Comedy

5f (with doubling)

In Brave Smiles…Another Lesbian Tragedy, master satirists the Five Lesbian Brothers turn their merciless eyes on the history of lesbians in theater, film, and literature. From their dismal yet erotically charged beginnings at the orphanage under the grip of a sadistic headmistress, our five heroines cross continents and a century to face their absurdly tragic ends. Along the way, they experience alcoholism, suicide, loneliness, pill popping, blacklisting, and a malignant brain tumor. Students of the lesbian art of misery will recognize gleeful skewerings of The Well of Loneliness, The Group, Maedchen in Uniform, and The Children’s Hour in this rollicking, hilarious, and smart multicharacter classic.

“Smart, satirical farce that uses laughter and touches of raunchy humor to debunk the myth of the doomed lesbian.” – The New York Times

“Parodies gay clichés about lesbian destiny with deadly accuracy.” –LA Times

Published in The Five Lesbian Brothers, Four Plays

FEE: $75 per performance

About the authors
The Five Lesbian Brothers are Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, and Lisa Kron. The Brothers came together as a theater company in 1989 after performing together in various other combinations at the Obie award–winning WOW Cafe Theatre in New York City’s East Village.

Together the Brothers have written five plays, Voyage to Lesbos (1990), Brave Smiles (1992), The Secretaries (1994), Brides of the Moon (1996), and Oedipus at Palm Springs (2006), which was written by Maureen Angelos, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, and Lisa Kron.

The Brothers’ work has been presented Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway by New York Theatre Workshop, the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, the WOW Cafe Theatre, Downtown Art Company, Performance Space 122, Dixon Place, La Mama, the Kitchen, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris. They have toured to London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, Columbus, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, and the deep woods of Michigan. Their plays have also been produced by other companies throughout the United States and, believe it or not, in Zagreb, Croatia.

The Brothers are the recipients of a Village Voice Obie Award, a New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie"), a GLAAD Media Award, and a New York Press Award as Best Performance Group. An anthology of their plays entitled Five Lesbian Brothers/Four Plays was published in 2000 by Theatre Communications Group and was nominated for a Lambda Literary award.

Other Five Lesbian Brothers titles available from Samuel French:
Brides of the Moon
Oedipus at Palm Springs
The Secretaries
Voyage to Lesbos