VAGINA REX & THE GAS OVEN: An ON HER SHOULDERS Event

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.

Originally published by Calder and Boyars in 1971, the play was long out of print, but has just been republished in Radical Rediscoveries – Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement in the 60s, 70s and 80s, edited and with an introduction by Susan Croft, Montez Press, 2025

Tickets are $20 and 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!

ON HER SHOULDERS was founded in 2013 to present rehearsed, staged readings of plays by women from across the spectrum of time and place, with contemporary dramaturgs contextualizing scripts for modern audiences. Since its creation, the OHS reading series has presented 71 plays by 56 writers from circa 955 to 1970 as well as special events on Theatre Women in the Suffrage and Radical Theatre Movements. A unique aspect of the Reading Series is the Play In Context component, which includes a dramaturgical essay that analyzes each featured play within its own time and place; a substantial playwright biography; and an introduction to a reading or performance by a dramaturg who brings a personal perspective to the dramatist and her work. All readings include a post-performance talk-back with refreshments.

For more information about ON HER SHOULDERS, contact Program Manager Liadin Stewart or visit https://tinyurl.com/OHSatNPTC