Women’s Experimental Theatre Collection

New York: The Women’s Interart Center, 1980-1981. Offset. Five items. 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 — 16 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. All very good to near fine. Item #10295

Five discrete items from two respective productions by Women’s Experimental Theatre (WET), staged at Women’s Interart Theatre, the Off-Broadway stage of Women’s Interart Center, which Lucy R. Lippard described as “the first women’s alternative space” in New York.

The collection includes a handbill and program for Electra Speaks, a feminist retelling of the Greek myth and the third work in WET’s Daughters Cycle; and two handbills and a poster for FOOD, the first work in the Woman’s Body and Other Natural Resources series.

Women’s Experimental Theatre was founded in New York City in 1976 by Clare Coss, Sondra Segal, and Roberta Sklar. In the Electra Speaks program included in this collection, they describe themselves as “committed to the creation and performance of theatre that reflects the experience of women, the development of a feminist theatre aesthetic, the establishment of women’s theatre as a form of expression within the arts, the nurturing of women artists, and the expansion of the audience for women’s theatre.” The three founders of WET, and co-directors of the works represented in the collection, had significant backgrounds in theater before launching WET; particularly Roberta Sklar, who began her career in the early-1960s directing plays at Caffe Cino, the legendary Off-Off-Broadway theatre central to the development of American queer and experimental theatre. WET, and the items included in this collection, are evidence of how second wave feminism and its accompanying political commitments reoriented many women’s aesthetic artistic trajectories.

Price: $250.00