Vagina Rex & The Gas Oven by Jane Arden
Join us for an On Her Shoulders Reading of Vagina Rex and The Gas Oven by Jane Arden!
Vagina Rex & The Gas Oven (1969)
by Jane arden
Directed by Liadin stewart; Dramaturgy by Osimiri sprowal
thursday, september 17, 7:00pm @ New Perspectives Studio (458 West 37 Street @ 10th Avenue)
On Her Shoulders is pleased to present a staged reading of Vagina Rex & the Gas Oven by Jane Arden, with refreshments and a discussion to follow. Liadin Stewart, Program Manager for OHS, directs.
Arden was a ground-breaking figure in feminist theatre andVagina Rex and the Gas Oven was the first play to emerge from the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain. It remains a radical, innovative, dark, witty and challenging piece.
The play is a powerful, interdisciplinary text about female rage and pain in heterosexual marriage. In 1969 Arden brought together the radicalism of her feminist rage with the possibilities of experimental staging when Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven appeared at Jim Haynes‘s Arts Lab Drury Lane, directed by Jack Bond and became a huge success. Arts Lab in Drury Lane was a key site in the alternative London theatre scene of the 1960’s linked to Yoko Ono and David Bowie amongst many others.
Admission is $20
Proceeds will support the On Her Shoulders Program, which rediscovers women who wrote plays from the 10th Century to 1970. There are currently almost 600 women in the FREE International database and more are being added every week!
JANE ARDEN (1927-82), like many prolific women writers before and after her, could be described as a mad genius. Born Nora Patrice Morris in Pontypool, Wales, she went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began acting in the 1940s, starring in both television and film. Her first two plays Dear Little Liz and Conscience and Desire (1954) were first performed at the New Lindsay Theater Club, directed by her then husband Philip Saville. Her next play, The Party, premiered at the New Theater in 1958 and due to positive reviews received a six month run. By the mid -1960s, there was a sharp thematic pivot in her works which became imbued with the politics of the Women's Liberation Movement and anti-psychiatry movement brimming in the U.K at this time. Her film Separation (1967), which she starred in and co-directed, could be argued to be her greatest cinematic inquiry into these socio-political ideologies. Inarguably, her greatest theatrical exploration of feminist and anti-psychiatric politics is the masterfully startling play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1968).
LIADIN STEWART (Director) is a multidisciplinary international theater director and devisor based in NYC. She gravitates toward feminist work with absurdist themes. Her interest in horror and how female characters develop agency has defined what work she is drawn to. Stewart is interested in a collaborative process and workspace, inspired by her training in devised theater at Pace University, where she received her Bachelor's degree in Directing. Her work has been seen internationally in collaboration with the Institute of the Arts Barcelona where she presented excerpts from Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land, a harrowing tale of female friendship and reproductive freedom. Stewart recently returned from Romania where she presented her play The Prospectors at Festivalul Internațional de Teatru de la Sibiu.
OSIMIRI SPROWAL (Dramaturg) is an Afro-Indigenous, Trans, Queer/crip playwright, poet, and homeless rights activist. Getting their start in youth slam, they are an internationally award winning poet (CUPSI 2018). Their book Gemini: Duality of Self won the 2019 Shockwire Micro Chapbook contest. They have received fellowships with Till Arts and CoLab Arts. They were a 2022 Marshall Scholar, where they earned two degrees in the UK. They also wrote, directed and produced Perseus, a contemporary mythological retelling of the traditional Greek myth for the Camden Fringe Festival in London. Their work has been featured in 2026 TAKETEN MFA Festival. Presently, they are a Playwriting MFA candidate at Columbia University.