Split Britches: Plays and Performances
This video documents their show Split Britches- The True Story, which marks the initial collaboration of the trio and is the show from which they got their name. Conceived and directed by Lois Weaver, its a show based on true stories of three members of Weavers family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, United States. It also marks the beginning of the companys aesthetic: weaving multiple true stories in one, trusting the details of the everyday and relying on relation rather than action. The Christian Science Monitor called this play a tiny masterpiece.
'Faith and Dancing'. Written and performed by Lois Weaver, the piece is an autobiographical journey from an early life growing up a strict Southern Baptist in 1950's Virginia to lesbian femme in the 1990's. In Weaver's exploration, faith meets science and sermons meets striptease and she reconciles how a youthful evangelist became an aging exhibitionist.
Monsieur-madame documents a staged reading of Ginka Steinwachs' text 'Monsieur-Madame'. Directed by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, the performance is a collaboration between Split Britches and legendary queer theater troupes Bloolips and The Five Lesbian Brothers.
Patience and Sarah documents their show Patience and Sarah, an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Isabel Miller. The piece was adapted by Joyce Halliday and produced in the style of the Split Britches Company.
'Lust and Comfort', a theater piece written by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and James Neale Kennerely and performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. 'Lust and Comfort' uses three story lines to examine the ups and downs of a long term relationship and the changing terrain of sexual desire. Using cross-dressing characters and movie references to 'The Servant' and 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant,' Shaw and Weaver address how lesbians invent their lives out of popular heterosexual cultural references.
This video documents a work-in-progress by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, staged at experimental theater venue Dixon Place in New York City in 1992. An informal evening on issues of butch-femme, gender and 'queer', it is a collaboration with artists Vicky Genfan, Claire Moed and Leslie Feinberg. The resulting piece is a vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performance 'for your theoretical entertainment'.
This video documents Peggy Shaw's one-woman show 'You're Just Like My Father.' In this performance Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950's with a combination of both toughness and vulnerability. Using male role models such as an Army officer and Elvis, Shaw explores the controversial relationship between a butch and her mother, offering both affirmation and criticism. If on the surface 'You're Just Like My Father' seems to be a wry exercise in pseudo-macho braggadoccio, it has its poignant undercurrents. Shaw's performance isn't so much a satire of male chauvinism as a pure celebration of her masculine self.
'Menopausal Gentleman', Peggy Shaw's bluesy, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness lounge act about a butch lesbian going through 'the change'. An Obie-winning, tour de force one-woman show about a menopausal body and the fires of its ageless heart, Peggy Shaw's 'Menopausal Gentleman' is a revelation. Shaw riffs on the hormonal effects of menopause complete with hot flashes, cold sweats, humor and tears, penetrating and perpetuating the mystery in an unlikely persona. She is a tough-speaking film-noir soul performed in Shaw's trademark drag patois (a self-conscious and artificially low New Yorkese), or to put it simply: a tough guy in a swell suit!
This video documents their performance 'Belle Reprieve'. Collaborating with legendary gay/drag performers Bloolips, Shaw and Weaver take on Tennessee Williams' 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and the mythic proportions of Stanley and Blanche. Both steamy and hysterical, 'Belle Reprieve' looks at gay and lesbian sex in the 1940's and both honors Williams and turns him on his head.
'Dress Suits to Hire'. Written by Holly Hughes in collaboration with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, the piece uses images from pulp fiction and film noir to portray the erotic cat-and-mouse relationship between characters Deluxe and Michigan, two women who live in a clothing store. Heated fantasies, brassy broads and sexual charades make for a carnivorous free-for-all. The video also includes a Q&A session with Shaw and Weaver at the end of the performance.
'Lesbians Who Kill', written by Deb Margolin in collaboration with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Performed by Shaw and Weaver as characters May and June, a couple who go very 'wrong', the play looks at what might motivate women and lesbians in particular to become killers and serial ones at that.
