Split Britches
Fifty Years On
A critical anthology of performance texts, interviews, and essays on the later work of Split Britches
Description
What does it mean to sustain a creative life over fifty years? Split Britches: Fifty Years On offers an intimate look at the enduring collaboration of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, the artists behind the groundbreaking performance troupe Split Britches. The collection highlights Split Britches’ enduring queer and feminist legacies, tracing how their distinctive butch/femme lesbian aesthetic and collaborative performance practice have evolved over five decades and nearly thirty original productions. It foregrounds their shift toward increasingly autobiographical and introspective work, while also situating their later performances within key theatrical, historical, and critical frameworks–paying particular attention to issues of embodiment, aging, the archive, and queer temporality. Bringing together performance scripts, candid interviews, production photos, accessible essays, and video documentation, Split Britches: Fifty Years On demonstrates how Shaw and Weaver pull from the past in order to critique the present. For scholars, artists, and students, the volume's unique combination of primary texts, critical essays, and multimedia resources makes it an essential volume that considers theatre scholarship and practice, queer and feminist discourses, and the evolution of creativity with age and time.
Benjamin Gillespie is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at Santa Clara University. He is the co-editor of Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging.
Peggy Shaw is an actor, writer, and producer. She is a founding member of Split Britches and the WOW Café Theater and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her solo works are published in A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw.
Lois Weaver is an artist, activist, writer, and director. She is a founding member of Split Britches and the WOW Café Theater and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her solo works are published in The Only Way Home is Through the Show: Performance Work of Lois Weaver.
Reviews
“Split Britches—as a pathbreaking experiment in feminist and queer performance; as the locus of some of the most vivid, embodied thinking and feeling about gender, sexuality, class, and age; as a love letter between two lifelong collaborators and their devoted audiences—is iconic. And yet some of their most scintillating pieces of the last twenty years have only been ephemerally available to theatergoers. Split Britches: Fifty Years On fills a major gap by making those pieces accessible as texts and by furnishing them with an incisive and dimensional critical apparatus.”
- Nick Salvato, Cornell University
“Split Britches: Fifty Years On demonstrates how Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver’s work has transformed over the past two decades, as they have continued to queer gender/sexual norms while meeting the challenges of aging. Collecting these scripts in a single volume with contextual historical and critical introductions and interviews with collaborators enables readers to chart the trajectory of Shaw and Weaver’s visionary and venturesome performances. The plays are not only artistically inspirational; they are survival manuals for loving, relating, and staying connected—to each other and a wider community—in our deeply troubled times.”
- Kim Marra, University of Iowa