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

political theatre Political theatre may refer to: * Political drama, a theatrical genre * Guerrilla theatre, a type of political protest with a theatrical quality * Political posturing or Kabuki, political acts made only for the sake of appearance * Political stunt ...

troupe

Split Britches Split Britches is an American performance troupe, which has been producing work internationally since 1980. Academic Sue Ellen Case says "their work has defined the issues and terms of academic writing on lesbian theater, butch-femme role playing, ...

, 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. ...

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 for Sustained Excellence in Performance. In 2005, Margolin won the Joseph Kesselring Prize 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 ...

. She currently teaches playwrighting and performance as an associate professor at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

. Her work includes ''O Yes I Will'', a detailed account of her experiences and insights on being under general anaesthesia. Margolin was forced to revise her 2010 play ''

Imagining Madoff ''Imagining Madoff'' is a 2010 play by playwright Deb Margolin that tells the story of an imagined encounter between Bernard Madoff, the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and his victims. Margoli ...

'' 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 laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in Fr ...

, 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 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) * ''

'' (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