American actor, writer and director
Carolyn Gage (born 1952) 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.
Early life.
Gage earned a master's degree in theater arts from Portland State University.
Career.
Gage's best known work is "The Second Coming of Joan of Arc", a one-woman play about the historical figure Joan of Arc. It has been translated into Portuguese, French, Italian, Bulgarian, and Mandarin and achieved first-class production in Brazil, starring Christiane Torloni. The script was published in "The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays", an anthology of Gage's historical plays. The anthology was named the national winner of the 2008 Lambda Literary Award in Drama.
Other notable work includes "Ugly Ducklings", which 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. "Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist" was presented at Actors Theatre of Louisville 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".
In addition to creative works, Gage has published a manual on lesbian theater production, "Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play", which was published by Scarecrow Press. Gage also wrote "Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors".
The author of numerous feminist essays, Gage was named contributing editor to the national feminist quarterly "On The Issues" and has published in the journals "Trivia", "Sinister Wisdom", "Lesbian Ethics", and "off our backs", as well as "The Lesbian Review of Books", "The Gay and Lesbian Review", and "Lambda Book Report". Other publications include "The Michigan Quarterly Review" and "Dramatists Guild Quarterly".
Gage served as a guest lecturer at Bates College from 1998 to 1999.
The University of Oregon archive acquired her personal papers in 2004.
In December 2014, Gage was awarded the first Lifetime Achievement Award given by Venus Theatre, founded by Deborah Randall in Laurel, Maryland. During the ceremony also celebrating the theatre's 50th production, she revived the memories of actresses, playwrights and directors Eva Le Gallienne, Henrietta Vinton Davis and Minnie Maddern Fiske who faced tremendous opposition to their work from the cultural establishment of their time. The American activist and playwright John Stoltenberg, lifelong companion of radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, said about Gage's acceptance speech: ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Her acceptance speech, which she spoke off-the-cuff from notes, had a profound effect on the audience, because in it she described real and raw truths about what it means to work in theater as a woman.In 2018, Gage was interviewed for an investigation about how invisible disabilities tend to be hidden by creative professionals in the American show business in order not to experience discrimination, having herself concealed for years her myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome, she had had since 1988.
References.
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