Originally published in off our backs: the feminist newsjournal, vol.xxxii, no.1&2, Jan-Feb. 2002, Washington, DC.

Interview with Carolyn Gage By Patricia Cramer PC: How does your publicly identifying yourself as a lesbian and radical feminist direct your work and, as importantly, your life? GAGe: It gives me a center, and it's accurate. It identifies me as aplaywright/performer who defines her own reality and who places herself at the center of her experience. It says, This is my context Deal with it! And, yes, that's an aggressive stance and, yes, I am oppressed for adopting it, but and hear this, because it's critical to my keeping goingit renders my oppression intelligible. Because I own the context of my work, the oppression I face is less insidious, less confusing, less crazy-making than it would be if I was attempting to pass the work off as assimilationist. It also eliminates a certain level of professional sadism to say at the outset, I don't really give a shit what your world thinks about this. In fact, that's my point. When you do that, really, all they can do is ignore you. And, of course, they do. Which is fine with me, because they're outside the context anyway. Right? But this is not to say that I don't care, and care passionately, about the conditions for women in mainstream theatre, because I do. Mainstream theatre is brutally excluding of the very women who have the most important statements to make with our presence and through narratives of our experiences. But fat women, lesbians and especially butch lesbians, women of color, survivors for whom any form of exhibitionism is
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anathema, old and older women (meaning over 35), girls unwilling to be fetishized as live dolls or human pets these are all folks who will have a hard time finding work with dignity or integrity in theatre. This is one of the reasons why I wrote my book Monologues and Scenes for Lesbian Actors. My index includes categories for fat women, women of color, survivors, butch women, poverty-class women .... as a response to this traditional exclusion. But we have to create our own context first. Otherwise even our most creative efforts will be subverted and used against us. I know. I just had that experience in Brazil with my play about Joan of Arc. PC: You are probably best known for your play The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and many women have responded enthusiastically to your version of Joan as a butch and survivor of male violence. How is your version of Joan different from those of male playwrights and filmmakers? Many women view Joan as a role model--was that your intention? GAGE: My Joan is a teenaged, runaway, lesbian, butch, survivor with eating disorders and other symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And there is ample evidence in the historical record to support my interpretation. If it were not for the complete censorship of authentic lesbian archetypes in the culture, there would be more recognition of this. My Joan is coming back from the dead, recruiting women to our own liberation and redeeming our collective and historic pain. It could be called Up From the Stake. Other versions of Joan just rehearse the horror and reinforce the fear. This explains the enduring appeal of The Second Coming for women. We are making our come back from the witch-burnings.

Joan, like many young survivors, has an analysis of her enemies that has outstripped her recovery. She hates men, but she has not been successful yet at loving herself or forming alliances with other women. This is a dangerous and lonely place to be. Is she a role model? Sometimes I worry about the younger dykes in the audience. Maybe I should perform in a teeshirt that says, Don't try this at home. But Joan is definitely an archetype of great courage in the face of massive brainwashing. PC: What other types of plays have you written? GAGE: You name it, I've got it. What do you want? Musicals? Gothic thrillers? One-woman shows? Romantic comedies? Studio dramas? Experimental theatre? Two-handers? Farces? I have a play, The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women that's an interactive courtroom drama. The audience becomes the judge and jury, which means that the play changes every night at different points along the way, depending on how the audience votes. It's a very challenging play, because it explores the ways in which women betray other women. As some women move from traditional roles as victims to positions of increasing empowerment, our levels of accountability toward each other are changing. That's what this play is about: tough ethical calls in a world of changing expectations. The betrayed woman is Anastasia Romanov, the daughter of the czar of Russia, who turned up in post-traumatic shock in a Berlin mental hospital. Many of the women in her life refused to recognize her. Women do deny each other recognition of our pain and of our achievements. This play brings the war home, and it's explosive.

