Gay Play Tuesdays: BELLE REPRIEVE by Split Britches (1991)

Join us for our next edition of Gay Play Tuesdays, on April 29th at 7pm, when we will read Belle Reprieve by Split Britches  (1991). Written by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the esteemed lesbian performance collective Split Britches — in collaboration with Paul Shaw and legendary drag performer Bette Bourne — Belle Reprieve is a steamy and hysterical parody of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. It explores gay and lesbian sex in the 1940s while challenging traditional gender roles and heteropatriarchal norms. The play both honors Williams and turns him on his head by re-imagining his mythic characters as butch lesbian-Stanley, femme lesbian-Stella, drag queen-Blanche and male fairy-Mitch.

Split Britches was founded in 1980 by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin in New York City. Since then they have created work out of a feminist, democratic DIY aesthetic, performing their first pieces at the WOW Café in NYC, which Shaw and Weaver co-founded. From scrappy, performance-making in the downtown NY theatre scene, the collective has risen to become one of the foremost groups working in queer performance art and lesbian identity. As academic Sue Ellen Case writes, “their work has defined the issues and terms of academic writing on lesbian theater, butch-femme role playing, feminist mimesis, and the spectacle of desire.”