![]() ![]() Her play has plenty of sharp and ribald humor, sharply defined characters, and a good deal of truthfulness in its observations of a certain class of people–bourgeois, upper-middle-class Manhattan lesbians who live for their summer rental cottages in the beach colonies along Long Island Sound. New York audiences in 1980 found Bluefish Cove an exhilarating and liberating experience simply because its protagonists’ sexual orientation was never questioned they actually reveled in the fact that Chambers had written “a soap opera for us.”įor soap opera is exactly what Bluefish Cove is–and Chambers, winner of a 1973 National Writers Guild Award for her work on the TV series Search for Tomorrow, was a specialist in the sudsy style. That sounds like such a simple thing but consider that the two most influential dramas about lesbians in 20th-century theater are Lillian Hellman’s outrageously homophobic The Children’s Hour (in which the closeted lesbian heroine commits suicide out of guilt for feeling an “unnatural” attraction to her straight best friend) and Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George (in which the defiant dyke heroine is left jobless and loverless because she refuses to act discreetly in “normal” society), and you’ll see just how ambitious Chambers’s intention was. ![]() Now it is having what is apparently its first professional Chicago staging at the hands of a new women’s company, the Footsteps Theatre.Ĭhambers’s aim, like that of other writers in the gay-play movement, was to offer her audiences something they had been denied by mainstream drama: lesbian characters who were secure in their sexuality and comfortable with each other’s friendship. First presented in 1980 by the Glines (the gay performing arts organization that also gave the world Torch Song Trilogy) with a cast that included Jean Smart (now of Designing Women) and Chicagoan Ellie Schadt, Bluefish Cove proved a “crossover” success in subsequent off-Broadway and regional productions. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreationīefore she died of a brain tumor in 1983 at age 46, Jane Chambers was one of the most important contributors to the gay-play movement her best-known work was Last Summer at Bluefish Cove. ![]()
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