My career in theatre began at an early age, when I realized that reality was going to kill me.

Raised in an environment of terror where my father had license to act on his irrational and sadistic impulses without fear of reprisals, I learned that it was possible to create another world, one where justice could prevail. Even more miraculously, I found that I could inhabit this world at will. It was, of course, a trick done with mirrors—or, more accurately, a trick done with those brilliant, refractory shards of a shattered identity, but it did enable me to survive the horrors of my childhood.

Everything in my universe as a child was sentient and animate, except for other human beings—especially adults. Like the images of Godzilla or King Kong in the old movies, grownups lumbered mechanically across the enchanted landscape of my childhood, obviously inorganic and superimposed—their outsize scale rendering their atrocities fantastical.

My world was a subtle one, not visible to them. It was a world of spirits, of fairies, of dragons, of pixies, of sorcerers, of fairy godmothers. It was a world I created wherever a stand of trees offered an umbrella of shelter to a little girl, wherever rainwater had pooled itself inside a rotten tree stump, wherever the roots of a large tree twisted themselves over the mossy ground. Nature was my great companion, and my co-conspirator.

It required more inventiveness to accommodate the fairy world indoors, but the stakes being high, I managed. Wherever I went, I carved out little toeholds for magic, crafting habitats for miniature beings in the dark corners of my desk at school, on the top shelf of my locker, in the corner of my closet behind the clothes, on the soap ledge of the bathtub, among the ridges and valleys of the blankets of my bed.

More often than not, these spaces were peopled by my dolls. I had a set of plastic dolls three inches high that I could transport with me like a kind of emergency first aid kit for the imagination. At school, I crafted fragile dolls for my desk out of Kleenex, rubber bands, clay, and pencils. But my real family, my primary collection of dolls, was housed at the ground zero of my abuse, in the bedroom.

My dollhouse was enormous, occupying an entire wall of my room. It was four feet high and six feet wide, made up of eight rooms and a garden patio. It had a ballroom, a throne room, and a treasure vault, and I called it "The Palace." Built for me by my cousins, it consisted of three tiers of rough plywood boxes and a moveable flight of stairs. I papered the rooms with sticky-backed vinyl paper, and covered the patio with floral fabric. I built a throne out of small cardboard boxes and tinfoil, and furnished the rooms of the palace with other articles of my own invention. I was never concerned with how others might view the dollhouse, because its function was to stand in for my imagination.

During my childhood, Queen Victoria's dollhouse was touring the country, and I remember how excited I was when I read about this, the most famous dollhouse in the world. I expected it to be a gateway into a realm of utter enchantment, a dollhouse that would raise my pleasure of fantasy to unimaginable heights.

To my disgust, Queen Victoria's dollhouse did nothing of the kind. It was the opposite of everything I thought a dollhouse should do, leaving nothing at all to the imagination. In fact, it forbade it entrance. It was as if there were a red velvet cord in front of every room of the dollhouse, with a placard reading, "Do not imagine." It was apparent even at a glance that the dollhouse had been built by adults, for adults. Everything in it was a meticulously crafted, miniature reproduction, an immaculate replica of furniture and fixtures from the adult world. Exactitude, not inventiveness, had become the index of cleverness. Money was everywhere apparent. Scavenging, the ethical core of my interactions with the adult world, was nowhere in evidence. Everything was accessible to adults—completely. What had been the point of the dollhouse? How was it that this child Victoria had allowed this appropriation of her only native territory? Had she embraced her oppression, self-colonized her own childhood? And was the massive colonial hegemony of Great Britain during the Victorian era the revenge of a thwarted child, the result of a misidentification with her perpetrators and their need to strip away all that was native, taboo, mystical, inaccessible to western eyes, and replace it with the sterile replicas of British so-called civilization?

My later orientation toward the stage would reflect this early experience. The bare stage has always been, in my opinion, the best setting for a play, because it permits the audience to conspire with the playwright. Whenever I enter a theatre with a "Queen Victoria's dollhouse" set, I see a red velvet cord stretched across the fourth wall, inviting me to admire but not participate.

