Penny Arcade (performer)
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Penny Arcade is the stage name of Susana Ventura (born 1950), a performance artist and playwright based in New York City.
Ventura's long association with avant-garde performance in New York began at age 17, when she performed with John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous, and appeared in the Jackie Curtis play Femme Fatale, followed by an appearance in the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey movie Women in Revolt. She traveled in Europe during the 1970s, and returned to New York in 1981, where she worked with many underground theatre artists including Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam. She was a close friend of Quentin Crisp, and the two created a long-running performance/interview piece, The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp.
She has been performing her own monologues since 1985, mostly in New York; in the 1990s she toured internationally with her most popular show, Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, which, like much of her work, was an opinionated commentary on sexual norms and censorship and also featured a chorus of strippers. In 1998 she performed at the first Gay Shame event at Dumba in Brooklyn and appears in the documentary film of the event by Scott Berry, entitled Gay Shame '98. Her 2002 performance New York Values, which also toured abroad, dealt with another of her major concerns: the loss of cultural identity in New York during the Giuliani years.
Penny Arcade is a co-founder of the Lower East Side Biography Project, a video production and oral history workshop that trains participants in documentary filmmaking and preserves the stories of Lower Manhattan artists and activists.
She is married to the musician Chris Rael.
