Four Flyers from Medusa’s Revenge [experimental lesbian of color theater]

New York: Medusa’s Revenge, 1979-1980. Offset. 8 1/2 x 11 in. All very good. Item #10368

Four flyers from the experimental lesbian theater, Medusas’s Revenge, founded by Cuban exiles Ana María Simo and Magaly Alabau in 1976.

Medusa’s Revenge at 10 Bleecker Street hosted influential lesbian theater groups, including the Medusa’s Revenge Theater Ensemble, Spiderwoman Theater, and Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company, and was particularly welcoming to women of color and working-class women.The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures later noted that Medusa’s Revenge was “less doctrinaire and more formally experimental and sexually explicit” than most lesbian and feminist theater of the period.

Frequent performers at the venue included such prominent feminist theater figures as Gwendolen Hardwick, Alexis De Veaux, Muriel Miguel, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver; the latter two had recently formed the lesbian theatrical company Split Britches and performed with the famed queer theater company Hot Peaches, which counted Shaw as a member for several years in the 1970s. Shaw and Weaver were key organizers of the WOW Festival and WOW Cafe Theatre, which utilized the lights and dimmers from Medusas’s Revenge. The four flyers in this collection document performances and events at the theater in late 1979 and early 1980, immediately preceding its closure. One of the flyers advertises the “Last Dance Dance,” as the theater was forced to close and the troupe to move out.

Scarce records of a short-lived experimental theater venue, centering sex-positive theater from women of color.

Sold