The dolls were the focus of my life for almost ten years. There were more than fifty of them, acquired as gifts or as hand-me-downs, and occasionally as found persons. They each had names and specific personalities, and they each had their own place in the palace hierarchy. The queen of the dollhouse was Ginny, my first doll—who, coincidentally, resembled my first girlfriend, the golden-haired and blue-eyed, six-year-old Mary Warren. Mary Warren had been a sunny, simple girl who accepted as her due the fact that she was cherished by her family. Where my world was multilayered and treacherous, requiring vast amounts of energy to reconcile or repress the overwhelming incoherence of atrocity, hers was a garden of delights from which anything unpleasant or harmful had already been banished.

Mary Warren was an angel to me, and in her company I had a taste of heaven. And on those glorious occasions when Mary Warren would agree to spend the night with me, I would create elaborate scenarios based on the fairy tales I consumed so voraciously, in which the bedroom would be transformed into an enchanted forest where we would build shelters for ourselves by draping bedspreads and blankets over the bureau and the desk—or else we would be stowaways escaping from our evil captors in a wagon that bore more than passing resemblance to my bed. And always there would come the point in the story where I would hold Mary Warren, or where she would hold me, and we would comfort each other. And in those moments, I understood on a cellular level that whatever this other adult world might be, so filled with pain and contempt, it was not and never could be real.

Mary Warren never returned the passion I had for her, because she could not comprehend the complexity and torment of my life. Paradoxically, it was her ignorance that had inspired my passion. She transferred to a different school after fourth grade and our friendship did not survive the move, but, by that time, Ginny was already ensconced as the goddess of my alternative world. Ginny was the queen. She was always wise, always compassionate, and her power was absolute—but not in the ways of human dictatorship. Unlike the sadistic patriarchal god who sets his misbegotten world into motion for the thrill of watching it careen toward certain destruction, Ginny was one with her universe. She was the embodiment of it. It was not a question of will, but of rhythm.

When I say that I "played with the dolls," I don't mean the dress parade that passed for "playing with dolls" among my peers, and which has caused generations of feminists to privilege the dump trucks and toolkits of male children over the dolls given to little girls.

No, when I "played with dolls," I was involved in sacred ritual; I was recreating the world. I was in my laboratory testing out systems of ethics. I was making detailed observations about the intricacies of human personality. I was healing myself, and I was conjuring. Literally entranced, I could stay present in the world of the dolls for six and eight hours at a time, enacting epic confrontations between the manifestations of patriarchal evil and the incontrovertible power of an overriding matriarchal consciousness.

Ginny presided over these dramas like the deus ex machina of the Greek plays, or like Louis XIV at the court dramas of Molière. She rarely participated actively, but the enactments were all performed in her honor and to her greater glory. The heroine of my dramas was a different doll, equally beloved, but much more human. This doll was named Pat, and she had a history as complicated as my own. She had been abused and then rejected by my neighbors, the Whitbys. Pat's hair had been ruthlessly pulled out or cut off, and her body had been stained by various ballpoint pen markings. When I found her, she was naked. Pat, a predecessor to Barbie, was not a child doll, nor was she an adult. She had the beginnings of breasts, but she did not have the exaggerated small waist designed to compensate for the waistband layers of fabric that could not be woven to scale. It is ironic to think that this solution to a purely technical problem has been misinterpreted by generations of girls as a mandate for self-starvation.

I rescued Pat, and introduced her into the royal family of the dolls. Her background was unknown, but she possessed an unmistakable nobility of spirit that put most of the members of the court to shame. She had obviously survived some terrible personal tragedy, which, for some reason, was never discussed by either me or by the other dolls. She had no family, and I made no effort to create one for her.

