Robbie McCauley

Major Works

• Sally's Rape (Obie Award for drama in which she also starred)
• Mississippi Freedom (drama)
• Quabbin Dance

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Biography of Robbie McCauley

Robbie McCauley,a celebrated  performance artist and theater director whose personal vision has consistently explored the "herstory" of Black women, was born in Virginia, but she has lived in many places in the South.

The presentation of her original work, SALLY'S RAPE, winner of a 1992 OBIE  Award for BEST NEW AMERICAN  PLAY (performed by Ms. McCauley with Jeannie Hutchinson) examines  "the silences around racism in  America that have gotten nailed in place" while recounting the life and survival of her great-great-grandmother, a slave on a Georgia plantation. (Source: Conjure Women )

Robbie McCauley is presently continuing her collaboration with Kamal Sinclair Steele on a revised version of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She recently performed her piece, love and race in the united states, at Texas A&M University last April, 2003,  and will direct  Daniel Alexander Jones’ Bel Canto this fall (2003) with Abe Rybek's Theater Offensive in Boston.

McCauley's none-too-conventional resume features an almost equal blend of academic work and performing. She has taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts. She has also worked as playwright, director and  actor in a long string of New York projects, including both Broadway and off-Broadway
productions, since the 1970's.

UPDATE 2008: Robbie McCauley is currently a member of the Performing Arts Faculty (Professor, 2001) at Emerson College. She has a B.A. from Howard University and an M.A. from New York University.

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A Review of Sally's Rape
from African American Review Winter, 1999

Sally's Rape: Robbie McCauley's Survival Art. African American Review, Winter, 1999,  by Ann E. Nymann

In the climactic scene of Sally's Rape, African-American performance artist Robbie McCauley stands naked on an auction block, encouraging spectators to bid on her body, while she describes the sale and repeated sexual abuse of her  great-great-grandmother, a slave. [1] As several feminist  performance theorists have noted, this particularly vivid image of McCauley crystallizes key issues in our discourse, such as the display of the black  female body, narratives of historical revision, and the centrality of identity, despite its various contingencies. [2] In this scene of bodily spectacle, as in  her more subtly crafted dialogue, how does McCauley manage to reclaim her  body from the inscriptions which have persistently haunted representations of women of color: the exotic other, white-man's pawn, tragic victim? Using black cultural studies and feminist performance theory, I will discuss how McCauley creates a space for self-representation, for emotional and intellectual reflection on a painful past, for talking back to the history of  victimization, and dismantling the structures of stereotype. [3]

Sally's Rape is a social experiment in which Robbie McCauley, an  African-American female performance artist, performs the black female subject out of victimization. Like any social or theatrical experiment, the  results are rather inconceivable to gauge. However, according to my own  reception, and that of other spectators, my evaluation is optimistic.

McCauley's contribution to the emerging black female theatrical subject is her development of an anti-racist, heuristic performance mode(l). She inherits a tradition of black performance which is both politically and  mimetically sophisticated, expanding it to express the often obscured experience of gender. McCauley's performance experiments demonstrate a  black female subject bearing witness to the confluent demons of racism and sexism in representation as well as in everyday life. In this essay, I will explicate McCauley's key heuristic tools--revision, embodiment, and dialogue--in the performance text of Sally's Rape.

Sally's Rape shares the theme of survival with two other performance pieces,  usually grouped under the series title "Confessions of a Working Class Black Woman." Since the mid-1980s, McCauley has performed this series as       works-in-progress, all of which center on stories from her family history. The first, My Father and the Wars, concerns McCauley's relationship with her father, and his life in military service. Indian Blood, part two, focuses on her  Native-American grandfather's participation in the genocide of his own people. In the third piece, Sally's Rape, McCauley shifts her focus to the experiences of women in her family. Each performance is about an ancestor's survival, but also about how McCauley tells their stories in painfully acute enactments which demonstrate the surviving impact of past events on present racial conflicts. [4]

Describing Sally's Rape is difficult, not only because of the intensity of the material but also because the performance text has varied greatly over the course of several years. It is now available in an anthology of plays by African-American women, but this published version was transcribed from a single event and cannot represent the many variations of this work-in-progress. Its inclusion in an anthology is important, however, because it will allow the play to reach a much wider audience, offering a  powerful representation of the black female subject in an interrogation of  American culture.

"Off Broadway" Artist Robbie McCauley performed at Humanities Conference held at Texas A & M, COLLEGE STATION. Award-winning writer and performer Robbie McCauley performed her latest work, "Love and Race in the United States Revisited as part of a Texas A&M University conference presented by the Center for Humanities Research.

An actor, performance artist, teacher and playwright, McCauley is a veteran of  "Off Broadway" and experimental theater in New York City.  According to the "Village Voice," McCauley's new piece begins with a  reminiscence from childhood: a Fourth of July picnic in the 1950s South during  which two of her aunts argued over whether it was appropriate for young Robbie to wear red shorts. But the performance soon jumps to other forms of address - a "professor of race" giving a lecture and a friend talking intimately about a romance  that failed.  The tacit questions embedded in the aunts' argument involve how a black woman's sexuality gets expressed and interpreted while examining related issues dealing with cultural assumptions and interracial romance.

McCauley created the role of Clara in Adrienne Kennedy's "A Movie Star Has to  Star in Black and White," directed by Joseph Chaiken and in Ed Bullins' "The Taking of Miss Janie," directed by the late Gilbert Moses.  She was featured in the ensemble production of "Beast Story" by Kennedy and  appeared in the Broadway production of "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" by Ntozake Shange.  Her performance theater works include "Confessions of a Working Class Black  Woman," a series of historical autobiographical pieces including "My Father and the   Wars," "Indian Blood," and "Sally's Rape," which received both an OBIE and a Bessie (Achievement in Performance) award.

Source:  Texas A&M University

Robbie McCauley is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a nationally recognized performance artist. She has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for three decades. One of the original cast members who devised for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Ms. McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country, striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local whites and blacks. In 1998, one of her pieces was highlighted as one of the "The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" by the Village Voice, a roster that included work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and  John Cage.

Source: FracturedAtlas.org

Related Websites

An interview with Robbie McCauley by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Review of Sally's Rape by Ann E. Nyman.

History of Drowned Town Meets Art in Quabbin Dance by Robbie McCauley

Link to Emerson College Faculty page for McCauley

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