Split Britches

Split Britches is an American performance troupe, which has been producing work internationally since 1980.

Split Britches was founded by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin in New York City in 1980. Shaw and Weaver met in Europe when Weaver was touring with an earlier troupe, Spiderwoman Theater.

Peggy Shaw (b. 1946) is a theatre artist whose work combines butch identity and dry humor. She has most recently produced a solo show, RUFF (2012), on having a stroke. at Dixon Place, a dedicated LBGTQ performance venue in NYC. Directed by Weaver, RUFF is touring in the UK, USA and to Canada (2013–14). Shaw is the group's primary designer and technician.

Lois Weaver is a performing artist whose work is recognized as seminal in creating a template for lesbian performance methodologies. She is touring a show called What Tammy Found Out (2014), and is Professor of Contemporary Performance in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. Weaver most often acts as the director for Split Britches.

Deb Margolin, no longer a member of Split Britches, is a renowned performance artist, currently a professor at Yale University. She was primarily the wordsmith of the troupe, known for transforming visions into the final script.

Split Britches, The True Story, is the performance from which the performance troupe got their name. This play is the original collaboration between Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin. The script was first published in Women & Performance, and has been said to have found inspiration within women’s performance traditions. The name of the company has been said to mimic the “split pants” of poverty and comedy.

Split Britches has worked with concepts of lesbian, queer, dyke, butch and femme identities and cultures in a context of American feminism and live arts movements which emerged through the 1970s. In Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, critic and theorist Sue-Ellen Case aptly sums up the importance of the trio in the development of contemporary lesbian performance: "the troupe created a unique 'postmodern' style that served to embed feminist and lesbian issues of the times, economic debates, national agendas, personal relationships, and sex-radical role playing in spectacular and humorous deconstructions of canonical texts, vaudeville shtick, cabaret forms, lip-synching satire, lyrical love scenes, and dark, frightening explorations of class and gender violence." The troupe uses these performances to create a safe space in which non-normative sexualities and genders can occur in peace, and it is praised for having maintained a theatre space for women's artistic endeavors.

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