WOW Cafe Theatre

In the late 1970s while touring through Europe with Hot Peaches and Spiderwoman Theater, we went to festivals in Europe and saw the ways in which they combined film screenings, performance, theater, dancing, drinking, and socializing in a way we didn’t have in New York. This was also the period of Reaganomics, and the effects of that hit us hard, pushing performers out of theaters and into alternative spaces.

We started to have conversations with our friends Pamela Camhe and Jordy Mark about starting a festival in New York, and one day after seeing three rainbows above the All-Craft Center building we asked if we could hold the festival there. The All-Craft Center said yes, and we were on our way with a venue seating 400 people. Next, we asked the Village Voice if they would report on the festival and they said yes! Now we had everything we needed except money and performers. So every day all day we would sit out on St. Marks, recruiting volunteers, materials, and money. All of this became the Women’s One World (WOW) Festival in 1980 and 1981.

Over the course of eleven days, 36 shows from 8 countries were performed for hungry New York lesbians. By the second year of the festival, we had presented over a hundred international performers and filled our theatres, bars, cinemas and cafes with many who had never encountered contemporary and experimental performance, let alone women’s experimental performance. Within 18 months WOW had a permanent space at 330 e. 11th street for a year-round festival of women’s and transgender peoples’ performance. The WOW Festival and Café started an infiltration of European women performers into NYC and the long term cross pollination of ideas and practices. The Festival helped us realize the possibility of having a permanent space, and WOW Café Theatre was established in 1983. Around 1984 WOW moved to the 1400ft loft space that it inhabits today at 59-61 east 4th street, and in 1990 WOW won an OBIE award.

WOW has always been an important part of our history, and we are proud to see it continue to thrive to this day. WOW has no Artistic Director nor any centralized control over the works that appear, and Producers have artistic liberty to produce what they desire. The theater is collectively owned and operated, and the tradition is that women and/or transgender people provide the central creative impetus behind a show at WOW.

Over the years many prominent artists such as Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron and the Five Lesbian Brothers.  Numerous articles have been written about WOW, including ‘The Wow Café’ by Alisa Solomon in The Drama Review. The book, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, Staging the Unimaginable at the Wow Café Theatre by Kate Davy, documents WOW and its 30 years of developmental work in lesbian and women’s performance in New York City. To date, WOW has never had an artistic director, nor an institutionalized system of governance. It is run purely on the passion and endurance of the collective and is thriving.

Read our manifesto on The Good Guide for Creating a Non Cooperative; or, How to Organize a Collective that will Last for More Than 30 Years.