Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre (review)

How does a small, chaotically organized, multi-perspective feminist theatre collective survive and foster a forum that produces ground-breaking performances by radical women in tiny spaces on even tinier budgets? Kate Davy believes the answer lies precisely in the minimal rules and fluid nature of the collective. In Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, Davy recaptures the rich history and aesthetics of the WOW Café Theatre - through a contextualization of its productions, performers, environs, and atmosphere - from its inception with its first women's festival in 1980 to the present day. Davy argues that WOW's genesis corresponded with a critical juncture in the women's movement and feminist theory, and she reclaims WOW's history to demonstrate not only the significance of the feminist/ queer paradigm shift but also how WOW's revolutionary feminist performances prefigured the new queer aesthetic. Davy's project offers an important historicization of WOW for the field of feminist performance and lesbian practice, but her interventions make it difficult to follow how the collective's contributions continue to affect women's performance across different sites of cultural production.

WOW is the only remaining women's theatre collective with a home in New York City, and Davy recognizes that it is a "slippery business" (6) to categorize WOW and its community. Davy first encountered WOW in 1984 and relies on her own spectatorship, selected interviews with WOW members, a limited number of theatre reviews (most shows were not reviewed), flyers, programs, press releases, and collections from the Lesbian Herstory Archives as sources for her research. The book provides a production history of WOW in the appendix, but Davy acknowledges that, since WOW had a limited staff over the years to record events, her documentation may be incomplete. Even the shows and gatherings were rarely publicized, and attendance relied on neighbourhood flyers and word of mouth within the community that the social club of WOW engendered. Given participants' differing stories in their recollections of events, Davy suggests that the collective forgetting of the specifics of WOW's history within the field of feminist performance's cultural memory is a necessary precursor to WOW's achieving legendary status.

In her effort to intervene and controvert these collective erasures, and in order to highlight especially the ways in which feminists coming out of the 1970s created outrageous "bad girl" performances, Davy locates the artistic origins of WOW in the work of its four founders - Pamela Camhe, Jordy Mark, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. Camhe and Mark separated from WOW soon after the four procured WOW's first fixed storefront location, but Davy reminds us of their influence. Camhe's and Mark's contributions were equal to Shaw's and Weaver's in the two inaugural Women's One World Festivals as well as in the innovations brought into the Café; however, their names are rarely mentioned in publications that discuss WOW's beginnings. Also, to counter the notion that many feminists looked to gay male culture to find the more playful, seductive, and queer side of their sensibility, Davy points to Camhe who, with a trunk full of glamorous male and female costumes, created photographed performances of erotically charged drag. Davy's account of the festivals, which included myriad lesbian and black lesbian performance groups, traces a genealogy of formerly eclipsed feminist performance.

Readers who seek a more in-depth and intimate knowledge of WOW, particularly those who missed the collective's heyday from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, will find Davy's vivid descriptions and anecdotes helpful in imagining a time and space of colourful, parodic, and sexually charged downtown feminist performance, which challenged anti-pornography feminists as well as the "stereotypical asexual, androgynous, lesbian feminist" (61). While WOW established itself as a woman's space and not exclusively lesbian (unlike the short-lived Medusa's...