Carolyn Gage is an American playwright, actor and theatrical director. She is also an activist on lesbian and feminist issues. Gage was a Guest Lecturer at Bates College in 1998-99.[citation needed] The author of five books on lesbian theatre and fifty plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history. The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (Outskirts Press, 2008) was named the national winner of the 2008 Lambda Literary Award in Drama.

Two counselors at a summer camp struggle with their love against a backdrop of homophobia. Scenes with the campers depict with chilling accuracy the cruelty of girls towards those they perceive as outsiders. Powerful, award-winning lesbian drama!

Ugly Ducklings picks up where Tea and Sympathy and The Children’s Hour left off. Set in a girls’ summer camp, the play explores the dynamics of homophobia in a same-sex environment.

Ugly Ducklings examines the unhealthy turns that relationships between girls can take when they are not allowed their natural expression. The so-called “Ophelia Syndrome” comes alive as the cabin of younger girls, their self-esteem still reinforced by the primacy of their relationships, comes into contact with the older girls who have begun to turn against themselves and each other in their attempts to conform to the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality.

Angie, a middle-class college student, is falling in love with another counselor at the camp, Renée, who is a working-class “out” lesbian. Against this backdrop of intense homophobia, the young women struggle with their feelings for each other and the problems of defining themselves in a society that insists they be invisible. The camp legend about a monster in the lake parallels the adult phobias about lesbianism, and, confronted with an attempted child suicide, campers and counselors are compelled to face their worst fears in the microcosmic world of the summer camp.

Ugly Ducklings breaks ranks with male-centered queer drama in foregrounding the experience of women and girls who are survivors of sexual violence and shattering romantic and sentimental conventions about the “gentle sex.”