Legend has it that Bertolt Brecht's world was turned upside down by a Chinese opera star. The European playwright, who felt that physicality had more integrity than speech, met a revelation of the body's true mutability in the person Mei Lan-Fang. To Brecht's amazement, Mei could use pure movement to

Chinese opera, Elegant, Epic, Mythic, Pioneering

"I'm the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down." -- Hedwig An East German war bride looks after a young boy in a Kansas trailer park. She is an ex-prostitute who turns her young charge on to Barry Manilow. The story seems lifted from a tabloid, but these are actual childhood memories for one unusual

Angry, New american musical, Perverse, Pop, Tragic

"M. Butterfly" is the ostensibly true story of a French diplomat who carries on a 17-year affair with a bewitching Chinese opera star, only to discover that she is not only a spy, but also a man. The play, rooted in a tabloid headline and realized in a retelling of Puccini's famous "Madam Butterfly,"

Eclectic, Epic, Layered, Off-broadway, Political

"To me, the television is sex, the bed is sex, the sky is sex, you're sex, I'm sex, everything is sex." Annie Sprinkle flies bare-breasted and smiling in the face of art-world pretension. Her work, a marriage of performance, pornography, spirituality, and science, is the undiluted product of 25 y

Bad girl art, Ebullient, Feminist theater, In-your-face, Joyful, Opulent, Repetitive, Sexy, Technology