Cynthia Hopkins is the latest “It-girl” on the contemporary theatre scene of New York City. Her recent The Success of Failure (Or, The Failure of Success) is the third installment of the Accidental Nostalgia trilogy, a poetic and enigmatic multimedia epic that is part autobiography, part science fiction, part none of the above.

Feminist performance artist Deb Margolin is well known for her loquacious and witty performances. Most recently, however, her focus has been on the use of silence in her explorations of the failure of language in performance. In recent pieces such as Index to Idioms and O Yes I Will , Margolin challenges feminist ideas of absence as well as patriarchal standards of language through a reclamation of silence.