Feminist Theatre Past and Present

Alisa Solomon is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the MA concentration in Arts & Culture. A longtime theater critic, political journalist, and dramaturg (most recently for Anna Deavere Smith’s “Notes from the Field”), Solomon is the author of “Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender” (winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review and winner of the Jewish Journal Book Prize, the George Freedley Memorial Award (Theatre Library Association), and the Kurt Weill Prize. As a staff writer at the Village Voice (1983-2004), she covered theater and such beats as U.S. immigration policy, Israel-Palestine, and women’s basketball. Solomon has also written for The Nation, The New Yorker, The Intercept, New York Times, American Theater, TDR, and elsewhere.

Carmelita Tropicana (she/her/hers), a persona created at the WOW Café Theatre, has been performing in New York’s downtown arts scene since the 1980s, straddling the worlds of performance art and theater with irreverent humor, subversive fantasy, and bilingual puns. Current works online include “Rad Women for Pandemic Times,” “100 Years/100 Women,” and “The Park Avenue Armory” (2020), as well as a sound podcast, “That’s Not What Happened,” a project of Soho Rep’s Project Number One. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and an Obie recipient in theater. Select awards also include Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships in playwriting and performance art.

Publications include “Memories of the Revolution: The First 10 Years of the Wow Café Theater,” (2015) edited with Holly Hughes, and “Jill Dolan and Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures” (2000).

Deb Margolin (she/her/hers) is a playwright, actor, and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. Margolin is the author of numerous plays, including “Imagining Madoff,” “Turquoise,” “Critical Mass,” and “Bringing the Fishermen Home,” as well as 11 solo performance plays which she has toured throughout the U.S. Her solo play, “8 STOPS,” a comedy concerning the grief of endless compassion, was produced by the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and ran at the Cherry Lane Theater. Margolin was honored with an OBIE award for Sustained Excellence of Performance, the Kesselring Prize for Playwriting, a Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright award, and the Richard H. Broadhead Prize for teaching excellence at Yale University, where she is Professor in the Practice in the undergraduate Theater and Performance Studies Program. She is working on a play commissioned by Keen Theater Company and is a proud alum of New Dramatists.

Dr. Jessica Del Vecchio (she/her/hers) is a feminist performance scholar. Her current book project, “Straddling Feminisms,” analyzes what she terms “post-wave pop feminism” in relation to experimental performance of the past decade. Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, and Modern Drama. Also a performer, she presented Songs of the Second Wave—her documentary theatre piece that explores feminist folk music of the 1970s—at venues across New York City. She is the Book Review Editor of Theatre Topics and is the former President of the Women and Theatre Program, part of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. 

Marga Gomez (she/her/they) is a teaching artist, actor, comedian, and writer/performer of 13 solo plays which have been presented nationally, internationally, and off Broadway. Selections from her work have been published in several anthologies, including “Extreme Exposure” (TCG Books), “HOWL” (Crown Press), “Out Loud & Laughing” (Anchor Books), “Contemporary Plays by American Women of Color” (Routledge), “When I Knew” (Harper-Collins), and “Out of Character” (Bantam Books.) They were born in New York City to entertainers in the Latino community.

At the start of the pandemic, Gomez pivoted to adapting and presenting her solo work for livestreaming. She has been featured in online theater festivals from New York to San Diego, as well as a five-week virtual run for Brava, SF, where they are an artist-in-residence. Gomez is a GLAAD Media Award winner and recipient of the 2020 CCI Investing in Artists grant. They teach solo performance for the virtual medium to online groups and individuals. In 2010, Gomez enjoyed a residency at Cornell, during which she presented her piece “Long Island Iced Latina.”

Moe Angelos (she/her) is a theatre artist and writer. She’s one of the OBIE-winning Five Lesbian Brothers and has been a member of the WOW Café Theatre since 1981. She works with The Builders Association, making media-infused performances that have toured all over the parts of the universe that are accessible to non-billionaires. Angelos has collaborated with many downtown NYC luminaries, including Lisa Kron, Jess Dobkin, Anne Bogart, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Carmelita Tropicana, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle, New Georges, and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She has been a mentor in Queer/Art/Mentorship, and her work has been presented in Toronto at FADO Centre for Performance Art and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Angelos is currently at work developing an online/live piece with The Builders about clickworkers called “I Agree to the Terms.” During COVID-19, she’s appeared on Zoom, Twitch, and Streamyard.

Sara Warner (she/her/they/them) is Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University and director of Cornell’s LGBT Studies Program. Warner also is an affiliate faculty member in Cornell’s Feminist, Gender, and Sexual Studies, American Studies, Africana Studies, and Visual Studies programs. They study the art of activism, paying particular attention to the role joy, laughter, and pleasure play in creating and sustaining social change. Warner’s work takes many forms, from academic tomes and mainstream journalism to community-based plays and the staging of “patriot acts” — political performances on national holidays. Their first book, “Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure,” received the Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theater in Higher Education and an Honorable Mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research, and was named a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Sue Perlgut (she/her/hers) is an award-winning documentarian and co-founder of the It’s All Right To Be Woman Theatre, an all-women theatre troupe collective telling stories from their lives. Perlgut also founded The Senior Troupe of Lifelong in Ithaca, NY, where she is director/writer and sometime performer. In 2007, she formed CloseToHome Productions to reach a wide-ranging audience with documentaries, videos, and multimedia films featuring topical and socially relevant issues ranging from retirement, to hospice, to abortion rights and women’s wisdom. Perlgut also creates short videos for artists, social justice causes, and politicians. Her most recent film is “It’s All Right To Be Woman Theatre: A Documentary,” available to stream on demand via Vimeo.