Event

IT'S ALL THE RAGE by Marilyn Pittman at The Marsh SF

The Marsh is proud to present Marilyn Pittman's IT'S ALL THE RAGE. Pittman developed IT'S ALL THE RAGE as one of six artists invited to join The Marsh's second Performance Initiative in 2009. She performed the show to sold-out houses and standing ovations as part of the Festival of New Voices II in June of this year.

After Pittman's parents died, she poured through her mother's journals and her father's post-WWII love letters, trying to find answers to her questions. Did her parents really love each other? Why did they stay married if they were so unhappy? Could she and her siblings have seen this coming? Gradually, she came to understand how a once-loving and mutually dependant relationship eroded over time into dangerous patterns of hate and fear. As she researched her father's WWII service in Germany, she noticed parallels to the rash of murder-suicides by soldiers returning from Iraq and to the wave of domestic violence, gun violence and raging mass murders during the years since they died. This realization that her parents' tragedy connected to others' and to the pervading issue of violence, transformed what was deeply personal into something that was also relevant to the larger world.

Pittman emerged from the San Francisco gay comedy scene during the AIDS era. She made her name at Josie's Cabaret in San Francisco's Castro district, performing countless headliner sets as well as her two solo shows 'Thank You For Sharing' and 'But Enough About You.' LGBT audiences from Provincetown to Anchorage rolled in the aisles at her wild and funny takes on right wing fundamentalists, personal ads, gay sex, lesbian relationships (including her own) and an assortment of annoying self-help books. She is a G.L.A.A.D. Media Award winner from that time for her work as an 'out' comic.