'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love: Staging Relational Care with Lois Weaver and Split Britches

Abstract

Drawing on the five phases of care identified by Joan C. Tronto and two long interviews with Split Britches co-director Lois Weaver, this chapter argues that Weaver is an exemplary theatrical practitioner of the many necessary layers of care, with special aptitude for – and self-aware, metatheatrical emphasis on – competence of care, or caring well. The chapter argues that Weaver’s emphasis on care in her work profoundly recalibrates hegemonic neoliberal Euro-American values, promoting the crucial value of care in market-dominated cultures where it is otherwise structurally deeply degraded. It argues that Weaver’s practice of care promotes social connections, interdependence and responsibility, instead of dangerous neoliberal fantasies of individual autonomy and self-interest. Examining Split Britches theatre company’s Unexploded Ordnances or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (2018), Weaver’s solo work as Tammy WhyNot, and her Care Café forum for public discussion, the chapter explores how Weaver’s practice of care offers urgently needed structures, strategies, and tactics for challenging dominant ageist and capitalist value systems and for realising a more caring theatre and a more caring world, especially for and with elders.