Lust and Comfort (1994)
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, furthering the Split Britches experiment with the use of deconstruction as a means to convey autobiographical and topical issues. Using cross-dressing characters and references to The Servant by Joseph Losey, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant by Fassbinder, and Una Voce Humana by Jean Cocteau, Shaw and Weaver address how lesbians invent their lives out of popular heterosexual cultural references.
Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw
Gay Sweatshop in association with Split Britches
Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, James Neale Kennerely
James Neale Kennerely
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Commissioned by Gay Sweatshop. Lust and Comfort was presented at the Drill Hall in London and toured the UK (1994); LaMama ETC in NYC (1995); Department of Theatre, UC Irvine (1996). It was a keynote performance at the American Theatre in Higher Education Conference, San Francisco (1995).
In his 1995 review in the New York Times, Ben Brantley said, ‘Ms. Shaw and Ms. Weaver have been sharing stages, and a personal life, for 15 years. "Lust and Comfort," ... is a spiky anatomy of that relationship, rich with insights about the traps of conventional role-playing and the uncertainty behind it.’
Full footage of the performance can be found here.
