One day in 1971, a New York City social worker Peggy Shaw
stumbled upon a drag queen singing a blues song by a lamppost, and
Peggy knew she was destined to become a performer.
She soon learned that the drag queen, along with other
performers stationed at different locations across the city, were
members of the street drag performance group Hot Peaches.
“It ended up on the East River with the sun setting behind
them, and everyone took acid,” said Peggy Shaw, now a veteran
performer in the queer theater scene for the last thirty years.
“I had never seen theater before, and I thought,
“˜Whoa, this is what life can be.’ So I just joined the
circus, I told them do with me what you may,” she added.
Shaw, now 58, has had quite a journey since then. After a few
years spent learning about being a performer through working with
Hot Peaches, Shaw trained and performed with theater groups all
over Europe and North America before eventually co-founding two of
her own New York-based collectives, Split Britches and Wow
Cafe.
Currently on tour performing a rotating repertoire of her solo
pieces, Shaw shrugs off many of the labels applied to her over the
years.
“I used to be called a male impersonator, but now there
are lots of words for what I am. I’m not a drag king,
I’m a butch lesbian who likes the magic of theater,”
Shaw said.
Magic is something Shaw has been undeniably able to reproduce on
stage. A winner of three OBIE Awards for her work with Split
Britches, she has made a name for herself as one of the foremost
lesbian performers touring the country today.
While she has drawn from a vast catalogue of material throughout
her tour, the piece Shaw will perform at UCLA tonight is titled
“You’re Just Like My Father,” and touches on
themes as varied as boxing, marriage and cross-dressing. Almost
every story Shaw tells is loosely based on her life or on members
of her family.
“I chose boxing as a theme because I was boxing, but also
because my grandfather was a boxer and he knocked out Joe Louis
with his bare hands. The show is based in my roots, which is an
Irish, working-class rough family, with seven kids and no
money,” Shaw said.
Shaw’s commitment to being an entertainer keeps her on the
road throughout most of the year, alternately teaching and
performing as she goes. Having spent time working with theater
students from across the country, she is always pleased to discover
young people experimenting with new forms of theater.
“I don’t know about studying Shakespeare, I mean
when you’re 58 you think, “˜God, they’re still
doing that jerk?’ The problem I have with tradition is that I
find that it’s basically straight white men, and they take
their heterosexuality, their linear arc, their war, and rape and
project it into the future,” Shaw said.
Having now spent half her life as a performer, Shaw gives the
impression of the consummate professional. She arrives early, works
with the stage crew on all of the lighting cues, and strives to
make each show as engaging as possible. While she acknowledges that
she was lured to the stage by the circus-like atmosphere of Hot
Peaches, that doesn’t translate into amateurism.
“I went to a circus once when I was young, and I paid my
quarter and I went in to see a fat lady. I went into this tent, and
she looked at me, and I looked at her and she knew I had come to
see her being fat. I realized that’s what I do, people come
to see me being whatever I am. It’s not a freak show, but I
have to entertain them,” Shaw said.
PERFORMANCE: “You’re Just Like My Father” will
take place Thursday at 4 p.m. at 1330 MacGowan Hall. Admission is
free.