Deb Margolin
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Deb Margolin is an American
performance artist Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
and
playwright A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays. Etymology The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...
. She came to prominence in the 1980s in the
feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
political theatre troupe Split Britches, which she co-founded with
Lois Weaver Lois Weaver (born 1949, Roanoke, Virginia) is a Guggenheim-winning artist, activist, writer, director, and Professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Engaging Science. H ...
and
Peggy Shaw Peggy Shaw (born July 27, 1944) is an actor, writer, and producer living in New York City. She is a founding member of the Split Britches and WOW Cafe Theatre, and is a recipient of several Obie Awards, including two for Best Actress for he ...
. Margolin has since created a string of one-woman shows. A compilation of her texts, ''Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO'', was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press. Literary theorist Lynda Hart edited and wrote a commentary on each piece. Margolin was the recipient of a 1999-2000
Obie Award The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards originally given by ''The Village Voice'' newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City. In September 2014, the awards were jointly presented and administered with the A ...
for Sustained Excellence in Performance. In 2005, Margolin won the
Joseph Kesselring Prize Joseph Otto Kesselring (July 21, 1902 – November 5, 1967) was an American playwright who was best known for writing '' Arsenic and Old Lace'', a hit on Broadway from 1939 to 1944 and in other countries as well. Biography He was born in ...
for her play, ''Three Seconds in the Key,'' a multi-character play which reflected her own experiences with
Hodgkin's Disease Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is a type of lymphoma, in which cancer originates from a specific type of white blood cell called lymphocytes, where multinucleated Reed–Sternberg cells (RS cells) are present in the patient's lymph nodes. The condition wa ...
. She currently teaches playwrighting and performance as an associate professor at
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
. Her work includes ''O Yes I Will'', a detailed account of her experiences and insights on being under
general anaesthesia General anaesthesia (UK) or general anesthesia (US) is a medically induced loss of consciousness that renders the patient unarousable even with painful stimuli. This effect is achieved by administering either intravenous or inhalational general ...
. Margolin was forced to revise her 2010 play '' Imagining Madoff'' after legal threats from
Elie Wiesel Elie Wiesel (, born Eliezer Wiesel ''Eliezer Vizel''; September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored Elie Wiesel b ...
, who is one of
Bernard Madoff Bernard Lawrence Madoff ( ; April 29, 1938April 14, 2021) was an American fraudster and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ s ...
's victims and had called Madoff a "scoundrel" but had refused to allow a character representing him and using his name to be used in the play. In the 1990s, Margolin participated in the Zale-Kimmerling Writer in Residence program at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. She later donated a large quantity of her personal materials such as journals, manuscripts, newspaper articles, flyers, ephemera, poetry, and correspondence to the Newcomb Archives at Tulane in August, 2018, forming the Deb Margolin Collection which spanned from the years of 1970 to 2016. In the Spring of 2020, an exhibit was later shown at Tulane University entitled "Deb Margolin's Performance Composition: Writing and Embodying" which focused on Margolin's process of performance composition by displaying her notes and writing (both handwritten and typed) from her time as a university professor, actor, and playwright.


Works

* ''The God Show'' (1982) * ''Coupla Weirdos'' (1986) * ''In a Vacuum'' (1988) * ''What's with Hamlet?'' (1989) * ''Of All the Nerve'' (1989) * ''You Don't Even Know Where the Strike Zone Is'' (1990) * ''970-DEBB'' (1990) * ''Gestation'' (1991) * ''Lesbians Who Kill'' (1992) * ''The Breaks'' (1993), written with Rae C. Wright * ''Of Mice, Bugs and Women'' (1994) * ''Carthieves! Joyrides!'' (1995) * ''Bearing Witnesses'' (1996) * ''O Wholly Night & Other Jewish Solecisms'' (1996) * ''Critical Mass'' (1997) * ''Bringing the Fishermen Home'' (1998) * ''Three Seconds in the Key'' (2001) * ''Rock, Scissors, Paper'' (2002) * ''Three Seconds in the Key'' (2002) * ''Why Cleaning Fails'' (2002) * ''Index to Idioms'' (2003) * ''Three Seconds in the Key'' (2004) * ''The Rich Silk Of It'' (2005) * ''Time Is The Mercy of Eternity'' (2006) * ''Clarisse and Larmon'' (2006) * ''O Yes I Will'' (2006) * '' Imagining Madoff'' (2010) * '' The Actor and the Text: Macbeth'' (2017)


References


External links


Official Website of Deb Margolin
American dramatists and playwrights American performance artists Feminist theatre Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Jewish American artists Yale University faculty 21st-century American Jews {{US-artist-stub