Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts

by Cherríe L. Moraga

Giving Up the Teatro in Two Acts

Genres: Plays, Drama, LGBT, School

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Cherríe Lawrence Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at Stanford University in the Department of Drama and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her works explore the ways in which gender, sexuality and race intersect in the lives of women of color.

Moraga was one of the few writers to write and introduce the theory on Chicana lesbianism. Her interests include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race, particularly in cultural production by women of color. There are not many women of color writing about issues that queer women of color face today: therefore, her work is very notable and important to the new generations. In the 1980s her works started to be published. Since she is one of the first and few Chicana/Lesbian writers of our time, she set the stage for younger generations of other minority writers and activists.

Moraga has taught courses in dramatic arts and writing at various universities across the United States and is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, performed at the Brava Theatre Company of San Francisco in May, 1996, won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award, from the Kennedy center for the Performing Arts. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1983, a group which did not discriminate against homosexuality, class, or race. it is the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States.

Moraga is currently involved in a Theatre communications group and was the recipient of the NEA Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award Her plays and publications have won and received national recognition including a TCG Theatre Residency Grant, a National Endowment for the art fellowship for play writing and two Fund for New American Plays Awards in 1993. She was awarded the United States artist Rockefeller Fellowship for literature in 2007.In 2008 she won a Creative Work Fund Award. The following year, in 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

stood in a used bookstore and read the entire thing in one go. more on the experimental side but reads gorgeously, perfectly rhythmic and powerful.

[Felix · Rating 4 out of 5]

You get some interesting things when you read Moraga's work on sexuality and gender role issues. Prominent themes in most of her work. She's a great playwright that is able to complicate her audience's thoughts about what it is they are witnessing or reading in her plays. Similarly here, the audience bears witness to Marisa/Corky as she reflects on her life and the companionship she seeks from Amalia.

[Bea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trigger Warning: Rape

[lil afghani · Rating 5 out of 5]

fkn beautiful

[Mei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for Latina/o Lit Class.

I liked it but the character Marisa was a bit off to me. I know/ dated many "dykes" that had this issue of "wanting" to be a man. Not that they want to be a man but they want to be treated and desired by women like they are. But again I felt she went a little too overboard, then again I could be wrong. I do want to see the play and maybe my views will change.