On the other end of the dramatic spectrum is my play Sappho in Love, which is what I call a women's music festival in a box. It's a wild, sexy romp on the island of Lesbos, with the goddesses of celibacy, love, and marriage all competing for Sappho's attention amid poetry contests, meteor showers, lessons on lesbian lovemaking, romantic trysting, mix-ups and disguises. The action spills all over the house, and it's comedy in the best Greek tradition. Then, I have a great musical, The Amazon All-Stars, about a lesbian softball team, trying to score on and off the field. It's got send-ups of Elvis, and the Rolling Stones, a rap number about ex-lovers, and a great rock number Under the Glove. It's broken box office records in every theatre where it's been performed. Okay, I'm showing off my chops, here, but I also have a play, The Spindle, which is a children's theatre play written for adults. It's full of color and magic and fairy godmothers and big sword fights and it's a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story where the spindle-pricking is a metaphor for incest. There's a wooden puppet who holds the memories . . . I found that the juxtaposition of the conventions of children's theatre with such a chilling reality for one-third of all girls was very effective. Chicago performer C.C. Carter is touring in my one-act play Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist. This play won the Off-Off Broadway Festival and toured to Howard University with a Ford Foundation grant. It's about the interface between therapy and radical activism. And California actor Debra Wright tours in my one-woman show about Charlotte Cushman, a big, old diesel dyke who just happened to be the most famous actress of the English-speaking stage in the 19th century. This is a wonderful
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rant-and-roar play showcasing the sex appeal of one of our most glorious archetypes: the grandiose butch. One of my favorite plays is Ugly Ducklings, which is a thriller about homophobia at a girls' summer camp. The play is radical on several counts. First, it's a lesbian play requiring a large cast of children. Second, it puts the so-called Ophelia Syndrome right out there, on stage, where the difference between the older cabins and the younger ones are obvious. And so is the cause that nobody seems to want to name: socialization to heterosexuality. And finally, it breaks the silence about child suicide, with an onstage attempt. The play makes a powerful statement about the need for girls of all ages to grow up with the understanding of lesbianism as a viable option and identity from early childhood on. Well, I could go on. I refer the curious to my online catalog at mywebsite at www.carolyngage.com. PC: In My Life Among the Dolls; or How I Became a Radical Feminist Playwright you trace the origins of your writing and political career to your girlhood fantasies and play. In your plays, girls are important in ways rarely seen in mainstream drama. Why? And how is this preoccupation with girlhood connected to your lesbian feminist politics? GAGE: Heteropatriarchy teaches adults, both male and female, to dissociate from our childhoods. This is easy to understand, because socialization to heteropatriarchy requires constant violation on all fronts for the child. If we were to retain our allegiance to the violated child, we could not be so easily recruited to participate in our own oppression as adults. And we would be positively outraged at what is being done to children!
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In my own life, going back to retrieve that split-off girl-child has been the hardest and most important work I've ever done. It informs all of my writing. In these post-modern times, there is a lot of rhetoric about the fluidity of identity and subject positions, etc. But as I look at my own life and the lives of people around me, what I see is the unrecovered and often buried child controlling every aspect of our lives. I don't see all this fluidity. The only choices I see are these: Repress and dissociate, and let the child control you through covert sabotage and compulsive behaviors, or remember and integrate, and work with conscious, ongoing process to challenge the conditioning. What happened to us in childhood is hard-wired in. We can bring in new circuitry and upload new programs, but, in my experience, the hard-wiring is always there. It's just a question of how much we are willing to allow this original conditioning to continue to organize our perceptions and program our responses. Pretending that it's gone, that we have reinvented ourselves, that we have transcended an assigned role by assuming another one in the same paradigm these are all delusions of grandeur from what I can see. The one who is most split-off from, most in-denial about her childhood, is absolutely the one who is being the most controlled by it. PC: In Take Stage! How to Direct and Produce a Lesbian Play, you describe live theatre as a sacred activity and you say that the magic of theatre can change the world. How have your theatre productions changed the consciousness and lives of women? What sorts of feedback have you gotten from women about your plays? How do you use your theatre productions as a medium for activism? GAGE: Telling the truth is always disruptive. And theatre, of all the art forms, is a particularly powerful medium for truth-telling.
