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

Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers is the latest addition to the influential Triangulations series, the mandate of which is to write, preserve, and celebrate the history and various aesthetic expressions of lesbian, gay, and queer performance. The book concentrates on the legendary WOW Café Theatre in New York, which has nurtured and produced such innovative talent as Split Britches, Holly Hughes, and Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana. Rather than tracing the career of individual performers, Davy sets out to fill a gap in the existing research by focusing on WOW as a performance space and organization with “a deep-seated commitment to an autonomous sexuality for women—that is, women as sexual subjects or agents, whether heterosexual or lesbian” (15). By consistently situating her topic in a cultural and political context, Davy offers a fascinating account of feminist and lesbian performance from the “sex wars” and the rise of the New Right to the emergence of the queer movement, the challenges posed by postcolonial critiques, and the gentrification process in the formerly bohemian neighborhoods of Manhattan. Throughout the book, she conceptualizes WOW as a community and uses the city as a unique and compelling metaphor to describe how individuals come and go, settle for shorter or longer periods of time, and contribute to the longest-surviving feminist performance space, where the “whole” has always exceeded the sum of its very talented parts.

After a short section introducing WOW and some of its best-known performers, chapter 2 sets forth the state of feminist theory and practice in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It also traces the backgrounds of WOW’s four founding members (Pamela Camhe, Jordy Mark, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver) and their respective roots in experimental theatre, drag performance, and lesbian aesthetics. Davy convincingly establishes how, from its inception, WOW offered a stage for the exploration of nonnormative desires and practices—not least, sadomasochism and butch/femme aesthetics—which were a thorn in the side of mainstream, bourgeois feminism.

Chapter 3, in many ways the heart of the book, offers an overview and celebrates the diversity of the different productions presented during the two festivals (Women’s One World, organized in 1980 and 1981) that marked the origins of WOW. Here, one of Davy’s key arguments emerges most clearly: namely, that three decades later, we have forgotten how radical, provocative, and humorous lesbian performance was on the eve of both Ronald Reagan’s election and the “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” conference at Barnard College, both of which marked a pivotal moment in the sex wars. The author suggests that our historical amnesia and selective collective memory (a concept borrowed from Joseph Roach’s influential book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance [1996]) limit our perception of actual feminist and lesbian performance in the early 1980s, so that now it is regarded as having been politically correct—that is, in line with white middle-class feminism and thus “generally humorless” and unable to “think playfully about gender or positively about sex” (61). By charting the performance of queer desires and aesthetics a decade before the emergence of the term “queer theory,” Davy invites us to revisit our preconceived notions and to reconsider the historiography of queer theatre. She develops this argument through a wealth of research material, contrasting numerous firsthand interviews conducted with key players at WOW with historical documents like performance reviews. In the process, she demonstrates how memory is often unreliable and betrays the unfolding of events.

In chapter 4, Davy outlines the occasional confusion and potential conflicts that have resulted from WOW’s nonhierarchical organization and rather informal decision-making process. She stresses that part of WOW’s appeal lies in how the collective has survived potential disruptions and continued to blossom, but she also leaves room for dissident voices, such as Sarah Schulman’s “theory of WOW as a cult” (115). My only regret...