MARLBORO — Award-winning playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin joins students from Marlboro College's “Borders, Boundaries, and Crossings” performance seminar in a show of solo works in progress.
The event is Monday, May 5, at 7 p.m. at the school's Whittemore Theater. Admission is free.
Students Laura-Rainbow Stakiwicz, Olivia Schaaf, John Marinelli, Peter Scibak, and Sophie Tulip will present work they developed in the seminar under visiting performance artist Carmelita Tropicana and Marlboro theater professor Brenda Foley.
Margolin is an associate professor at Yale University's undergraduate theater studies program, a founding member of Split Britches Theater Company, and a Village Voice Obie Award winner for sustained excellence in performance for solo work.
At Marlboro she will perform from her latest work, “8 Stops,” which had its world premiere the weekend of April 24 at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.
Margolin says she was not aware she had a connection with Marlboro College when professor Foley called her out of the blue to perform with the students from the seminar.
“All I knew of the school was from a young man that grew up in the house I was living in, who went there,” she says. “Later, I discovered that Carmelita Tropicana co-taught the seminar with Brenda, and I know Carmelita from the early days when were both were part of WOW.”
The WOW Café Theater is the New York City-based collective where works produced, written, and directed by women are showcased every week. Margolin was a founding member.
“I just called up Deb Margolin and asked her to come to this presentation,” says Foley. “She was so gracious and generous to accept.”
Margolin's newest one-woman show, “8 Stops,” as described by the Kimmel Center, looks at life and death through the eyes of her son.
“Margolin's comic investigation touches many of the saddest registers as she contemplates the suburbs, the spiritual exurbs, illness, desire, and a subway ride with a motherless child” whom Margolin realizes she has only eight stops to raise. Margolin asks the audience to ponder, “Isn't that all the time we ever really have - eight stops?”
Teaching at an Ivy League college and perhaps the most prestigious acting school in the country, Margolin may seem formidably respectable, but her career began with the radical performing group Split Britches, which she, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver formed in New York City in 1980.
According to Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, edited by Sue-Ellen Case for Routledge, this feminist theater company “has worked with concepts of lesbian, queer, and dyke identities and cultures.”
Margolin says their mission was to take the stage “unapologetically, comically and personally. […] Peggy, Lois and I were three weirdos who proclaimed our ownership of the text and our bodies. We were oddballs. I may be straight myself, but I was Jewish and just plain odd.”
In creating works for Split Britches, Margolin began her writing career, which has evolved into a substantial facet of her art. In addition to writing her own one-woman shows, she writes traditional plays. Of these, she says, perhaps her best known is “Imagining Madoff” (2010), which tells the story of an imagined encounter between Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and his victims.
“When I wrote for Split Britches my job was to catch and put into words the ideas of the collective, not merely my own,” Margolin explains. “We had things we wanted to say, but I would never say we were politically didactic. Split Britches was not agitprop theater. We just wanted to express the crazy, important things going on in our lives.”
Margolin says she left Split Britches to focus on her solo career, playwriting, and family.
“The reason I went on my own was because I had a baby and could not take to touring as much as Peggy and Lois could,” she says. “Don't get me wrong. I still did tour. But unlike them, I could not take off for three months to perform somewhere in Europe.”
Even during her tenure with Split Britches, Margolin began developing her solo stage career.
“I did it basically to explore areas that perhaps did not interest the group as much as it did me,” she says.
Margolin says she didn't plan on a solo career. One came calling. What happened was a producer approached her, saying she had great material and should go for it.
“I told her, 'No, I don't do solo shows.' She said, 'When do you want to do it, the seventh or the 23rd?' I said, 'The 23rd.'”
“But after I did the show, I said to myself, Wow, you know this is cool! So right now, I have my solo performing and playwriting to keep me busy. And, then again, I have my teaching.”
Margolin loves teaching.
“I learned to teach by modeling from Lois Weaver in Split Britches,” she says. “I believe you learn to teach from other teachers. Peggy Shaw has also become a great teacher. I take my responsibility in that profession seriously, and I work with great humility. The value I find in teaching is simple enough: through it I feel I can be useful.”
With fewer places for theater artists to learn their craft, Margolin sees the classroom as especially vital to young performers.
“I want to provide students a safe space that takes you as you are, a place where you can make a fool of yourself,” she says. “That's how you learn as an artist. That is certainly what we did enough times in Split Britches. But the performing venues we had then no longer exist.
“Now there is now an unforgiving professionalism out there that is hard on newcomers. And theater has become so expensive. All of this is also true for myself.
“Recently I was considering putting on 'Imagining Madoff' at a lovely theater nearby. They were quite pleased with the idea - that is, if I bought along with me $250,000 to stage it. If it costs that much to put on a show, there are simply not enough creative or artistic spaces for young artists. For that reason alone, we need to treasure and support places like Marlboro College,” she says.