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

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre is a landmark critical study about how one evolving community theatre revolutionized feminist, lesbian, and queer performance practices. Following the success of two international women’s theatre festivals held in 1980 and 1981, the WOW Café (as it was known then) opened its doors in 1982 in a storefront on New York City’s Lower East Side. As an arts organization, WOW was instrumental in the early careers of former members such as Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano), and members of the Split Britches Company (Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin). Its influence on theatre and performance studies scholars writing on feminist and queer theory, LGBT history, ethnicity, butch/femme role-playing, drag, camp, and gender performativity is indisputable and cannot be overestimated. It continues to thrive as one of the longest-running American women’s and transpeople’s theatre collectives in a space that once housed a doll factory.

Kate Davy’s clever choice of title signals that her book focuses on the following: WOW collective’s members (the theatre troupe Five Lesbian Brothers got its start at WOW), its cultural production (The Lady Dick is the title of a 1984 play by Hughes), and its distinct aesthetic style with its emphasis on humor, parody, contradiction, female desire, and lesbian sensibilities. Early in the preface Davy makes the startling admission that writing on WOW was beset with challenges. With no artistic director or organizational hierarchy, WOW’s disorganization, poor record keeping, and anarchical tendencies thwarted the efforts of many scholars over three decades. To her credit, however, Davy found aesthetic strength in WOW’s “inspired messiness,” asserting that WOW’s longevity can be attributed to its organizational strategies as well as “an abiding sense of tumult combined with desires released from constraint” (3). Reading Davy’s descriptions of WOW members’ enthusiasm, DIY work ethic, consensual decision-making, and solidarity (one can join the collective by attending WOW’s weekly Tuesday evening meetings and participate by volunteering) was a revelation. I could not help but think that the book’s potential readership exceeds the disciplinary purviews of theatre and performance studies as it offers a provocative case history to those researching anarchical and participatory cultures.

In addition to combing through two incomplete archives, Davy drew from her own memories and documentation, describing vividly and discussing insightfully numerous WOW performances she attended from 1985 to 1993. She also conducted dozens of interviews with WOW performers, playwrights, audience members, colleagues, and her sister, former WOW collective member and founding Lesbian Brother, Babs Davy. Given her sources and methodologies, it makes sense that her historical account emphasizes WOW’s origins and early years.

Davy takes an egalitarian approach in her discussion of WOW’s key players as if to say that WOW is not just about its two most celebrated stars, Shaw and Weaver. For example, Davy introduces WOW in chapter 1 by discussing the success and artistic process of Lisa Kron, the first WOW veteran to make it to Broadway. In chapter 2 she recounts how artists Pamela Camhe and Jordy Mark teamed up with Weaver and Shaw to organize two WOW festivals without any public funding or institutional support. According to Davy, “the four women were informed by the aesthetics and sensibilities of work produced by three important, sometimes overlapping groups: women of color, feminists, and drag queens” (29). Davy argues that while WOW was feminist and diverse from the start, it also valorized lesbianism as WOW founders and members sought to make women’s desires—including those for other women—visible onstage.

In chapter 3 Davy sets the record straight regarding WOW’s connections to the women’s movement, the 1980s feminist sex wars, and queer history. She notes that existing accounts of WOW’s beginnings minimalize or even omit altogether important...