Reviewed by: Last Gasp (WFH) by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver Heidi Łucja Liedke LAST GASP (WFH). Written and performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Directed by Lois Weaver. Movement by Morgan Thorson. Video design and editing by Nao Nagai. Sound design by Vivian Stoll. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York City. Streamed, December 6, 2020. When a global pandemic brings most areas of life to a halt, it is perhaps not surprising that self-reflection and virtual journeys to the past set in. This is, on the surface, what Split Britches’s Last Gasp (WFH) did also. The “series of verbal and physical essays,” as the duo put it in their event description, invited viewers to catch their breath, consider the personal, the (im)permanent, and how to care for one another in a series of scenes. The order of essays presented in the show did not seem to follow a particular logic; instead, the show’s structure resembled a storytelling jukebox set on shuffle. What Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver created with their latest performance, filmed in a mostly empty house in London entirely via Zoom’s recording feature, was a warm blanket, held together by seventy-five years of words. Some of its patches might have been scratchy and uncomfortable, but words can hold up amid the turbulence. The first Zoomie (as Shaw has called it) that I saw, Last Gasp (WFH) began with Weaver conjuring up the sound of a storm of bees, directing them or perhaps something else in her memory. She then used these movements to start a meditative but ragged dance through a barren room containing only one table and cracked wallpaper. While an unusual beginning, the reference to the waggle dance of bees and their humming served as an anchor for the show: Mother Earth’s quiet version of white noise. Weaver then left the room briefly, returned putting on glasses, turned around and looked at what was before her in a seemingly disappointed, concerned, and exhausted manner as if to say “What can I say to you anyway?” She then began with the words: “This is a very emotional moment for me. Because, twenty, thirty, forty years ago I bought this dress.” In Last Gasp, time played an important role, as naming points in time triggered our memory, but linear time structure did not have to be obeyed exactly. This relegating of linearity and time frames to the coincidental was what set Shaw and Weaver on a series of eclectic wordscapes that were held together and enabled by acts of attentive and mutual listening. The latter was not only a performative device, but also a necessity, since Weaver fed Shaw her lines over bulky headphones throughout the show. Shaw has been unable to remember lines since suffering a stroke in 2011. What held Shaw’s scenes together were songs and music, and snippets repeated on loop, such as the line “I know, I know, I know” from Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” that functioned both as a reflection on Shaw’s inability to know or remember everything any longer and the way in which “I know” has become an empty phrase nowadays. That which could be a profound declaration of one’s certainty has become an offhand phatic silence-filler. Click for larger view View full resolution Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw in Last Gasp (WFH). (Photo: Split Britches.) Shaw’s reminiscences were personal: when she talked about the role Black male musicians—quite a few of them called Johnny—had played for her [End Page 225] as butch role models, for instance. When she presented the singer Johnnie Ray, she went through the window curtains next to her, which in the next shot became the curtains through which she entered the stage. To a karaoke version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” she informed us that the song was sent up on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 because NASA thought it would represent life on earth to extraterrestrials. These bits of trivia and episodes from her childhood were delivered by a static, towering Shaw who only sometimes smirked tentatively. Shaw’s smirk reemerged throughout the...
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Jan 1, 2022
Shane Lecompte + 1
Open Access
