Sallie Bingham

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You are here: Home / Theater / Show Business

Show Business

October 12th, 2014 by Sallie Bingham in Theater Leave a Comment

Show Business - Sallie BinghamEvery few years, for reasons no has explored, women playwrights find a less chilly reception than we have usually encountered in the theatre. Such a blissful period, in the eighties, ushered in my first plays, and now another blessed moment gives me a chance to submit one of those first plays to a short play festival in New York.

The best thing about being a newbie in the business of theatre is that everything seemed possible. No one was talking, yet, about the need to keep the cast size under four, to use only one, minimal set, and to imitate as far as possible—and of course this was never said—whatever had succeeded off-Broadway the previous season, which usually means a play about a family with a screaming mother.

When I wrote Couvade, which you can read on this post, I was noticing that suddenly “we” were pregnant—the presumptive father as well as the mother, somehow sharing the experience which, as I remembered it, is utterly unsharable. Perhaps like death…

Imagining what it would be like for a man to be, literally, pregnant, I wrote Couvade. The title comes from an ancient practice in Polynesia; when a woman there went into labor, the man involved went into labor, too, with all the same groans and screams.

Every few years, for reasons no has explored, women playwrights find a less chilly reception than we have usually encountered in the theatre. Such a blissful period, in the eighties, ushered in my first plays, and now another blessed moment gives me a chance to submit one of those first plays to a short play festival in New York.

But men don’t ordinarily groan and scream, except perhaps in combat, and so the whole idea of a man would be, for the duration of his labor, wrenched apart.
Couvade was performed at Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, as part of a short-lived series of plays by women. In my perhaps glorified memory, they were all brilliant. And, almost as certainly, only one of them ever reappeared again on the stage.

But Couvade may live again, and in that case, you will have been among the first to read it.

Download a .pdf of Couvade

Read the original 1983 New York Times review of Couvade and other plays performed in “83 Shorts.”

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In Theater Couvade theatre

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
Taken by the Shawnee Reading

Taken by the Shawnee Reading

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This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

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salliebingham avatar Sallie Bingham @salliebingham ·
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Years ago a man I was in love with persuaded me to have a large fish pond dug near my studio. I think it was his attempt to be part of my necessarily solitary life there; like other such attempts it failed—and now I'm left with the fish pond! https://buff.ly/fGgnN39 #Koi #KoiPond

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salliebingham avatar Sallie Bingham @salliebingham ·
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Our wisdom outlasts kingdoms and democracies and tyrannies. It is for all places all people and all times. Unfortunately our wisdom can be bought, suborned, which is what I see in all the pretty women around Mr. T. "Lady Wisdom": https://buff.ly/mKAYBnf #HagiaSophia #DonaldTrump

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Sallie Bingham's latest is a captivating account of ancestor's ordeal
Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican

“I felt she was with me” during the process of writing the book, Bingham says. “I felt I wasn’t writing anything that would have seemed to her false or unreal.”

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