A lesbian feminist performance artist and playwright with a flair for telling the outrageous stories of everyday lesbian life, Holly Hughes has grown used to controversy. But Holly' work is meant to create controversy, to shake audiences out of their complacency, and to provoke movement and thought.
Holly was born into an upper-middle-class family in Saginaw, Michigan. She graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1977. Holly moved to New York in 1979 and began to work with WOW Cafe, a lesbian theater group and storefront that was committed to experimentation.
Some of Holly' plays, such as Well of Horniness (1983) and The Lady Dick (1984), delve into the contradictions within the lesbian community itself. Other of her works tread the heavily mined territory of the family. World Without End (1989), for example, is about the death of her mother, while Clit Notes deals with her relationship with her father.
Although she has won two Obie awards for excellence in off-Broadway theater for her plays - Dress Suit to Hire (1988) and Clit Notes (1990) - her work has been called pornographic by both right-wing politicians and some members of the queer community.
Holly gained national notoriety in the early 1990s as one of the "NEA Four," artists who received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 but whose grants were then cancelled. In a climate of political conservatism and right-wing religious zealotry, the cancellations were justified on the basis of a clause in the organization's charter requiring that funded art be within "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public."
With the other artists - Karen Finley, John Fleck and Tim Miller - she sued the NEA not only to have their grants reinstated but also to change the wording in the charter. They argued that the vagueness of the clause allowed it to be used politically to limit the artists' freedom of speech. The grants were eventually reinstated, but the "decency clause" remains part of the NEA charter.
Holly began her career as a painter of abstract art, and she brings that same sense of abstraction to her work in the theater. Her plays deconstruct common realities and then reorder them to provide a fresh perspective. They combine satire, silliness, and camp to explore serious issues of contemporary life. The result is always exuberant, usually hilarious, and frequently disturbing.
