Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater ed. by Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan, and: The Only Way Home is Through the Show: Performance Work of Lois Weaver ed. by Jen Harvie and Lois Weaver (review)

1985. You stand in front of a doorway, your feet sturdy on the cracked sidewalk under you. There's no buzzer to this building, so you look up and shout, "WOW!" It's like a password. Four stories above, a small sock tied to a string descends from a window. You catch it in your hand and wrest the key from inside. You open the door and unknowingly enter history.

The books Memories of a Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater and The Only Way Home is Through the Show: Performance Work of Lois Weaver seek to account for seemingly unnarratable histories, consisting of multiple actors working collaboratively within, across, and against time to create art. Each of these collections employs an array of women's voices (some of which are heard in both collections) to tell a particular story: the story of the first 10 years of a feminist performance space (1980–1992ish) and the story of a feminist performance artist. Yet each of these stories is not easily told. The WOW Café Theater, which still exists today in the East Village, sits a little over a block from my office, ensconced in an old New York building on theatre row. The WOW Café is very much present, as much as it is out of sight. So too is the longstanding performance work of the femme Lois Weaver clouded by everything that keeps a femme gal in the shadows of cultural resistance. Weaver's inspiring collaborations, her ability to construct art with her stories, and her drive when rehearsing with her artistic partner Peggy Shaw remained relatively unnoticed until her colleagues spoke her influence out loud in The Only Way Home, making her work visible.

This making visible does not seem a difficult task at first. After all, these books follow in the footsteps of many others: they both offer written excerpts from performance pieces, historical photos of performances and performers, interviews, and explanatory writings by those involved. These accounts create a multilayered approach to divining historical significance while striving to present a picture of their subjects: a performance space, a performer. Yet in Jill Dolan's preface to Memories of the Revolution, she points out what's sticky about establishing a historical collection on feminist, lesbian subjects: the task requires engaging in "queer time," a practice by which "lesbians and gay men often radically reorder conventional linear time" because they "reject all the markers of 'normal' (that is, heterosexual, middle-class) life cycles" (xi–xii). While many accounts of artists who might follow more normative paths can be narrated linearly, the work of the artists of the WOW Café, as well as that of Weaver (who also performed at WOW Café), are better served by nonlinear narratives. These books both position their histories through a multiplicity of perspectives that sketch out a particular performance or a moment. These moments build up to a panorama of the performer/collective space. Together, the various stories represent a queer history — a history that queers the reader's desire for linear forms of truth.

1990. You stand in front of a doorway, your feet marking the moves for tonight's dance number. You look up and scream "WOOOOHOOOO!!!" Fuck it. It's close enough to the password. A small sock hits you on the head. You grab it with your hand and wrest the key from inside. You open the door and head...