Sue-Ellen Case

Split Britches : Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance

1. Split Britches 2. Beauty and the Beast 3. Upwardly Mobile Home 4. Little Women 5. Belle Reprieve 6. Lesbians Who Kill 7. Lust and Comfort.

Herbert Blau: 1926–2013

I was not yet 20 when I wandered into Ruby Cohn’s class in Modern Drama at San Francisco State College. Hanging around her office, as undergrads will when the class is life-altering, I noticed that her officemate was often, in the morning, taking a nap. Herb had been up late rehearsing at the Actor’s Workshop and was napping before teaching his classes. It was the golden age of SF State, when working-class students like me could still afford an education, and brilliant teachers, like Herb, son of a plumber, could inspire a generation that would hit the strike lines in favor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies, facing off riot-geared cops in front of the English Department. That same practice of radical knowing, always Herb’s signature, led him to take Waiting for Godot out of the theatre and into San Quentin penitentiary, and to envision a Cal Arts that would bring together the leading avantgarde artists and scholars at that raucous time, with Alan Kaprow’s students doing a “hum in” on the lawn, while Angela Davis visited the class of Maurice Stein.