When Jibz Cameron takes the stage at Time & Space Limited in Hudson on August 23, she’ll arrive as herself. She won’t remain that way for long.
Cameron is best known as Dynasty Handbag, the grotesquely glamorous, furiously funny performance persona she has inhabited for more than two decades. The new stage version of her memoir, Hell in a Handbag, brings Cameron and Dynasty together in public for the first time, alternating candid readings with selections from a catalog she describes as her “weird shit.”
The production is strikingly spare. Cameron reads part of a chapter at a podium, pulls a costume piece from a trash bag, puts on Dynasty’s wig, and moves to center stage to perform something connected to the passage. Then she returns to the podium and begins again. The show includes somewhere between seven and 10 pieces—Cameron can’t remember exactly—and none of the archival footage or technical embellishments she initially imagined.
“I thought it needed to be more,” she says. “It needed to have bells and whistles.” Co-producer and director Amanda Verwey persuaded her otherwise. “It’s very simple, but somehow it worked.”
That simplicity leaves Cameron exposed in a way Dynasty never has. Performing as her alter ego has become second nature; reading autobiographical material aloud proved frightening. The memoir recounts a Northern California childhood among back-to-the-land hippies and clowns, her mother’s severe mental illness, her father’s alcoholism, sexual assault, addiction, self-harm, and her mother’s death by suicide. Early in rehearsals, Cameron raced through the readings before realizing she had to “learn how to perform as me.”
“It’s still not me, because I’m putting it on,” she says. “But it is a performance, and it’s very controlled.”
Published earlier this year, Hell in a Handbag traces Cameron’s path from an isolated, chaotic childhood through the East Bay punk scene, the San Francisco Art Institute, New York’s experimental theater world, and the creation of Dynasty during a disastrous marriage. Writing required a different form of investigation than performance, which Cameron describes as a way of “chewing up experiences” and making them bigger, stranger, and more physical.
The memoir demanded excavation. Remembering her childhood fascination with Prince or Gilda Radner wasn’t enough; Cameron had to ask what those artists revealed to her about gender, comedy, performance, and herself. “It was more and more layers of trying to understand experiences in a different way,” she says.
Dynasty became a vehicle for emotions Cameron had difficulty expressing in daily life. “There’s a lot of rage behind her,” Cameron says. “Expressing anger, rage, sadness, disappointment as Jibz is a much harder thing for me to do than it is as Dynasty Handbag.”
Humor runs through even the memoir’s harshest episodes, but Cameron distinguishes between comedy that emerges from processed experience and jokes used to flee it. During writing, she sometimes caught herself making light of something that remained painful. Her test is whether an artist has examined the material from every angle.
“I think you can be honest and funny,” she says. “But I think you’re funnier the more honest you are.”
That combination of discomfort, candor, and comic disintegration has placed Cameron in a queer performance lineage she initially knew little about. The late theorist José Esteban Muñoz described Dynasty as an embodiment of “queer failure”—a refusal of the roles assigned to women, queer people, and polished entertainers. Cameron says his writing gave her an intellectual framework for instincts she had been following all along.
“He was one of the first people to tell me what I was doing,” she says. “When I read that, I was like, ‘Yep. That’s what I’m doing.’”
“Hell in a Handbag” will be performed at 7:30pm on Sunday, August 23, at Time & Space Limited in Hudson. The event is presented by TSL and John Doe Books. Tickets and information.
