Split Britches is a three-woman company founded by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin. Formed at the end of the founding decade of feminism, the company has written and performed in trio, in duet, and solo, as well as collaborated and performed with other artists. Our five trio pieces include Split Britches; Beauty And The Beast; Upwardly Mobile Home; Little Women, the Tragedy and Lesbians Who Kill. We collaborated with Holly Hughes in Dress Suits To Hire, Bloolips in Belle Reprieve, and Gay Sweatshop in Lust And Comfort. Between us we have completed over ten solos, including Peggy Shaw's You're Just Like My Father, Menopausal Gentleman and To My Chagrin; Lois Weaver's Faith And Dancing and What Tammy Needs to Know; and Deb Margolin's Of Mice, Bugs And Women. The company has received numerous awards, including a Jane Chambers award, three Village Voice Obie awards, and the Otto Award for Contribution to Political Theatre. Our collections of scripts, Split Britches: Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice, won the 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Drama.

Split Britches takes its name from a garment worn by Lois Weaver's ancestors in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, an undergarment that was split so that women could pee standing up in the fields. The name became a good metaphor for our work: independent; empowering; personal; bordering on the private and humorous – you could split your britches laughing. The sources of our material are in the details of everyday life. We borrow from classical texts and popular myths. We characterise little-known people and tell untold stories. Our work is rooted in popular culture, but positioned against it. It relies on moments rather than plot, relationships rather than story. We find narrative in the relations between women, between women and their surroundings, between us and the news of the world. It straddles the line between performance and theatre. Our performances rely on theatricality yet expose the pretence, allowing the personalities of the performers to peek through the curtain of the characters. We believe in the unpredictable, the surprise of transformation rather than the logic of psychological narrative. We draw our style and our method of survival from the working class genre of vaudeville. We perfect the act, pack our bags and work until we have enough money to get to the next town. Split Britches’s work is about a community of outsiders, queers, eccentrics. It is feminist because it encourages the imaginative potential in everyone and lesbian because it takes the presence of lesbian on stage as a given.