This video documents the first version of their show Upwardly Mobile Home, performed at WOW Café on East 11th Street in New York City. The piece is a working class survival story, where a troupe of actors camps out under the Brooklyn bridge and peddle their wares, trying unsuccessfully to sell out and be greedy like the rest of America in the 1980s.
Beauty and the Beast. Based on the classic fairy tale, influenced by the long rule of republican politics and informed by the Christian agenda that dominates the US scene up till the present, it is the personal journey of a Salvation Army woman who plays the good and beautiful daughter who secretly wants to be bad, a Rabbi in pink toe shoes who is relegated to the role of the father and longs to be a stand-up comic, and an 86-year-old lesbian vaudeville freak who embraces the role of the Beast and comments on politics by forgetting which play she is in.
This video documents their show The Anniversary Waltz. A celebration of Lois and Peggys 10-year relationship, created 15 years before the debate on gay marriage, it is a commentary on the tendency to couple and a critique on the institution of marriage. At the same time it is a tribute to long term relationships sustained through creative work and an appropriation of the husband and wife team identities represented in vaudeville variety acts, comedy duos and musical duets.
Little Women: The Tragedy. The piece tackles complex issues of pornography and feminism through the humor of only two possibilities: heaven or hell, preacher or prostitute, and the left hand and right hand of Louisa May Alcott.
Valley of the Dolls House, created in residency with 26 students from the University of Hawaii in 1997. Based on Henrik Ibsens A Doll's House and Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, the piece is a celebration of difference and a critique of whiteness set in the uniquely multicultural city of Honolulu that is both besieged by and dependent on a tacky tourist trade.
Retro Perspective is a short medley of old Split Britches hits that provides a humorous slant on Peggy Shaw's and Lois Weaver's last thirty years of work and play. In Small House, two explorers lay claim to the same territory. These people have known each other for a long time. They occupy a house that has been divided and subdivided by time and bad habits. They sit on a porch, watch the horizon, and wait for the weather to change. Their only hope is an audience. This video also includes a post-performance discussion with Peggy, Lois, and performance artist Anna Jacobs.
'Salad of the Bad Café' is a postmodern cabaret written and performed by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw of Split Britches and Asian American performance artist Stacy Makishi. Inspired by Carson McCullers' story 'The Ballad of the Sad Café' and the lives of Tennessee Williams and Yukio Mishima, it is a treatise on love in a post-claustrophobic era. The play begins in 1945, in the summer that lay between the war and the postwar period when Japan was weeping, the American South was seething and the word 'gender' was mostly used in grammar class.The setting is a café where people come to spend a few hours so that the 'deep bitter knowing that their life is not worth much can be laid to rest.' Racial, gender and regional stereotypes come together to tell a story of unrequited love, in an attempt to demystify the Queer, disorient the Orient and demythify the Southern Gothic and the American Grotesque. This is one of the first iterations of the piece, performed as a work-in-progress in London in 1998.
These two videos document the NY premieres of the shows 'Miss Risqué' and 'It's A Small House and We've Lived in It Always', performed at La Mama, in the context of the two-piece spectacle show 'Double Agency', the first collaboration between Split Britches and the renowned English troupe The Clod Ensemble. The first video in this set documents their piece 'Miss Risqué', a story of secrets and showgirls, set in turn-of-the-century Paris, where working-class girls could become rich and famous, prostitutes could pass for nobility, women could have open affairs with women, and sex wasn't exclusive to the marital bed. A piece on 'resistant femininity', 'Miss Risqué' is a lyrical lesbian tarantella that explores the power of femininity, visibility, invisibility and deception.It was commissioned by the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University and supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, and Queen Mary, University of London. The second video in this set documents their piece Its a Small House and We've Lived in it Always. In it, two explorers lay claim to the same territory. With three chairs as its only props, little speech, some song and much meaningful movement and expressive acting, the piece shows longtime cohabitants engaged in a contest for space. These people have known each other for a long time. They occupy a house the size of a small stage, a house divided and subdivided by time and bad habits. They sit on the porch, watch the horizon, and wait for the weather to change. Their only hope is an audience.As they move apart and then together, spurn advances and accept closeness, mime rejection and flirtation and reveal need, the two performers enact the ebb and flow of a universally resonant relationship. This work was first commissioned by the South Bank Center as part of the British Festival of Visual Theatre.