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Playwrights historically have ended up in hot water, because the nature of live theatre is inherently political. You have all these people come together in a room at the same time already you're talking about a rally. And then you create this alternate reality on the stage, this different paradigm, and you ask the audience to accept this paradigm shift at least for two hours, and then during those two hours, the play goes in and rearranges the mental furniture of the audience. So then the curtain comes down and the audience claps and gets their coats and heads for home. But they find out that something has changed. Things that used to be comfortable are not comfortable anymore. Things that hurt and were hidden, are suddenly out in the open and not so scary. Their thinking has changed on a very deep level while they were laughing or weeping or holding their breath in suspense. Magic: the ability to change consciousness at will. That's what theatre is all about. And it's dangerous as hell. The playwright bears a lot of responsibility. Feedback? I hear from women about how they have changed their jobs or left their husbands. Women come out as lesbians, or come out of the closet. They stop thinking they're crazy or feeling they're the only one. Some of them get angry. Some of them begin the serious business of recovery. I get all kinds of feedback. Sometimes they come up to me after a performance and just cry. I don't use my theatre for anything. I serve an uncompromising muse. She uses me. I get up at all hours of the night; I rewrite draft after draft; I'm tracking down Latin transcripts from the Inquisition or Greek phrasing of Sapphic poetry or I'm hanging out at the ballfield, trying to figure out if there is a certain archetype for shortstop, as opposed to the right fielder
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(and, yes, there definitely is). My end of the deal is to make the best play that I can. If the art is done well, it will move people, and if enough of them move then you've got a movement. PC: In addition to being a playwright and activist, you are a producer, actor, and director of lesbian theatre. Is the transition between creating the work and directing it a difficult one for you to make? GAGE: It has been very difficult for me, and that's why I haven't had a theatre company in ten years. What I really need is a theatre that will take me on as a resident playwright. That would be ideal. PC: Who or what has most influenced or inspired you to write? GAGE: I write, because I am really unreconciled with what passes for reality. As a child, I invented many different and enchanting worlds everywhere I went, using every conceivable material. I had a little universe on the top shelf of my locker, in the back of my desk. When I took a bath, my knees were islands and the soap dish was the ledge of a magical cave. When I was down at the creek, I built whole villages with leaves and twigs in the mud. In other words, anything but this world. As an adult, I write plays, because it's an acceptable adult outlet, occasionally even lucrative, for those earlier impulses. What inspires me? Rage. That's huge. And lack of closure. Oh, goddess The crimes committed in my presence as a child! Unmentioned and unmentionable, the criminals untried and even venerated! I have such a story to tell! I have such a need for witnesses. At that time in my life, when I was a little girl, I just needed one witness: my mother. That would have satisfied me. That would have healed me. But she was not there. So now, forty
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years later, I have an insatiable desire for witnesses. Now, forty years later, I cannot tell the story too many times, in too many ways, for too many audiences. My audiences are witnesses, and now, because that one witness was not there when I needed her, thousands and thousands of witnesses will not be too many. And, of course, I am inspired by women. Many of them turn up in my plays. I read a tremendous number of biographies, because real life does not work like fiction. I am interested in knowing what really works. And I am very interested in strategies that work. I find these in the lives of famous, and not-so-famous women. And, invariably, the things that enabled them to succeed have been downplayed or erased, to create the illusion that exceptional women were just born that way. In fact, scratch around any of these women of achievement, and you will usually uncover vast underground networks of women helping women more often than not, lesbians. PC: For whom do you write? GAGE: I write for lesbians, and especially for survivors of child sexual abuse. I consider my work universal, because I consider the survivor's story archetypal, but until we live in a world that is safe for women, most people have a hard time claiming the survivor's truth as their own. PC: Your familiarity with trauma studies and recovery movements is apparent in your plays as well as political essays. For example, in your collection, The Spindle and Other Plays, you identify the truthtelling survivor of sexual abuse [as] the archetype for a new women's drama; and many of your female protagonists are victims of male violence who exhibit a range of behaviors typical of trauma survivors. Yet radical feminists have sometimes been dismissive of recovery
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ideologies and therapeutic solutions to male sexual violence against women. How have recovery movements and trauma studies influenced your radical feminist politics? GAGE: This is a false polarity the recovery movement vs. radical feminism. There has been nothing in my experience more radical than my recovery, because that is where the enemy is the closest and most dangerous. During the height of my posttraumatic stress disorders, I can remember living in a neighborhood where there were drive-by shootings. Friends were expressing concern about my inattention to locking doors. I had to explain to them how the killer was already inside the house. Radical feminism What can I say? It saved/saves my life. But radical feminism, like most everything else in our culture, suffers from dissociative disorders you know, parts that have been split off. I found a certain lack of kindness, a kind of fascist judgmentalism, in the way in which I and some of my mentors were practicing our politic. It seemed as if there was an unbridgeable gap between political correctness and the diversity and contradictions inherent in human beings. I learned a lot in the recovery movement about respectful boundaries, effective communication, and accountability but the recovery movement is dissociated from political context. So I wrote Like There's No Tomorrow, my radical-feminist, daily-meditation, recovery book. This was my attempt to integrate the two movements. And let me say a little something here about trauma It's a key element in that synthesis. The personal is the political, yes, and we use that to hold each other accountable for our choices. But it's equally true that the political is the personal, and nowhere is
