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To The Dogs & The Dove

by Djuna Barnes

Like & Murder Cake

by Diane di Prima
article in sfgate.com by Apollinaire Scherr

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Don't Be Absurd!

Traditionally, absurdist theater has been something of a
boy's club: Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter, Albee. Perhaps
inundation by the humdrum absurdities of daily life has
weakened women's appetite for vast existential questions.
But Christina Augello, the enterprising director of Exit
Theater and its six-month Absurdist Season, knew that if
she tweaked the definition of "absurdist" a bit, she'd find
plenty of women writers in love with the absurd. In the
second to last offering of the season, the Exit presents
rarely staged works by the high priestess of modernism
Djuna Barnes and famed beat poet Diane di Prima.

Called the Garbo of Greenwich Village for her extreme
reclusiveness (neighbor ee cummings would shout across
the courtyard, "Are you alive over there, Djuna'"), Barnes is
most celebrated for her tragic 1936 novel, "Nightwood." But
before "Nightwood" and before giving up writing completely,
she penned a couple of odd, intriguing short plays. In "The
Dove" and "To the Dogs," it's as if Ibsen took on the voice of
Oscar Wilde -- Barnes depicts the thwarted lives of her
women with aphoristic wit. Among SF poet Diane di Prima's
thirty-three books of poetry and prose are the two surreal
word scores, "Like" and "Murder Cake," created when
Dante, Emma, Richard Lovelace and Childe Harold jumped
off her shelves and started to chatter. Di Prima sat very
quietly, and listened.
Apollinaire Scherr, SF Gate

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