About

Radio Interviewer:
Perhaps you can tell a little more about these women. Who are they?

Jane Chambers:
Well, they're not based on any very specific characters. As a matter of fact someone once said they're the Eight Faces of Jane, which is me the playwright, eight schizophrenic sides of my personality.

- 1981 Radio interview
on Last Summer at Bluefish Cove

The Eight Faces of Jane

Five women are trapped in a forest cabin during a snowstorm.

Four of them want to sleep with Ellie.

A young innocent woman wanders into a lesbian summer community and promptly captures the heart of the resident heartbreaker.

Two women are living out an idyllic and back-breaking life of back-to-the-land, when an ex-boyfriend suddenly shows up to further test the bonds of their relationship.

Thirty years ago gay marriage and entire cable channels aimed at gay and lesbian audiences would have seemed impossible. One playwright did see her extended lesbian and gay community as a family and her fourteen-year relationship with another woman as a marriage. She re-created these visions in her plays - a lesbian wedding scene in My Blue Heaven, the extended family in Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, the ménage-a-cinq fantasy of A Late Snow. Her plays have been in production ever since.

A generation after Chambers' death her work has become more socially relevant and remains, as always, hysterically funny. This documentary brings Chambers' life, loves, and her struggles as a writer, both personal and political, to the forefront.

Jane Chambers was one of the very first writers to depict the love of woman for woman as an ordinary, non-spectacular way of being human.

- Nancy Dean, 1995

Jane Chambers

Jane in the play Single Man at the PartyJane Chambers was born in Columbia, South Carolina, on March 27, 1937. Her plays include Random Violence, Tales of the Revolution and Other American Fables, Common Garden Variety, A Late Snow, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, My Blue Heaven, Kudzu and Quintessential Image. She wrote for the CBS-TV soap opera Search for Tomorrow. Her novels include Burning and Chasin' Jason.

After her death in 1983 from cancer, her long-time partner and manager Beth Allen published a collection of her poems entitled Warrior at Rest. Chambers was an active member of the New York Theatrical community in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. In addition to being Playwright-in-Residence for The Glines, she was the recipient numerous prestigious awards. For a complete list, see www.glbtq.com/literature/chambers_j.html