Terry Baum to Present Lesbo Solo: My Gay History Play at The Marsh Berkeley

The cabaret bar at The Marsh Berkeley: It’s a low-lit, convivial room where stories feel personal, laughter bounces off the bar glasses, and conversation lingers long after the curtain call. This fall, it’s the stage for cultural firebrand and renowned playwright Terry Baum’s Lesbo Solo: My Gay History Play, her chronicle, love letter, and rallying cry to gay revolution across five decades and counting.

Lesbo Solo brings modern audiences along for the confusion, laughter, bruises, and joys of queer liberation as Baum lived it. The show’s world-premiere presentation at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2024 was succeeded by a second engagement at World Pride in Washington, D.C., which drew rave responses, particularly from younger queer audiences who had never seen their history told with such raw intimacy. One described it as a thrilling moment of “having their history,” a truly relatable story that resonates across generations. Queer history is not always a struggle. That is why we celebrate the good times.

Onstage, Baum is equal parts storyteller, comedian, and griot. She opens with tales of her adolescence, when she dutifully attended synagogue and insisted she liked boys, even as her heart tugged her elsewhere.

She weaves in mythologies like the story of Lilith, banished from the Bible into the Apocrypha, later reimagined as a feminist icon. Lilith became the namesake for Lilith Women’s Theatre, the Berkeley-based feminist theatre company Baum co-founded in 1975 with two of her friends. Revelatory and a true celebration, Baum’s story gathers and delights across generations and queer factions.

“We had a hell of a lot of fun along the way,” Baum says of her journey, and that fun pulses through the performance. Her bravado lights up the cabaret room with electrifying eccentricity as she moves triumphantly from homophobic teenager to “slightly world-renowned” lesbian playwright. She clowns, she cajoles, and lets the punchlines do the political work until the audience suddenly realizes they’ve absorbed truth. In a flash, she pivots again, back to laughter. The trickster spirit is her through-line and she disarms with humor so we can better face what’s been won and what’s still at stake.

Baum’s credentials are etched into Bay Area theatre history. In 1975, she planted a flag for women’s voices in a cultural landscape that set aside very little room for them. By 1981, she had written and staged Dos Lesbos, the very first lesbian play by a lesbian playwright produced on the West Coast. She jokes that she missed being the “national first,” beat out by New York City just two weeks earlier.

At every turn, she’s been a rule-breaker, a rabble-rouser, and a cultural trickster with a sharp comic edge. Lesbo Solo is an invitation to a rollicking conversation with a master entertainer, complete with drinks. The Marsh’s cabaret makes that intention clear; the full bar is open before and after the show and Baum urges audiences to linger and share their “gay history.” It’s a call to enjoy a collective celebration of historical highlights. In a city where queer stages have dwindled and bars have shuttered, Baum’s energetic presence reminds us all to remember where we have been, and look ahead with guts, gusto, and pride.

Lesbo Solo: My Gay History Play comes at just the right time: running through October 12, it overlaps with the observation of International Lesbian Day (October 8), making it a timely celebration of identity, community, and endurance. For longtime activists, Baum’s stories will rekindle the fire of marches past. For younger generations, it’s a chance to encounter queer history in the flesh, told by someone who never stopped laughing through the revolution.

Whether you’re a veteran of the movement or someone just beginning to trace your queer lineage, Lesbo Solo: My Gay History Play is more than a play. Baum goes beyond a mere recount of the history of gay liberation; she embodies it and calls in new torchbearers to pick up the baton and run with it.

Raise a glass, join us at the cabaret, and let Terry Baum remind you: before history is written, it is lived—and it’s ours to keep living, together.

Terry Baum’s Lesbo Solo will run September 7–October 12, 2025, at The Marsh Berkeley Cabaret and Theater, 2120 Allston Way. For tickets and additional information, go to: https://bit.ly/4muJAxH

Published on August 28, 2025