Moe (Maureen) Angelos is an American theater artist, playwright, and performer known for her innovative work in theater and her contributions to collaborative performance art. She is a member of the Obie Award-winning theatre company The Builders Association and a co-founder of the Obie Award-winning company, The Five Lesbian Brothers.
Angelos began her theater career in the early 1980s, joining the WOW Café Theatre in 1981. WOW Café is a feminist theater collective in New York City known for fostering avant-garde and experimental performances. Angelos continues to be an active member of the WOW community.
In 1988, Angelos co-founded The Five Lesbian Brothers, the Obie Award winning theater company that created works exploring feminist and queer themes. The group has written and performed six plays, including The Secretaries, Oedipus at Palm Springs, and Brave Smiles... Another Lesbian Tragedy, two of which were staged at the New York Theatre Workshop. Their innovative approach to storytelling earned them an Obie Award for their significant contributions to theater. [1] The Brothers members include Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, and Lisa Kron. In 1997 they published the book, The Five Lesbian Brothers’ Guide to Life: A Collection of Helpful Hints and Fabricated Facts for Today’s Gay Girl with Simon & Schuster. [2]
Angelos has been a core member of The Builders Association, a New York-based theater company, since 2000. Known for integrating media and technology into live performance, Angelos has contributed as both a writer and performer to many of the Builders' critically acclaimed productions, including Sontag: Reborn for which she wrote and performed a theatrical adaptation of Susan Sontag’s early journals to trace Sontag’s private life from the age of 14 to her emergence as a world-renowned author and activist; and Elements of Oz, a mashup of performance, tech and pop culture that moves through through the landscapes of Oz from the surreal novel, to dark conspiracy theories, to the making of the iconic film, in which she plays the equally iconic Glinda. Angelos' work with The Builders Association company has been praised for its innovative storytelling and has toured internationally, bringing multimedia-infused theater to audiences around the world. [3]
Moe Angelos continues to expand her artistic collaborations with diverse creators and mediums. She has worked with Toronto-based FADO Performance Art Centre, creating Book Club performances in 2019, blending literature and live art. In 2019 she presented "This Used to Be Gay!" The Moe Angelos East Village Walking Tour at Queer|Art that offers live memoir of the "gay-borhood's" many changes over the years. Collaborating with Canadian visual artist Hazel Meyer, Angelos performed in projects such Weeping Concrete (2022) and The Marble in the Basement. In a collaboration with Rachel Hauck, she co-created Guzzle 'n' Puzzle at the 2023 Rhubarb Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, an interactive lounge inviting audiences into an experience with multi-disciplinary artist Melissa Levin's infamous puzzle collection. In film, Angelos stars in Landfill (2024) portraying Alice, an elder butch dyke navigating terminal illness and legacy. Written and directed by Jess Lee, Landfill is based on Anna Leventhal's short story, Sweet Affliction. These works highlight Angelos' versatility and commitment to innovative, cross-disciplinary, collaborative art.
The Five Lesbian Brothers The Builders Association Wow Café Theater
Camp is an aesthetic and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ culture and especially gay men. Camp aesthetics disrupt modernist understandings of high art by inverting traditional aesthetic judgements of beauty, value, and taste, and inviting a different kind of aesthetic engagement.
Well is a play by Lisa Kron. It concerns relationships between mothers and daughters and "wellness", among other themes. It ran Off-Broadway in 2004 and then on Broadway in 2006.
Holly Hughes is an American lesbian performance artist.
Dixon Place is a theater organization in New York City dedicated to the development of works-in-progress from a broad range of performers and artists. It exists to serve the creative needs of artists—emerging, mid-career and established—who are creating new work in theater, dance, music, literature, puppetry, performance, variety and visual arts.
María Irene Fornés was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Her plays range widely in subject matter, but often depict characters with aspirations that belie their disadvantages. Fornés, who went by the name "Irene", received nine Obie Theatre Awards in various categories and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for 1990.
Elizabeth S. "Lisa" Kron is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the lyrics and book for 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.
Ana María Simo is a New York playwright, essayist and novelist. Born in Cuba, educated in France, and writing in English, she has collaborated with such experimental artists as composer Zeena Parkins, choreographer Stephanie Skura and filmmakers Ela Troyano and Abigail Child.
Sydney Ellen Lucas is an American actress with credits in musical theatre, film and television. She is best known for her portrayal of Small Alison Bechdel in both the original Off-Broadway and Broadway productions of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori's musical Fun Home; she won an Obie Award and Theater World Award and received nominations for a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance. She most recently starred in the main cast of AMC's western drama television series The Son as Jeannie McCullough.
Alina Troyano, more commonly known as Carmelita Tropicana, is a Cuban-American stage and film lesbian actress who lives and works in New York City.
Sharon Bridgforth is an American writer working in theater.
Fun Home is a musical theatre adaptation of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, with music by Jeanine Tesori, and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. The story concerns Bechdel's discovery of her own lesbian sexuality, her relationship with her closeted gay father, and her attempts to unlock the mysteries surrounding his life. It is told in a series of non-linear vignettes connected by narration provided by the adult Alison character.
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 American 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.
Peggy Shaw is an American 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.
Marianne Weems is the artistic director of the New York-based Obie Award-winning performance and media company, The Builders Association, https://thebuildersassociation.org/ founded in 1994. She is a director of theater and opera and a professor at UC Santa Cruz.
Leigh Silverman is an American director for the stage, both off-Broadway and on Broadway. She was nominated for the 2014 and 2024 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for the musicals Violet and Suffs, and the 2008 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for the play From Up Here.
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, Johnny Science, and The Five Lesbian Brothers.
The Five Lesbian Brothers is an American theater company that focuses on plays and literature on lesbian and feminist topics. Their work has been produced and performed in several cities in the United States, and they have been recognized with several industry awards. Reviewers have described their performance style as being "loosely structured" and "outrageous", more focused on the expression of ideas and themes than on theatrical conventions of the time and genre. Their works are created collaboratively by the troupe, made up of Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron.
Hot Peaches was a gay, political, NYC]] theatre company in New York City that would put on plays, active from the 1970s-1990s. Hot Peaches was founded by Jimmy Camicia in 1972, who encountered a group of drag queens and began writing work for them to perform. Their work has been described as "political camp, dominated by drag".
Madeleine Olnek is an American independent film director, producer, screenwriter, and playwright. She has written 24 plays and three feature films, including Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, The Foxy Merkins, and Wild Nights with Emily. Her feature films have been described as "madcap comedies with absurdist leanings" and are all centered around LGBT characters.