- 227 Terry Baum & Carolyn Myers: Pioneers in Lesbian and Feminist Theater Gail Zelitzky and Catherine Marienau 36:11
Playwright, director and collaborators for 50 years, Terry and Carolyn fearlessly tackle lesbian and feminist themes. They are thrill-seekers. While Carolyn is married with children, the pair seize every opportunity they can to work together.
Terry moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974 and founded Lilith, a women’s theater collective, which she led for five years. Carolyn, the engine that pushes ‘things to happen’ joined her there. In 1981, Terry and Carolyn wrote a play about lesbians from a lesbian’s point of view: Dos Lesbos: A Play By, For and About Perverts. It inspired and was published in Places, Please, 1985, the first anthology of lesbian plays.
In January 2008, A Coupla Crackpot Crones premiered in New Mexico. “Terry wrote on LillithTheater.com: The Crones’ feminist sketch comedy and improvisation have graced the New York International Fringe Festival (2012), the Santa Cruz Fringe Festival (2013, Women on the Way Festival and the National Queer Arts Festival, the University of Redlands (CA), and various venues in New York, Oregon, and California. In 2016, the Crones toured Mexico, performing in English and Spanish in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and San Miguel de Allende.”
In 2014, they produced a play about Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover, Lorena Hickok, drawing on 2,336 letters Eleanor wrote to Hick. HICK: A Love Story, The Romance of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt won awards at the New York and San Francisco Fringe Festivals. In 2019 Exit Press published One Dyke’s Theater: Selected Plays by Slightly World-Renowned Lesbian Playwright Terry Baum, edited by Carolyn Myers.
During the pandemic, Baum and Myers, as Lilith Theater, produced several ZOOM productions: HICK: A Love Story, Divide the Living Child, Immediate Family, and Eve in Therapy.
“We have the same values, we laugh a lot and unconditionally support each other.”
Connect with Terry:
Email: terryjoanbaum@gmail.com
Website: www.LilithTheater.com
Website: www.Terrybaum.blogspot.com
Book: One Dyke’s Theater: Selected Plays, 1975-2014 by Terry Baum. Edited by Carolyn Myers Available at Amazon.com
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