#lois weaver

Lois Weaver

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 26 October 1949  

Ethnicity: White

Split Britches Ready for A Big Public Service Announcement

Something exciting is kicking off this saturday across the country, and no matter where you are you can get involved!

STIs are normally the preserve of teens and tweens, but a bold new artistic movement from Split Britches aims to highlight the importance of such diseases in an ageing population. Having challenged convention at every stage of their careers, Split Britches are now set to disrupt…

by Megan Hanley

This month, Split Britches founder Lois Weaver is performing What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex at La MaMa. Featuring a chorus of sexy singing seniors and Weaver’s alter-ego, the country Western singer turned lesbian performance artist Tammy WhyNot, the show tackles sexuality, sex, and aging. Weaver says: “We all want to know about sex. Everybody wants to know about sex. And Tammy and I really want to know what it means to get old and have sex. What happens to the sex drive. What kind of sex do we have, do we still want to have sex, do we not want to have sex, what do we do if we don’t have sex?”

  Split Britches, one of the most celebrated feminist theatre collectives in the United States, began creating lesbian and queer theatre in 1980. Over their 34 years of work, Split Britches has, as Sue-Ellen Case writes, led the exploration of “lesbian theater, butch-femme role playing, feminist mimesis, and the spectacle of desire” onstage.  In more recent works, including Peggy Shaw’s Ruff, Split Britches’ Retro Perspective, and now What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex, the company relies upon their decades of experience queering pop culture to examine aging. Just as their early plays took as a given the importance of performing lesbian desire onstage, Split Britches’ current work tackles the invisibilization of aging, disability, and queer desire by placing their own bodies in the spotlight.

  Last week in conversation with Alisa Solomon at La MaMa’s Coffeehouse Chronicles, Weaver articulated the importance of personal narrative within her body of work. She shares: “I used performance to figure out what it meant to be a femme, and then a femme feminist, and then a resistant feminist [… We’re] using performance to understand what it is to age and to deal with failure. I like to walk onstage with the feeling of this could really fall on its face." Split Britches’ celebration of precarity allows the audience a deeply personal view of the performers, whether it is in Tammy WhyNot’s admission that she’s dropped a line or, in Ruff, the choice to fill the stage with teleprompters that help Shaw, who survived a stroke in 2011, to remember her lines. This visual choice, rather than trying to obscure the struggle inherent to the piece, highlights it.

  Weaver and Shaw shared that their company has always included mistakes, failed shticks, and total breakdowns in their pieces. Weaver describes this tactic as a way of “twisting” the dominant narrative. In so doing, they are very much practicing what Jack Halberstam calls the queer art of failure:

To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy… (Halberstam 186-187)

  Split Britches has embraced failure as a subversive tool in their own work, but their performances do not disappoint. What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex runs until November 23 at La MaMa Etc. Tickets are available at: http://lamama.org/what-tammy-needs-to-know-about-getting-older-and-having-sex-the-concert-tour/.

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What Tammy Needs To Know About Getting Old and Having Sex at La MaMa, November 6 - 28, 2014. Conceived and directed by Lois Weaver, written by Lois Weaver in collaboration with Peggy Shaw, performed by Lois Weaver and Special Guests.

There is no beginning

It is a performance of a breakfast, lunch or dinner

Those seated at the table are the performers

The menu is up to you

Talk is the only course

There is no hostess

It is a democracy

To participate take an empty a seat at the table

If the table is full you can request a seat

Once you leave the table you can come back

There can be silence

You can break the silence with a question

You can write your questions on the table

There can be laughter

There is no conclusion