Peggy Shaw

Peggy Shaw is an actor, writer and producer. She co-founded the Split Britches Theater Company with Lois Weaver and the WOW Café Theatre in New York City.  Peggy has also been a collaborator, writer, and performer with Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater.  She played Billy Tipton in the American Place production of Carson Kreitzer’s The Slow Drag.

Recently, Split Britches were a part of Staging Human Rights, where they worked in prisons in Rio de Janeiro and England prior to being Artists in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU).

They were associate artists on the Clod Ensembles’ Performing Medicine project, which created workshops on gender and difference for medical students and health professionals.  As part of this project Peggy created a new piece, in collaboration with The Clod Ensemble, MUST:  The Inside Story, poetically examining the inside of her aging queer body, which she performed and toured in lecture and anatomy theaters.

Following this work, Split Britches received a commissioning grant from Dixon Place to perform their new piece Lost Lounge in New York City, prior to an artist residency at the University of Richmond, Virgina.

For her work with the company, Peggy has received 3 OBIE Awards for performances in Dress Suits To Hire, Belle Reprieve, and Menopausal Gentleman.  She has also won the New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Emerging Forms in 1988, 1995, 1999, and 2005; the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award for “excellence in making the world a better place for gays and lesbians;” and a 2003 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre. The Foundation for Contemporary Performance recently awarded Peggy with Theatre Performer of the Year.

Michigan Press has published a new book on Peggy, edited by Jill Dolan, which includes the scripts for her three solo shows You’re Just Like My Father, Menopausal Gentleman and To My Chagrin, and will also include the script MUST:  The Inside Story.
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Peggy is a freelance teacher of writing and performance around the world and has been awarded the PS122 Ethyl Eichelberger award for 2011.