Deb Margolin | |
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Occupation | Performance artist and playwright |
Nationality | American |
Website | |
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Deb Margolin is an American performance artist and playwright. She came to prominence in the 1980s in the feminist political theatre troupe Split Britches, which she co-founded with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. [1] Margolin has since created a string of one-woman shows. A compilation of her texts, Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO, was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press. Literary theorist Lynda Hart edited and wrote a commentary on each piece. [2]
Margolin was the recipient of a 1999-2000 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance. In 2005, Margolin won the Joseph Kesselring Prize for her play, Three Seconds in the Key, a multi-character play which reflected her own experiences with Hodgkin's Disease.
She currently teaches playwrighting and performance as an associate professor at Yale University. Her work includes O Yes I Will, a detailed account of her experiences and insights on being under general anaesthesia.
Margolin was forced to revise her 2010 play Imagining Madoff after legal threats from Elie Wiesel, who is one of Bernard Madoff's victims and had called Madoff a "scoundrel" but had refused to allow a character representing him and using his name to be used in the play. [3]
In the 1990s, Margolin participated in the Zale-Kimmerling Writer in Residence program at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. She later donated a large quantity of her personal materials such as journals, manuscripts, newspaper articles, flyers, ephemera, poetry, and correspondence to the Newcomb Archives at Tulane in August, 2018, forming the Deb Margolin Collection which spanned from the years of 1970 to 2016. In the spring of 2020, an exhibit was later shown at Tulane University entitled "Deb Margolin's Performance Composition: Writing and Embodying" which focused on Margolin's process of performance composition by displaying her notes and writing (both handwritten and typed) from her time as a university professor, actor, and playwright. [4]
Tristan Taormino is an American feminist author, columnist, sex educator, activist, editor, speaker, radio host, and pornographic film director. She is most recently known for her book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, which is often recommended as a starter guide to polyamory and non-monogamy.
Lady Macbeth is a leading character in William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. As the wife of the play's tragic hero, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes queen of Scotland. Some regard her as becoming more powerful than Macbeth when she does this, because she is able to manipulate him into doing what she wants. After Macbeth becomes a murderous tyrant, she is driven to madness by guilt over their crimes and kills herself offstage.
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena, which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Carolyn Gage is an American playwright, actor, theatrical director and author. She has written nine books on lesbian theater and sixty-five plays, musicals, and one-woman shows. A lesbian feminist, her work emphasizes non-traditional roles for women and lesbian characters.
Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the Theatre Department in the School of Theater Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Meryl F. Vladimer (1951-2022) was an artist, theatrical producer and political activist.
Tee A. Corinne was an American photographer, author, and editor notable for the portrayal of sexuality in her artwork. According to Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia, "Corinne is one of the most visible and accessible lesbian artists in the world."
Elizabeth S. "Lisa" Kron is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the lyrics and book to the musical Fun Home for which she won both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Fun Home was also awarded the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015 and the 2014 Obie Award for writing for musical theater.
Imagining Madoff is a 2010 play by playwright Deb Margolin that tells the story of an imagined encounter between Bernard Madoff, the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and his victims. Margolin had originally planned to use Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as a character representing a victim, but was obliged by legal threats to substitute a fictional character, whom she named Solomon Galkin.
Maria Teresa Dizzia is an American actress. Dizzia was nominated for the 2010 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in In the Next Room .
Feminist views on BDSM vary widely from acceptance to rejection. BDSM refers to bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and Sado-Masochism. In order to evaluate its perception, two polarizing frameworks are compared. Some feminists, such as Gayle Rubin and Patrick Califia, perceive BDSM as a valid form of expression of female sexuality, while other feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Susan Griffin, have stated that they regard BDSM as a form of woman-hating violence. Some lesbian feminists practice BDSM and regard it as part of their sexual identity.
Split Britches is an American performance troupe, which has been producing work internationally since 1980. Academic Sue Ellen Case says "their work has defined the issues and terms of academic writing on lesbian theater, butch-femme role playing, feminist mimesis, and the spectacle of desire". In New York City Split Britches have long standing relationships with La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, where they are a resident company, Wow Café, which Weaver and Shaw co-founded, and Dixon Place.
Lois Weaver is a Guggenheim-winning artist, activist, writer, director, and Professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Engaging Science. Her work centers on feminism, human rights and possibilities for public participation. Active for over four decades she is the founding member of significant New York theatre companies Spiderwoman Theater (1975), Split Britches (1980) and WOW (1980). Weaver came to London to take on the role of artistic director for Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company in 1992. She lives in New York and London.
Peggy Shaw is an actor, writer, and producer living in New York City. She is a founding member of the Split Britches and WOW Cafe Theatre, and is a recipient of several Obie Awards, including two for Best Actress for her performances in Dress Suits to Hire in 1988 and Menopausal Gentleman in 1999.
She Must Be Seeing Things is a 1987 lesbian feminist film directed by Sheila McLaughlin and starring Lois Weaver and Sheila Dabney. It was the film debut of both Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. It was controversial when first released.
Spiderwoman Theater is an Indigenous women's performance troupe that blends traditional art forms with Western theater. Named after Spider Grandmother from Hopi mythology, it is the longest running Indigenous theatre company in the United States.
WOW Café Theater is a feminist theater space and collective in East Village in New York City. In the mid-1980s, WOW Cafe Theater was central to the avant garde theatre and performance art scene in the East Village, New York City. Among the artists who have presented at the space are Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Patricia Ione LLoyd, Lisa Kron, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, Dancenoise, Carmelita Tropicana, Eileen Myles, Split Britches, Seren Divine, and The Five Lesbian Brothers.
Dress Suits to Hire is a play written by Holly Hughes and originally performed by the Lesbian and Feminist performance group, Split Britches. It premiered in 1987 at Performance Space 122 in Manhattan's East Village. The play is essentially a lesbian love story told in the overheated style of film noir, also drawing upon images from pulp fiction; The show has been revived several times since its premiere, with the original cast of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver (Michigan) reprising their roles. The show won OBIE Awards for both Shaw and Hughes.
Muriel Miguel is a Native American director, choreographer, playwright, actor and educator. She is of Kuna and Rappahannock ancestry and was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1976, Miguel founded the Spiderwoman Theater with her sisters, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo. The Spiderwoman Theater was the first Native American women's theater troupe to gain international recognition, and remains the longest continuous running Native American female performance group. Miguel has directed nearly all of the Spiderwoman Theater's shows since their debut in 1976, and currently serves as its artistic director.