Menopausal Gentleman

Obie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. A founder of the renowned performance troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish working-class roots to her aging butch body. This collection of Shaw's performance scripts evokes a 53-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic "Menopausal gentleman"); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw "You're Just Like Your Father"); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated "To My Chagrin"); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical "Must", a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble).