While not all feminist theatre is lesbian, most lesbian plays, given their reliance on women’s experiences and women’s relationships, are, arguably, feminist. In fact, both feminist and lesbian theatre can be traced back to the surge of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and the resultant collectives of all-women theatre groups formed to give voice to women’s lives. Certainly for Jane Chambers, the two always went hand-in-hand.

Chambers was born in South Carolina in 1937 and grew up in Florida. She started college there in 1954, but immediately became frustrated to learn that she would only be allowed to enroll in the playwriting and directing courses if there was space left after all the men in the program had signed up for them. She left in 1956 to study acting in California, and eventually ended up in Vermont, where she completed her undergraduate degree at Goddard in 1971 and met her lifelong companion, Beth Allen.

In the early 1970s, she received the Rosenthal Award for Poetry, an educational television award, and a Eugene O’Neill Fellowship. She had a play staged at the Women’s Interart Center in New York City as a result of her work there to establish a theatre program. A Late Snow was first produced in 1974, and it was to become her best known work. After its publication in 1979, it received at least a dozen productions in the first year, by gay-affiliated, women-centered, and even university theatres.

Chambers then began working with Glines, a theatre company in New York focused on presenting the gay and lesbian experience, and two of her other important plays, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove and My Blue Heaven, were produced for their 1st and 2nd Gay American Arts Festivals, respectively. Her last play, The Quintessential Image, was produced for the Women’s Theatre Conference in Minneapolis in 1982. In 1981, Chambers was diagnosed with cancer, and she succumbed to it in early 1983, at the age of 46.

Before she died, Chambers had received the Fund for Human Dignity Award; after her death, the Women in Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education created a playwriting award in her honor. 2003 marks the twentieth such award given. Sponsored by Smith College, UT Austin, and SMU (among others), the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award honors women creating plays or performance texts that both reflect women’s perspectives and provide opportunities for women performers.

What is significant about A Late Snow is exactly what makes Jane Chambers a major voice in feminist theatre history: it deals with the lives and loves of women who are comfortably homosexual, giving them such dignity and appeal that their story transcends attempts to confine it to a “niche”—and thus opens the door for other such stories to follow.

This essay was compiled from the following sources: Emily Sisley’s essay in A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance, edited by Carol Martin and Beth Kattelman’s on-line essay on Chambers.

[November 2003]

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