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that more apparent than in the field of trauma studies, where we learn about the behaviors, strategies, and syndromes of women who have been traumatized as children. Some of these strategies and ways of identifying or organizing perceptions are appalling to radical feminists. But they make perfect sense and may well be, in fact, heroic choices from the perspective of the individual who has survived trauma. I'm not saying we radical feminists should table our analyses, but I am saying we need to temper it with a serious commitment to incorporate what trauma researchers are discovering. The more I read about trauma, the more compassion I have for myself and for my community. I am thinking of Judith Herman's ground-breaking Trauma and Recovery the one that really cracked the code, but also Victimized Daughters by Janet Liebman Jacobs, which has a specific focus on the impact of trauma on gender identities and sexual practices. Blew the doors off my barn We have to learn each other's metaphors before we can engage in any kind of meaningful dialogue. If a trauma survivor is split off from her trauma and acting out a syndrome, she's not in a position to hear a political critique of her behaviors as anything except one more attack on an endangered self. If the radical feminist is holding to a political analysis that dissociates the ways in which a child's perception of the world develops and carries over into the adult world, she's not in a position to critique her own self-righteousness. So I think we need to take this recovery business seriously and go hunt up the pieces that we are missing from all of us and reorganize ourselves and our communities in ways where compassion and politics are not at loggerheads. PC: And why, then, is trauma so important to your work?

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GAGE: Well, the primary trauma in the lives of women is our experience of male sexual aggression, especially child sexual abuse, and especially incest. In male culture, the primary trauma is defined as war. Not surprisingly, a great deal of men's theatre has to do with themes of war. And, as an extension, the son's struggle to overthrow the tyrant/patriarch. What is surprising is the near-total absence of incest narratives in theatre. The few mainstream plays that deal with it are written mostly by men, and mostly deal with it as a sexually-titillating, adult, consensual breaking of taboos. I don't know any woman with that experience of incest. But almost every single woman I know has some history of sexual trauma. This is our archetypal story. Where is it? Where is the story of the mother in this? Where are the stories of the survivors who recruit allies and prevail? Where, oh, where, is the anger? The female survivor is a heavily censored archetype, disbelieved like Cassandra or silenced like the rape victim in Titus Andronicus who has her tongue cut out. The entire foundation of female sexual colonization rests on the non-recognition, the repression of this story. And so, naturally, dyke that I am, this is the story that compels me. PC: Who produces your plays and how much control do you have over the ways in which your plays are presented? GAGE: Many small women's theatres produce my work. Women's festivals have been tough to break into, because they are so geared toward producing music. The festival format is geared toward musical acts, with 50-minute sets, not two-hour plays. Also, the cost of bringing in a large cast would be prohibitive. So, even though festival audiences would be ideal for my work, the venue is not compatible. They do one-acts and one-woman shows of mine, but a lot of my work is full-length
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and large-cast. I have had several off-off Broadway productions, and there was a recent Broadway-level production of The Second Coming in Brazil. It featured the film star Christiane Torloni, and it toured all over the country and was very successful. They even revived it last month. But, they made certain changes to it that I was not aware of until after the run. They added four men to the cast men on motorcycles. They de-lesbianized some of the dialogue. And they cut the passage where Joan describes the rape in retrospect. Instead, they acted it out on the stage, with full male nudity. This change to the script was a violation of my contract, and I was not aware of it until after the production. That was a real learning experience to me. As most struggling artists do, I sometimes ask myself, What would it take for me to become commercial? Brazil has answered the question: Add men (and machines) that will outnumber the women four-to-one, de-dyke the script, have somebody take off their clothes, and violate/neutralize the strong female lead so that the violation, not her resistance, becomes the most memorable part of the evening. So, now I don't have to wonder. The truth is that the theatres I need just aren't here yet. I have no doubt they are coming, but theatre is labor-intensive and the product has a very short shelf life. It takes time and a certain amount of money to commit to producing theatre. Right now, my work tends to be too lesbian for straight feminist theaters, and too feminist for mainstream theatres and theatres needing to appeal to gay male audiences which is an unfortunate financial reality for most of the so-called gay-and-lesbian theatres. We need to have our own theatres, and that's why I wrote Take Stage! I wrote a book so that any lesbian, with no experience at all, could learn how to start her own theatre. I encourage lesbians to hold readings of plays in their living
