100 Women We Love 2016

Here’s to this year's class of the women who inspire us, give us hope, make us laugh and make us want to get up and dance. 

PEGGY SHAW

Peggy Shaw—a performer, writer and producer—is a co-founder of the Split Britches Theater Company, which has “transformed the landscape of queer performance with its trademark vaudevillian, satirical, gender-bending works.” Along with Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin, Shaw started the company in 1980; the same year, she co-founded the WOW Cafe Theater—now the oldest collectively run performance space for women and/or trans artists. One of her solo performances, “RUFF,” is about her stroke in 2011 (and subsequent recovery), which also inspired her first-ever PSA advisory film designed for older people, as well as a Green Screening workshop format for stroke survivors. “A Menopausal Gentleman,” a compilation of solo show scripts, was published the University of Michigan Press. She’s won several Obies, grants, awards and other well-deserved accolades. These days, she teaches writing and performance internationally. “I get up every day and try to do the best with what I have, and then I have the privilege of trying to make something. I make something that wasn’t there before. I make a plan. I make a dinner. I make love. I make a show. I’m a lucky fucker.” Collaborating again with Weaver, Shaw is now developing “Unexploded Ordnances,” about “creating methodologies for mining unexplored potential in older people.”–SLO


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