Peggy Shaw's book - Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw has been published and it is available to buy - if you are in the states click the title above if you are in Europe click here for a direct link to Amazon to get a copy.
She is a living legend - I feel deeply privileged Peggy is a part of my life and I have programmed and presented some of her work since we first met - Menopausal Gentleman, MUST and SWAGGER. Always grounding, always beautiful and always deeply passionate - her book is a window into the genius of her writing, performative language and her optic on the world. Every fiber of her being is fuelled by a performative presence that is beyond this world.
I first witnessed Peggy perform when she performed a short extract from Menopausal Gentleman as part of an event for Performing Medicine - I was a young trainee producer but my 'producer' instinct sent off fireworks in my programming sensibility when I saw Peggy mingle the crowd and deliver her performance. I had fallen in love - this is the best way I can describe the performances and performers who blow my mind - I knew I wanted to make something happen. It took days for me to pick up the courage to make the call, I had an idea - Peggy to revive Menopausal in full 10 years after she had first performed it. It would be part of 'The End of the World Cabaret' at BAC - she loved the idea and from there it began. Peggy played to a full house, the audience hung on every syllable falling from her lips, every dash of her hand, every howl...later she told me what it felt like to do the show 10 years after it's last performance going from being a woman in her 50's to now a woman in her 60's..the show took new meaning, new life and new strength for her. It was during this time she had begun to collaborate with the Clod Ensemble to make Must and I was able to provide some initial modest support for this emerging project.
Since this time I have witnessed and shared many moments and journeys with Peggy. I have had the privilege of presenting Peggy's work to audiences, other artists and student artists too.
Every theatre maker and writer should own this book.
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. Co-founder of the renowned 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-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.
This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-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 My 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: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.
