Miss America

Miss America (2008)

In Miss America, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver turn their unapologetic critique and riotous humor loose on the dissolution of the American Dream. A beauty pageant on a landfill full of too much information in the midst of a giant storm, Miss America exposes what is lost in a society that is still hopelessly clinging to winning. 

Split Britches investigate how what we have seen, heard and experienced has helped to construct our fragile identities and what happens when those identities are undermined by natural and national disasters.  In Miss America, the company use the conventions of the Miss America Pageant and the media coverage of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina to take an unapologetic and humorous look at the dissolution of the American Dream. 

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Commissioned by New York State Council on the Arts for the Arts Award and recipient of a Rockefeller MAP Grant.

Miss America premiered at La Mama ETC in NYC (June 2008) and toured to venues including Out on the Edge Festival, Boston (October 2008); Open Eye Figure Theatre, Minneapolis (November 2008); The People’s Place, Queen Mary University of London, London (March 2009); Performance Studies international#15, Zagreb (June 2009). The script is published in Texts For Post-Dramatic Performance (Anna Furse, editor, Methuen, 2011).