Album Notes

The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
Written and Performed by Carolyn Gage

Here, at last on CD, is the explosive, award-winning, lesbian underground classic that has been performed around the world!

This one-woman show, about a a teen-aged, cross-dressing, runaway, lesbian Joan of Arc who has returned from the dead to share her experiences of patriarchal betrayal with contemporary audiences, has been transforming women’s lives for two decades.

Carolyn Gage is one of the most prolific and controversial contemporary playwrights. She is the author of six books on lesbian theatre, and more than fifty-five plays. In this electrifying performance, she embodies the militant French heroine, replacing history’s “simple-minded peasant girl” with the “cross-dressing butch with the smart mouth.”

The play has been featured on Public Radio International, and it has been performed in Dublin, Malta, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, Montreal and Toronto… as well as Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, Portland, and Salt Lake City.

The play has won literary awards, been anthologized twice, and is used as a textbook for courses on women’s studies, queer studies, and theatre. Gage has toured with the play to dozens of colleges and universities, as well as conferences and festivals. In 2009, it was the title work of the book that won the national Lambda Literary Award in Drama.

The Second Coming of Joan of Arc has been called a manifesto, an epic, an underground classic, an exorcism, a catharsis, a channeling, a recruiting speech, a piece of propaganda, a deconstruction, a revisionist view of history, a reclamation, a diatribe. But whatever the label, the play continues to catalyze women's anger, and its remarkable history makes it a watershed in the history of women's theatre.