'Faith and Dancing'. Written and performed by Lois Weaver, the piece is an autobiographical journey from an early life growing up a strict Southern Baptist in 1950's Virginia to lesbian femme in the 1990's. In Weaver's exploration, faith meets science and sermons meets striptease and she reconciles how a youthful evangelist became an aging exhibitionist.
Monsieur-madame documents a staged reading of Ginka Steinwachs' text 'Monsieur-Madame'. Directed by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, the performance is a collaboration between Split Britches and legendary queer theater troupes Bloolips and The Five Lesbian Brothers.
Patience and Sarah documents their show Patience and Sarah, an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Isabel Miller. The piece was adapted by Joyce Halliday and produced in the style of the Split Britches Company.
'Lust and Comfort', a theater piece written by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and James Neale Kennerely and performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. 'Lust and Comfort' uses three story lines to examine the ups and downs of a long term relationship and the changing terrain of sexual desire. Using cross-dressing characters and movie references to 'The Servant' and 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant,' Shaw and Weaver address how lesbians invent their lives out of popular heterosexual cultural references.
This video documents a work-in-progress by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, staged at experimental theater venue Dixon Place in New York City in 1992. An informal evening on issues of butch-femme, gender and 'queer', it is a collaboration with artists Vicky Genfan, Claire Moed and Leslie Feinberg. The resulting piece is a vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performance 'for your theoretical entertainment'.
This video documents Peggy Shaw's one-woman show 'You're Just Like My Father.' In this performance Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950's with a combination of both toughness and vulnerability. Using male role models such as an Army officer and Elvis, Shaw explores the controversial relationship between a butch and her mother, offering both affirmation and criticism. If on the surface 'You're Just Like My Father' seems to be a wry exercise in pseudo-macho braggadoccio, it has its poignant undercurrents. Shaw's performance isn't so much a satire of male chauvinism as a pure celebration of her masculine self.
'Menopausal Gentleman', Peggy Shaw's bluesy, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness lounge act about a butch lesbian going through 'the change'. An Obie-winning, tour de force one-woman show about a menopausal body and the fires of its ageless heart, Peggy Shaw's 'Menopausal Gentleman' is a revelation. Shaw riffs on the hormonal effects of menopause complete with hot flashes, cold sweats, humor and tears, penetrating and perpetuating the mystery in an unlikely persona. She is a tough-speaking film-noir soul performed in Shaw's trademark drag patois (a self-conscious and artificially low New Yorkese), or to put it simply: a tough guy in a swell suit!
This video documents their performance 'Belle Reprieve'. Collaborating with legendary gay/drag performers Bloolips, Shaw and Weaver take on Tennessee Williams' 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and the mythic proportions of Stanley and Blanche. Both steamy and hysterical, 'Belle Reprieve' looks at gay and lesbian sex in the 1940's and both honors Williams and turns him on his head.
'Dress Suits to Hire'. Written by Holly Hughes in collaboration with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, the piece uses images from pulp fiction and film noir to portray the erotic cat-and-mouse relationship between characters Deluxe and Michigan, two women who live in a clothing store. Heated fantasies, brassy broads and sexual charades make for a carnivorous free-for-all. The video also includes a Q&A session with Shaw and Weaver at the end of the performance.
'Lesbians Who Kill', written by Deb Margolin in collaboration with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Performed by Shaw and Weaver as characters May and June, a couple who go very 'wrong', the play looks at what might motivate women and lesbians in particular to become killers and serial ones at that.
This video documents the first version of their show Upwardly Mobile Home, performed at WOW Café on East 11th Street in New York City. The piece is a working class survival story, where a troupe of actors camps out under the Brooklyn bridge and peddle their wares, trying unsuccessfully to sell out and be greedy like the rest of America in the 1980s.
