When Deb Margolin walks into a room, people pay attention. An enigmatic combination of water nymph and she-devil, Deb instantly captivates an audience with her infectious smile, uproarious anecdotes, and unfathomable appreciation that anyone would want to listen to her stories about life in the theatre. A playwright, performance artist, professor, and mother, Deb is the quintessential feminist - fiery, intelligent, compassionate, ridiculously funny, and until recently, virtually unknown outside of feminist and experimental performance circles. I had the privilege of meeting Deb in my Master's Thesis seminar at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University in late November, 2004. As a performer, activist, and educator, I hung on each of Deb's poetic and insightful words, eager to glean everything I could from a woman who so embodies feminist practice.

Born in a predominantly African-American community in Westchester County, New York, Deb cultivated early on a respect and affinity for those whose identities diverged from her own. Deb never hesitates to step out of her comfort zone and try something new. For example, although she was an undergraduate English major at New York University, her senior year she had the realization she "knew nothing about matter" and decided to finish her degree by studying science.

Shortly after college, Deb met the man who would change her life, Joe Friendly. Although he pretty much thought he was Jesus, she nevertheless followed him all over New York, eventually to Women's Experimental Theater Project's production of Electra Speaks. For Deb, this was the "most radical and stunning thing I ever saw, normal women performing their lives." Particularly poignant for Deb was the image from the production where a woman drew an invisible line across the stage with her toe and dared to cross over it. "This was huge," says Deb, women daring to create a counter history and putting it up on a stage.

A year later, Deb's on again, off again best friend re-emerged in her life. She first took her to see Spiderwoman Theatre's production of An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images, for which she was the business manager. Deb found the performance "wildly funny" and political and it did something for female audiences that "got over saying the word vagina a long time ago."

Not long after, Deb officially entered the world of performance writing. Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, who would go on with Deb to start the groundbreaking lesbian performance group Split Britches, asked Deb's on again, off again best friend to bring Deb to a workshop. Their writer had taken off for Europe with all of their money and they had one week until their show, about three women in Virginia, opened. Deb went to the workshop, found the women's "throwing pie dough and cackling" utterly ridiculous and went back to her friend's house, assuming nothing more would come from the exchange. But the women called her, asking if she had written anything and Deb lied with a resounding yes. Disturbed in bed that night by a mosquito's incessant buzzing and a frisky cat, Deb spent the night on her friend's bathroom floor with a pad of paper and a pencil and pumped out monologues, scenes and songs for what would become Split Britches first show, Split Britches.

Deb accidentally became the resident writer for the three white women, lesbian company which would go on to produce a variety of lesbian feminist shows such as Upwardly Mobile Home, Little Women: The Tragedy, Beauty and the Beast, and Lesbians Who Kill. She describes the group's collective creation process as one where "ideas went up in a collective way and came down in scenes, monologues, songs and images, glued together with personal memories." Although Deb considers her time with Split Britches as a writer, collaborator and ultimately a performer as some of the most prolific years of her life, Deb felt "a fire in her pocket," the same words the New York Post used to describe Split Britches many years back. Deb needed to use language to explore other images more closely related to her own experience, "images of divinity and mortality," and images and language that would allow Deb to engage with her heteronormativity. Deb's solo performance career was born.

"I hate the term performance artist," Deb confesses to our class. "It's pejorative," connotes a "bullshit artist. I am a playwright." Nevertheless, Deb has frequently been placed in this category. Her performance work embodies the ideals of a theatre of the poor because it can happen anywhere. For Deb, it is highly appealing because it is "a theatre of desire." It is written from the body and is highly sexual. "I have to change my clothes twice," Deb says, "when I'm writing something erotic." In addition to female sexual desire, Deb's performance work has looked at everything from Monica Lewinsky, to Beckett and Shakespeare. It has probed the boundaries between the real and the mediated, investigated the structure of language, critiqued desire for religious assimilation, and used performance to muck with commonly held notions of temporality.

Deb's post-Split Britches, predominantly solo performance work has been performed in such New York City venues as P.S. 122, HERE Arts Center, Women's Interart Theater, and Dixon Place. These works include Of All the Nerve; 970-DEBB; Gestation; Of Mice, Bugs and Women; Carthieves! Joyrides!; O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, and my favorite, for its playful and poignant look at the relationship between the critic and the performer, Critical Mass>. Deb has also gone on to write plays and in late spring 2004 saw, Three Seconds in the Key (which was loosely based on her relationship with her son during her recent bout with cancer) performed by New Georges at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City. She has received grants as a Franklin Furnace Artist and New York Foundation for the Arts Performance fellow and prior to her current position as an Instructor in Theatre Studies at Yale University, she has been an instructor at universities around the country, including an artist-in-residence at Hampshire College and Lecturer at The Tisch School of the Arts and The Gallatin School at New York University. She has also appeared on TV on Comedy Central and HBO.

For Deb, writing from the body is "an amazing resource for creation" because "the body holds memory." Deb differentiates such solo performance from method acting because in method acting, one is attempting to lose oneself in a character. In solo performance, there is no illusion. An audience is encouraged to see the muddy intersections between writer, performer, and character.

Although Deb is currently an instructor at Yale, she clearly delineates between theory and performance. "You cannot have the critical side of you present when you're making performance," Deb warns. "You write from your body, your place of desire. No body has dreamer's block." For Deb, the theory comes in during the staging of a performance, often times from the guidance of a director or other outside eye. Deb reminds our class of budding female artists, "Nobody gives women the stage; we must steal it!" This cannot happen if one is constantly second guessing herself.

Deb is also mindful of how others have tried to write her out of history. She considers herself a scholar as well as an artist and asks, "Can't I participate in the discussion even if I don't have a PhD?" She equally resents her marginalized place in queer performance history. Although she is usually mentioned in historical and scholarly writings about Split Britches, she is often described as "the Jewish girl," her heterosexual identity obscured and her desire to belong to a lesbian-identified performance group unproblematized.

Deb, who will be returning to New York City to perform her new solo work, Index to Idioms, at The Culture Project this March-April 2005, concludes her Q and A with my class by giving us all her e-mail address, encouraging us to be in touch so that we can perhaps "one day make theatre together." Deb is the real deal. She is ferociously talented, incredibly supportive of the next generation of feminist performers and theoreticians, and has enough fire in her pocket to keep her writing and performing for many decades to come.