Pat was, of course, a dyke and a survivor of sexual trauma. This was the late 1950s, and it would be two more decades before I would claim those identities as my own. But I had created her, obviously, in my own image. No matter what evils befell her (and these were many), she always emerged triumphant, vindicated, restored to her rightful position. She was never angry, never jealous, but her protection lay in her absolute integrity, her innate sweetness, a kind of fierce innocence. And, of course, she had access to magic. The fairies and other supernatural beings of Ginny's realm favored her above all the other dolls, and, although this favoritism did not spare her from the trials that constituted my major plot device, these magical helpers made sure that the harsh experiences brought on by the jealousy and intrigues of the other dolls would only cause Pat's qualities to shine all the brighter.

I did not realize that, in creating this myth, I was sowing the dragons' teeth of denial that would rise up as an army of demons in my adult years. My innocence did not protect me. My magic, which was the ability to dissociate, only rendered me invisible to myself, not to my assailants. And my harm was real, deep, and permanent.

When I turned thirteen, my mother told me that it was time to put away the dolls for good, and, in my first step toward becoming an adult, I believed her. We began to pack the dollhouse together, but almost immediately I became overwhelmed with the horror of what I was doing. Sobbing hysterically, I fled from the room, leaving my mother to disassemble my childhood.

Why did I run away? Why hadn't I challenged her? Why hadn't I put up the fight of my life for these dearest of friends, these boon companions with whom I had gone on so many adventures? I knew that what was happening that afternoon was nothing less than a massacre. We were killing off the dolls. Why didn't I fight? I suspect it had something to do with "normalcy."

I was entering puberty. For the first time, there was a possibility that I might have the power to determine the course of my life, to affect my own reality. Perhaps I would be able to live my adventures, my romances, my fairy tales in the real world. I believe it was this hope, this promise of a normal life—maybe it was not too late to become Mary Warren!—that seduced me into the abandonment of my dolls.

I had abandoned them, but I had not participated in the putting-away of them. The coward who flees may live to find the courage to return, but the woman or girl who turns her hand against her own dreams—she is more dead than her victims.

My mother had murdered her own dolls. I was sure of it. They would never have allowed her to live with the man I called my father. They would never have allowed her to settle for such unhappy endings, over and over. The woman who can betray her own daughter must have betrayed herself first. Sadly, in the silence and stilling of the imagination that followed the massacre of the dolls, I turned to my mother for solace. She, and not Ginny, became my goddess, and my indoctrination into heterosexuality began in earnest.

And in kindness to myself, I draw a curtain over the next twenty years—years of confusion, chaos, and dissociation. I adopted serial personas, as do many women with backgrounds like mine. I lived on the streets for a while; I hitchhiked around the country, attempting to exorcise my demons by exposing myself to scenarios as terrifying as those of my childhood; I escaped into a religious cult. I retreated into a heterosexual marriage. In the words of Mary Daly, I sought safety in the "presence of absence," in the "absence of presence."

In 1986, Sleeping Beauty—she who had been pricked so young and who had been asleep for so many years—began to awake. I came out as a lesbian, and I came out as an incest survivor, and I came out as an artist. These three identities were not separate, and it would have been impossible for me to have claimed any one of them without the others. My first action upon awakening was to estrange myself from my mother. And then I began to tell my story with my art.

The patriarchal world is not receptive to the story of the incest survivor, because incest is the paradigm of patriarchy. The incest survivor who takes her observations to their natural conclusions will find herself, like Cassandra, blessed with prescience and cursed with lack of credibility. It will drive a woman mad, unless she can find some place of justice, some place where she can reconcile the contradictions.

I have returned to the world of the dolls—you might say with a vengeance—and I redeem my betrayal of them by telling the story of that betrayal. I stand now with the dolls, among them, advocating for the girl who is never believed. I have starved with her, and I have been humiliated with her, and I have raged with her. I have an enemy and I know his identity and I name it. Over and over again. This time around, I understand the difference between magic and superstition. This time around my spells are binding. This time I am working with truth.