Feminist Theatre Past and Present

Aladrian C. Wetzel (she/her/hers) is a Baltimore-born actress, playwright, producer, and director. She received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware and an M.S. in Management from the University of Maryland Global Campus. Wetzel serves as the Executive Director of Two Strikes Theatre Collective, Membership Director with Fells Point Corner Theatre, and an associate member of the hip-hop Shakespeare company Fools and Madmen. She has several upcoming productions in fall 2021, including her adaptation of the 1916 anti-lynching play “Rachel” by Angelina Weld Grimke (Rapid Lemon Productions), an original piece “Invisible Remembrance” for the Truepenny Projects playwright festival IMmortal, and production-managing the TSTC annual play festival “Brown Sugar Bake-Off.” In whatever role she serves, Wetzel has been a champion of Baltimore small theatre for over a decade. She is a lazy engineer and an anti-theatre theatre person.

Brooke O’Harra (she/her) is a professional theater director and an artist. She was co-founder of the NYC-based company Theater of a Two-headed Calf and its queer wing, the Dyke Division. O’Harra developed and directed all 14 of Two-Headed Calf’s productions, including the OBIE Award-winning “Drum of the Waves of Horikawa,” “Trifles,” and the opera project “You, My Mother.” The Dyke Division was created as an independent wing of Two-Headed Calf in 2008 with Brooke O’Harra, Jess Barbagallo, Laryssa Husiak, and Laura Berlin-Stinger, and later Sacha Yanow and Barbara Lanciers, to develop “Room for Cream,” a live lesbian serial that ran for three seasons from 2008-10 and returned for a fourth season in 2017 at The New Museum.

Haruna Lee (they/them) is a nonbinary Taiwanese/Japanese/American theater maker, screenwriter, educator, and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. Recent plays include “Suicide Forest,” published by 53rd State Press (Ma-Yi Theater Company; The Bushwick Starr); “plural (love)” (Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab; New Georges); and “Memory Retrograde” (UTR; Ars Nova; BAX). Lee is a recipient of an Obie Award for Playwriting and Conception of “Suicide Forest,” the Ollie New Play Award, FCA Grants to Artists Award, Mohr Visiting Artist Fellowship at Stanford University, MacDowell Fellowship, the Map Fund Grant, and Lotos Foundation Prize for Directing. They were a member of the 2019 artEquity cohort and a co-founder and lead facilitator for the Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck. Lee writes for HBO Max’s “The Flight Attendant” and co-directs the Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting Program.

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. 

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.

Tina Satter (she/her) is a writer, director, and Artistic Director of the Obie-winning theatre company Half Straddle, founded in 2008. She is a recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award and a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award. Satter has written and directed 10 full-length shows with Half Straddle that have premiered in New York City, with a number going on to be performed at theatres and festivals in Europe, Japan, and other U.S. cities. In October 2019, the critically acclaimed “Is This A Room,” a show conceived of and directed by Satter, was the company’s Off-Broadway debut at the Vineyard Theatre. The production transferred to Broadway this fall. Satter attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her first collection of plays, “Seagull (Thinking of You),” was published by 53rd State Press in 2014.