Book Celebration—Late Stage: Theatre, Aging, and the Legacy of Elinor Fuchs

Book Celebration—Late Stage: Theatre, Aging, and the Legacy of Elinor Fuchs

Join us for an evening of conversation, performance, and remembrance celebrating the release of Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging, edited by Benjamin Gillespie and Cindy Rosenthal with the late Elinor Fuchs. This landmark anthology is the first comprehensive collection to bring age studies into dialogue with theatre and performance scholarship, challenging ageist narratives of decline and reimagining aging as a dynamic, socially shaped dimension of identity. The collection explores key works by figures including Caryl Churchill, Jordan Harrison, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, Split Britches, and many others. 

The evening will also honor the legacy of the late scholar Elinor Fuchs (1933–2024), Yale emerita professor and CUNY Graduate Center alumna, whose collaboration and intellectual vision were central to the project. The evening will feature panel conversations with the editors along with contributors Bonnie Marranca, Hillary Miller, Scott Magelssen, Dorothy Chansky, and Valerie Barnes Lipscomb alongside performances by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, with additional participants to be announced.

The event will conclude with a reception and book signing. 

*The event will be livestreamed as well.

Benjamin Gillespie is Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University. He is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) and Performance Review Editor of Theatre Journal. He is editor of Split Britches: Fifty Years On (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and co-editor of Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America (Routledge, 2027).in North America (Routledge, 2027). 

Cindy Rosenthal is Professor of Drama at Hofstra University. She has authored/edited six books on the avant-garde, radical ensembles, playwriting, and directing and contributed essays to The New York Times, Performance Research, Theatre Survey and TDR. Her monograph, Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre won the 2017 George Freedley Prize.

Elinor Fuchs (1933-2024) authored/edited five books, including The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater after Modernism, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism and Making an Exit a family memoir about dementia and aging. She was Professor Emerita of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale’s David Geffen School where she taught from 1987 to 2015.

Panelists:

Valerie Barnes Lipscomb is Professor of English at the University of South Florida. She is lead editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (2024) and Staging Age (2010), as well as author of Performing Age in Modern Drama (2016). She serves as treasurer of the North American Network in Aging Studies. 

Dorothy Chansky is Professor Emerita of Theatre in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Losing It: Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in the American Theatre; Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience; and Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre.

Scott Magelssen teaches Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington. His books include Performing Flight: From the Barnstormers to Space Tourism; Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning; and the co-edited collections Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance and Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions, and Enacting History.

Bonnie Marranca is founding editor and publisher of PAJ Publications. Her books include Timelines: writings and conversations, Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, Theatrewritings, and Conversations with Meredith Monk. She has also edited the anthologies Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, Conversations on Art and Performance, New Europe: plays from the continent, and Plays for the End of the Century.

Hillary Miller is the author of Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and Playwrights on Television: Conversations with Dramatists (Routledge, 2020). She teaches at Queens College, City University of New York and is an affiliate faculty member in the Theatre and Performance doctoral program at the Graduate Center (CUNY).

Performers:

Peggy Shaw is a performer, writer, producer and teacher. She has collaborated with Lois Weaver and Split Britches since 1980. Peggy has received three OBIE Awards and was the recipient of the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Theatre Performer of the Year Award in 2005. Her book, A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw, edited by Jill Dolan won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for LBGT Drama. Peggy was the 2011 recipient of the Ethyl Eichelberger Award for the creation of Ruff, which explores her experiences of having a stroke. She was a recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award and a 2017 United States Artist Fellowship.

Lois Weaver is an artist, activist and teacher. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Fellow for 2016-2018. Lois co-founded both Spiderwoman Theater and WOW Cafe Theatre in NYC. She has collaborated with Peggy Shaw and Split Britches since 1980. Recent performances includeUnexploded Ordnances (2016-18) and Last Gasp; A Recalibration (2020-23). Her experiments in performance as public engagement include Long Tables, Porch Sittings, and Care Cafes, and public facilitator, Tammy WhyNot. Lois’s performance practice is documented in The Only Way Home Is Through the Show: Performance Works of Lois Weaver, edited by Lois Weaver and Jen Harvie (2015).