THEATRE

What card-carrying lesbian hasn’t read The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, Ann Bannon’s series of groundbreaking 1950s lesbian pulp fiction novels (as if we had to explain what they were)? See your favorite lovelorn lesbian characters come to life in the new stage adaptation of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, at the Fourth Street  Theatre starting Sept 27 (featuring a special audience talk-back with writer Ann Bannon after that night’s performance). Set in pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles celebrates the era when “the love that dares not speak its name” began breaking the old rules. Fueled by booze and furtive sex, the play follows the lives and loves of Laura, Beth and Beebo as they navigate uncharted territories of desire.

Sept 19–Oct 13, the Manhattan Theatre Source presents the 8th Annual Estrogenius Festival, a celebration of women’s voices including theater, solo shows, music, visual art and dance. This annual festival is committed to providing opportunities to female artists ranging from the emerging to the seasoned professional. This year’s highlights include Melissa Maxwell’s Fetus Envy, Shoshona Currier’s The End and T.D. Mitchell’s In Dog Years.

Girl meets gang, girl loses gang, girl gets girl gang! Sept 22–30, Angry Girl Gang Productions presents a newly-revised production of the acclaimed musical GIRL GANG at The Atlantic Stage 2. This slice of 1950s American juvenile delinquency offers a darkly comic twist to the teen pulp fiction genre. Follow DiDi, a clean teen looking to escape her sordid home life, down a path of infamy and eventual redemption in a reform school with other girls gone wild (including Myra, a tough teen-age lesbian with a heart of gold).

Sept 13–Oct 25, hot emerging theater troupe The Gossip Factory presents 4f: The New Class at The Laurie Beechman Theater. 4f: The New Class takes audiences on an emotional journey back to the glorious days of book reports and bus rides, hall passes and history, puberty and, of course, Phys Ed. Watch as the kids of Halliburton Middle School (straight, lesbian, bi and gay) face all the trials and tribulations of middle class bourgeois life and the struggle to achieve the American Dream of today’s youth.

Sexy erotic comedy Mastering Sex & Tortillas tackles sexuality, race, gender and immigration through a queer Chicana lens, now through Sept 29 at Teatro LA TEA’s Lower East Side. Writer and performer Adelina Anthony plays La Profesora Mama Chocha, a high-femme and high-drama seminar instructor who more than educates her audience on Lesbianism 101 from a “tortillera” point of view. After the intermission, she returns as debonair FBI agent Papi Duro, who has plenty of work to do “under the covers.”

One of the biggest musical theater events in the world, the New York Musical Theatre Festival hits the city Sept 17–Oct 2. Each fall, the NYMF presents more than thirty new musicals at venues in the midtown theater district, and additionally, features a wide range of special events, readings and concerts of new music, explorations of musicals in TV and film, and unusual collaborations with other New York-based arts organizations. Don’t miss dyke fave Lea DeLaria in Roller Derby, an original musical about the hard-hitting sports phenomenon referred to in the title.