Lust and Comfort

 Since 1981, the Split Britches Company (founded by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin, www.splitbritches.com) has written and performed in trio, duet, and solo, as well as collaborated and performed with other artists. They describe their work in this way: 'Our work is rooted in popular culture, but positioned against it. It relies on moments rather than plot, relationships rather than story. It depends on the surprise of transformation rather than the logic of psychological narrative. It straddles the line between performance and theater, exploiting theatricality while exposing the pretense. It is about a community of outsiders, queers, eccentrics. It is feminist because it encourages the imaginative potential in everyone and lesbian because it takes the presence of lesbian on stage as a given.' Their vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performances have received numerous awards, including a Jane Chamber award and four Village Voice OBIE awards. Their collection of scripts, 'Split Britches Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice', edited by Sue Ellen Case, won the 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Drama. This video documents 'Lust and Comfort', a theater piece written by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and James Neale Kennerely and performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. 'Lust and Comfort' uses three story lines to examine the ups and downs of a long term relationship and the changing terrain of sexual desire. Using cross-dressing characters and movie references to 'The Servant' and 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant,' Shaw and Weaver address how lesbians invent their lives out of popular heterosexual cultural references.