CAROLYN MYERS
Carolyn Myers met Terry Baum in a playwriting class at UC Santa Barbara in 1972. With many zany others, they created The Isla Vista Community Theater, which housed both The Isla Vista Feminist Theatre - one of the first feminist theaters and The Gorilla Theater, a political improvisation/sketch troupe.
In 1975, Carolyn moved to San Francisco to join Lilith, a women’s theater founded by Terry Baum. Lilith became internationally renowned, toured the West Coast and Europe, and was a major participant in the women’s movement. With Terry and Alice Thompson, Carolyn wrote and directed Dos Lesbos, a play by about and for perverts, in 1981. Dos Lesbos inspired the first anthology of lesbian plays, Places, Please and has had many productions over the past 35 years. In 2000, an Italian production offended the Pope.
With Dori Appel, Carolyn co-directed Mixed Company Theater in Ashland, Oregon, for over 20 years. Of their collaborative scripts, Girl Talk and Hot Flashes are published by Samuel French, Inc., and were featured at The National Women’s Theater Festival in Boston; the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of Women, in Seneca Falls, New York; and in New Orleans where popular Divas “of a certain age” performed Hot Flashes as their contribution to Katrina recovery efforts.
For fifteen years, beginning in 1987, Carolyn was the director of Southern Oregon teen theaters. The Crater Cabaret, a high school company, of “teens talking to teens about teen type topics,” spawned Duct Tape Theater for younger audiences, and Ophelia Rising, an all-girl troupe. The companies performed for tens of thousands of high school and middle school students throughout The Pacific Northwest. For this work, Carolyn together with co-director Cil Stengel, received recognition on local, state, and national levels, including a National Planned Parenthood Youth Outreach Award.
In 1999, Carolyn became a founding member of The Hamazons, Warrior Princesses of Comedy. Originally a company of seven fabulously funny women, The Hamazons, often in glamorous attire, have filled 100's of houses hundreds. It is all improv—never the same show twice.
Carolyn re-united with Terry Baum in 2008 to form a classic comedy duo, A Coupla Crackpot Crones. Pioneer funny feminists, popular in San Francisco, they have traveled throughout California, and to Oregon, New York, and New Mexico; appearing at conferences, at fringe festivals, at colleges, in community centers, in theaters, in living rooms, on the radio, and on YouTube.
Carolyn has directed the premiere production of over a dozen solo shows. She has written for Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, a teen health manual, and The We’Moon Calendar. Her epic poem She-Bop, about her life and hard times seeking The Goddess, was made into an animated film, and is being reimagined as a music video. Carolyn was inspired to revive Lilith Women's Theater in 2015 and directed Hick: A Love Story, Lilith’s first production.
