Penny Arcade

Penny Arcade is the stage name of Susana Ventura (born 1950), a performance artist and playwright based in New York City.

Ventura's long association with avant-garde performance in New York began at age 17, when she performed with John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous, and appeared in the Jackie Curtis play Femme Fatale, followed by an appearance in the Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey movie Women in Revolt. She traveled in Europe during the 1970s, and returned to New York in 1981, where she worked with many underground theatre artists including Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam and Hibiscus's Angels of Light. She was a friend of Quentin Crisp, and the two created a long-running performance/interview piece, The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp.

She has been performing her own monologues since 1985, mostly in New York. In the late 1980s she created a character named Margo Howard-Howard, a 50-year-old drag queen with a scandalous past, for her performances.^[1] The New York Times refers to the character as "patently unbelievable", but in a later article acknowledges that her monologue was "based on real Lower East Side residents." Howard-Howard received an obituary in The Village Voice.

in the 1990s she toured internationally with her most popular show, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, which, like much of her work, was an opinionated commentary on sexual norms and censorship; it featured a chorus of amateur reverse strippers. In 1998 she performed at the first Gay Shame event (as opposed to gay pride) at DUMBA in Brooklyn; she appears in the documentary film of the event by Scott Berry, entitled Gay Shame '98. Her 2002 performance New York Values, which also toured abroad, dealt with another of her major concerns: the loss of cultural identity in New York during the Giuliani years.

Penny Arcade is a co-founder of the Lower East Side Biography Project, a video production and oral history workshop that trains participants in documentary filmmaking and preserves the stories of Lower Manhattan artists and activists. Recently profiled individuals have included Herbert Huncke, Jayne County, and Marty Matz, among others.

She is married to musician Chris Rael, with whom she performs all over the world.

References

External links

• Penny Arcade at the Internet Movie Database
• Penny Arcade at Allmovie
• Penny Arcade's website