Almost from the beginning Audre Lorde questioned the fundamental tag of identity: her name. As a chubby, unruly five-year-old, she dropped the "y" from "Audrey," enjoying the aesthetic balance that "Audre Lorde," with its double "e," created on her blue-lined notebook paper. Later in life she would a

Agitated, Angry, Bombast, Feminist, In-your-face, New black aesthetic, Power, Visceral

Spalding Gray splashed into the national consciousness with the epic monologue-cum-performance piece "Swimming to Cambodia" (1985), a distinctive solo show that has been on the road in some incarnation for well-nigh 20 years. He cut his teeth on Postmodern performance theory with SoHo's experimental

Agitated, Epic, Neurotic, Solo performance

America's premier poet of twentieth-century theater dominated the stage for almost 20 years. Despite his fall into ignominy and artistic disfavor in the final years of his career, Tennessee Williams is still considered one of the world's finest dramatists. Together with Arthur Miller, Williams pionee

Agitated, Anxiety, Death, Homoerotic, Melancholy, Neurotic, Off-broadway, Post-war theater, Sexy, Southern gothic

The work of Philip K. Dick represents some of the most influential writing to come out of the 1950s and 1960s. His explorations into the tenuous nature of reality have influenced thinkers across disciplines and genres. Recognizing that reality is a construct -- he disturbingly called it a "consensual

Agitated, Cyberpunk fiction, Dark, Distorted, Dystopic, Fantastic, Layered, Machinistic, Noir / pulp fiction, Religious, Trippy