Memories of the Revolution: The First
Ten Years of the WOW Café Theatre
Edited by Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, & Jill Dolan
University of Michigan Press. 242 pages, $35.
The Only Way Home Is through the Show:
Performance Work of Lois Weaver
Edited by Jen Harvie & Lois Weaver
University of Chicago Press. 248 pages, $35.
THE WOW (Women’s One World) Café Theater was founded in 1980 by Lois Weaver, her lover Peggy Shaw, and a handful of other feminist performers. The theater-café, located in the East Village, was all about performance art with clear feminist and lesbian themes, and their shows were satirical, often erotic responses to the issues of the day.
Remarkably, this performance collective has survived in New York for a generation without any government funding. The founders, who were interviewed for both of the books under review, explained that they decided early on not to apply for government grants because the application process would take up valuable time and energy, and they would probably be refused, and if they were accepted, they would have to conform to the funder’s rules.
These two books on overlapping topics are a pleasure to hold and to look at. Memories of the Revolution is a standard-sized paperback with a collection of photos in the center, and The Only Way Home Is through the Show is a large paperback art book, lavishly illustrated throughout.
This reviewer regrets not being able to attend more than one of WOW’s performances. In February 2003, I was in New York for a few days for a reading from Best Women’s Erotica at Bluestockings Bookstore. On one of my days off, I went to the current WOW performance, a series of skits that ridiculed the official paranoia about terrorism that followed 9/11. Hamlet it wasn’t (although WOW member Deb Margolin had starred in her own version of Shakespeare’s tragedy in 1989), but it was a clever debunking of the mass-media version of reality. The space was intimate, and the audience was encouraging. I wished I could have taken the ambience home with me.
If you’ve never watched a WOW performance, reading these books is the next best thing to being there. Both books do a remarkable job of capturing a zeitgeist. Much of the longevity of the WOW Café Theater can be attributed to the energy of its members, some of whom formed spin-off groups such as Split Britches, while others belonged to more explicitly political groups such as the Lesbian Avengers of the 1990s. In all of these grass-roots collectives, political theory and public performance were treated as two sides of the same coin.
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Jean Roberta is a writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan.
