Menopausal Gentleman
Howie Baggadonutz Presents at the Echo Theater,
1515 SE 37th Ave., 224-8499
8 pm Friday-Saturday, Oct. 6-7
$17.50
An opening-night reception for Peggy Shaw follows the performance
Oct. 6. Call 203-3305 for tickets.
For more on Shaw's work, see Split Britches: Lesbian
Practice/Feminist Performance, edited by Sue-Ellen Case
and published by Routledge.
I first saw Peggy Shaw in 1992 at the Drill Hall Arts Center
in London. She was in a production of Belle Reprieve,
a gender-bent take on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar
Named Desire developed between Shaw's famed radical
lesbian theater group Split Britches and the London-based
avant-drag queens of Bloolips. Though comical, the piece
packed a serious examination of gender, with Shaw doing
a mean and memorable Brando. But "Splitlips," as the combined
effort became known, raised hackles among many in London's
queer community who went to the performance expecting to
see gender-shtick camp--proving that meaty and clever assessments
of sexual identity and role dynamics are not things that
only narrow straights
shy from.
Shaw founded Split Britches in 1980 with fellow performers
Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin. In the mid-'80s she co-founded
the WOW Cafe performance space, and she won her first Obie
Award for Dress Suits to Hire, a collaborative effort
with performance artist Holly Hughes. Since 1997, Shaw has
branched out into solo performances beginning with You're
Just Like My Father, a funny yet melancholy self-portrait
of a young woman developing a butch identity in Eisenhower's
America. This was the first part of a projected trilogy,
with the second installment being Menopausal Gentleman,
for which Shaw won another Obie in 1999. After two years
of Shaw and Portland producer Howie Baggadonutz wrangling
over calendars to get Shaw to Portland, she finally presents
her award-winning piece this week. WW spoke by telephone
to Shaw in New York, as she was just recovering from Giuliani
flu--an asthmatic condition many New Yorkers have developed
since the city started spraying pesticides to thwart the
spread of West
Nile fever.
Willamette Week: Why a Menopausal Gentleman?
Peggy Shaw: It's about the person I've become: a woman
in men's clothes. The Village Voice hit it when they
called the piece a "Seven Stages of Man." It's the stages
of man as I've lived it...as a gentle-man. For a woman,
passing as a gentleman is actually much more difficult than
passing as a construction worker. Many of my San Francisco
women friends choose to pass as working-class men, I think
because that's where romance and identification lies for
them. But being a gentleman demands a delicacy. My father
was a gentleman and he was very delicate...that interests
me. There's a femininity found in the gentleman's suit that
doesn't exist in Stanley Kowalski's clothes. To move within
a suit requires a grace.
That's an interesting point. Certainly, here in the
testosterone-driven American West, for a man to wear a nice
suit is almost a subversive act. There's definitely a class
component at play, but overall, the West disparages "the
suit," I think, because it's seen as something graceful
and cultured, therefore "feminine."
Well, perhaps it's time for men to reclaim the suit and
all that it stands for. Now, many drag kings put on a suit
to take the piss out of men, but my work isn't about that.
Have you heard of the British pair Bitz and Bobz, two
drag queens who are challenging the misogyny they find infecting
a lot of drag?
I know of their work, but I haven't seen them. I personally
haven't found gross amounts of misogyny in drag. I worked
with Hot Peaches in the West Village during the '70s, and
they were just boys in dresses...just as Bloolips is men
in frocks.
Are drag boundaries being
broken?
Absolutely. I saw a young male drag artist in Baltimore
with a shaved head impersonating Sinéad O'Connor.
That's interesting to me, because it really pushes the definition
of drag. It's a creative art, and it's changing dramatically.
It's also challenging the dull black box realities of the
theater. Performance art is where the real innovations in
theater are happening. Consider the work of Ethyl Eichenberger
and Bette Bourne. Good theater is like good drag: It's about
creating more options for people.
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