Beauty and the Beast. Based on the classic fairy tale, influenced by the long rule of republican politics and informed by the Christian agenda that dominates the US scene up till the present, it is the personal journey of a Salvation Army woman who plays the good and beautiful daughter who secretly wants to be bad, a Rabbi in pink toe shoes who is relegated to the role of the father and longs to be a stand-up comic, and an 86-year-old lesbian vaudeville freak who embraces the role of the Beast and comments on politics by forgetting which play she is in.
This video documents their show The Anniversary Waltz. A celebration of Lois and Peggys 10-year relationship, created 15 years before the debate on gay marriage, it is a commentary on the tendency to couple and a critique on the institution of marriage. At the same time it is a tribute to long term relationships sustained through creative work and an appropriation of the husband and wife team identities represented in vaudeville variety acts, comedy duos and musical duets.
Little Women: The Tragedy. The piece tackles complex issues of pornography and feminism through the humor of only two possibilities: heaven or hell, preacher or prostitute, and the left hand and right hand of Louisa May Alcott.
Valley of the Dolls House, created in residency with 26 students from the University of Hawaii in 1997. Based on Henrik Ibsens A Doll's House and Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, the piece is a celebration of difference and a critique of whiteness set in the uniquely multicultural city of Honolulu that is both besieged by and dependent on a tacky tourist trade.
Retro Perspective is a short medley of old Split Britches hits that provides a humorous slant on Peggy Shaw's and Lois Weaver's last thirty years of work and play. In Small House, two explorers lay claim to the same territory. These people have known each other for a long time. They occupy a house that has been divided and subdivided by time and bad habits. They sit on a porch, watch the horizon, and wait for the weather to change. Their only hope is an audience. This video also includes a post-performance discussion with Peggy, Lois, and performance artist Anna Jacobs.
'Salad of the Bad Café' is a postmodern cabaret written and performed by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw of Split Britches and Asian American performance artist Stacy Makishi. Inspired by Carson McCullers' story 'The Ballad of the Sad Café' and the lives of Tennessee Williams and Yukio Mishima, it is a treatise on love in a post-claustrophobic era. The play begins in 1945, in the summer that lay between the war and the postwar period when Japan was weeping, the American South was seething and the word 'gender' was mostly used in grammar class.The setting is a café where people come to spend a few hours so that the 'deep bitter knowing that their life is not worth much can be laid to rest.' Racial, gender and regional stereotypes come together to tell a story of unrequited love, in an attempt to demystify the Queer, disorient the Orient and demythify the Southern Gothic and the American Grotesque. This is one of the first iterations of the piece, performed as a work-in-progress in London in 1998.
These two videos document the NY premieres of the shows 'Miss Risqué' and 'It's A Small House and We've Lived in It Always', performed at La Mama, in the context of the two-piece spectacle show 'Double Agency', the first collaboration between Split Britches and the renowned English troupe The Clod Ensemble. The first video in this set documents their piece 'Miss Risqué', a story of secrets and showgirls, set in turn-of-the-century Paris, where working-class girls could become rich and famous, prostitutes could pass for nobility, women could have open affairs with women, and sex wasn't exclusive to the marital bed. A piece on 'resistant femininity', 'Miss Risqué' is a lyrical lesbian tarantella that explores the power of femininity, visibility, invisibility and deception.It was commissioned by the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University and supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, and Queen Mary, University of London. The second video in this set documents their piece Its a Small House and We've Lived in it Always. In it, two explorers lay claim to the same territory. With three chairs as its only props, little speech, some song and much meaningful movement and expressive acting, the piece shows longtime cohabitants engaged in a contest for space. These people have known each other for a long time. They occupy a house the size of a small stage, a house divided and subdivided by time and bad habits. They sit on the porch, watch the horizon, and wait for the weather to change. Their only hope is an audience.As they move apart and then together, spurn advances and accept closeness, mime rejection and flirtation and reveal need, the two performers enact the ebb and flow of a universally resonant relationship. This work was first commissioned by the South Bank Center as part of the British Festival of Visual Theatre.
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