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rooms. These are wonderful! Theatre is such a marvelous art form, and it's really been taken away from people and especially women, and isolated off in these elitist institutions. Every town big enough to have a women's softball team and a chorus should have some kind of lesbian theatre activity. I think a lot of our celebrated relationship dyke drama is a result of our not having appropriate venues for acting out. As feminist astrologer Caroline Casey says, Create theatre or live melodrama. That's another tee-shirt I should wear. PC: Universities seem to be one of the few sources of income for many writers. What have been your experiences with universities and their reactions to your work? GAGE: I enjoy going to the colleges and universities, because there is always so much excitement about the work. This is a generation of women who, for the most part, have not been exposed to radical feminist ideas, and it's very validating for me to see how eagerly they embrace my plays. Lesbians who have come of age in queer communities that traditionally focused their activism on AIDS or other gay male issues, are often surprised to see lesbian-specific work, and we have very stimulating conversations over the issues raised by our differences. The colleges and universities are fun. Sometimes the audiences you know, football players and sorority girls sit there and watch me like a hog staring at a wristwatch. But every now and then there's that young woman you know, the one in the back row hunched down with her hair falling in her eyes and her arms crossed over her chest. And I can feel her in the house. And play for that young woman. I play like both our lives depend on it. Because if someone had performed The Second Coming of Joan
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of Arc for me when I was that age, it would have changed my life. So, I'm an evangelist. PC: How have the Queer and transgender movements impacted on your writing and the reception of your work? GAGE: I say, read the plays. Anyone who gives central place to trauma as a defining experience in the lives of women is going to resonate with the themes of my plays. The plays speak for themselves. I don't need to speak for them. Read the plays. PC: What are you working on now? GAGE: I am working on two plays: A one-act called The Drum Circle, in which much of the characterization and the relationships are elucidated through the drumming, without dialogue. This is a play in which I explore how circle process can contain conflict. I am interested in exploring the limits of language, but I'm also interested in a process in which a spiritual center in this case the drumming itself is transformative. And I am working on a full-length lesbian play called Esther and Vashti, based (loosely, oh, so loosely) on the Bible story. In this play, I am exploring the interface between a Jewish, working-class separatist and her former lover, a highly assimilated woman of privilege. I'm also looking at communities of women: an underground community of Jewish women activists and a prison community of sexual slaves inside the harem. This is a play about systems of privilege, their underpinnings, and their collapse. This year, I am adding the one-act play Louisa May Incest to my repertory. I will be touring in this with lesbian performer who plays Alcott's lesbian alter-ego Jo March (from Little Women).
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This is a play about the nature of the creative act how it can be liberating, but also how the creator can use it as a vehicle for perpetration. The National Women's Music Festival has been tremendously supportive of my work, and I am hoping to be performing it there next summer. I will be performing The Second Coming in Provincetown during Women's Week, and I've got some touring lined up for Northern California and the Midwest. PC: How do you manage to continue writing and producing the kind of work that you do? GAGE: I think it's really just an issue of my not being able to do anything else. I pay a very high price for being a full-time, radical, lesbian-feminist playwright, but whenever I try to imagine myself doing anything else, I just can't see it. So then you do what you have to in order to keep going. And sometimes that takes some creativity. I remember one night, when I just felt I couldn't take it anymore. I made a cassette tape, in which I pretended to be a series of famous dead women, like Emily Dickinson and Harriet Tubman. And on the tape, I told myself (in the persona of these women) how wonderful my work was and how much we (all these famous dead women) were enjoying the productions of my plays. I felt like an idiot doing it but it was one of those nights, you know, when it was either do something extreme or die. So I did it and then I played it back. Laughing, of course, at how pathetic it was. And then I played it again. And, you know, the mind is a glorious thing. On some level, I began to feel as happy as if these women really said these things to me. Okay, so you say, that's nuts.

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But over the years, I've received maybe fifteen hundred reject letters from men who work in theatre, telling me that my plays are no good. Now, whose reality is that? And even if they're right --- and when have men ever been right about women's work? --- I still have to do the work. The French lesbian author Monique Wittig gave us lesbians the best piece of strategy when she wrote, Failing to remember, invent! I want that on my tombstone. PC: Do you care to make any comments on the current status of feminist movements? GAGE: I think the future of feminism lies in its incorporation of what we are learning about the effects of trauma on women. This is where I see a possibility for common ground with some of the conflicts that have polarized our communities. PC: How can women purchase your work and attend upcoming performances of your plays? GAGE: My catalogue of plays is online, along with ordering information, at www.carolyngage.com.

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