"Who Speaks and Who Is Spoken for?"

Joan Lipkin is uppity. No other word describes her as well. I suspect she was uppity long before she founded That Uppity Theatre Company in St. Louis in I988.' At a 1991 conference in Seattle, where she and I first talked, it was clear that this playwright, teacher, and director/producer had no patience for theorizing performance without seeing that theory into practice. A self-styled visitor in the land of academic conferences, Lipkin prefers to write and stage activist theatre, that is, theatre that presents itself as politically and socially engaged in its community. As a result, Lipkin's forays into theory are always performative and provocative. Speaking in Atlanta a year later about her play Some of My Best Friends Are...: A Gay and Lesbian Revuefor People of All Preferences, Lipkin returned in her own uppity fashion to the problems of creating activist theatre

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