist, Association for Theatre in Higher Education One-Act Play Competition for The Pele Chant