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Acker, Kathy

Entry updated 25 September 2023. Tagged: Author, Theatre.

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(1947-1997) US playwright and author born Karen Alexander, who may never have met her biological father Harry Lehman Jr; she went as Kathy from early childhood, and took the surname of her first husband, Robert Acker, on ther marriage in 1966. She lived in the UK off and on for many years. Acker's apocalyptic sense of the latter-day world is conveyed in works whose tortured absurdity (see Fabulation) sometimes catches the reader by surprise, or transfixes the spectator of one of her plays, which have been as a whole perhaps more telling than her prose. The Birth of the Poet (performed 1984 Rotterdam; in Wordplays 5, anth 1986, ed anon) runs a gamut from the nuclear Holocaust depicted in the first act to the picaresque jigs and jags of the second and third. Three novels – Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986), a surrealistic afterlife fantasy; Empire of the Senseless (1988), which features a quest through a Near Future Paris-cum-America surreally evocative of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and the not-quite terminal coupling of fleshly beings and Robots; and Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), an erotized Dystopian adventure with echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) – are of interest. Her use of sf icons and decor in this last book resembles that of William S Burroughs, especially in its homage to Cyberpunk, conveyed by cut-ups of text by William Gibson. Her appropriations of previous texts, and their exposure within radically dissonant frames of story, were declaredly central to her work. [JC]

Karen Lehman

born New York: 18 April 1947 [from NY birth records; 14 April has also been given]

died Tijuana, Mexico: 30 November 1997

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