ABSTRACT
From its inception, Dress Suits was made to be performed at P.S. 122, an East Village venue for new, or nonmainstream, theatre, dance, music, and performance art.2 Hughes, Shaw, and Weaver understood that the tacit assumptions operant when making work specifically for WOW and its audience-assumptions that inform the nature and shape of the workcould not be taken for granted outside WOW turf. Working toward performance in a sociologically (if not artistically) mainstream, predominantly heterosexual space influenced the narrative and performative strategies developed for Dress Suits in an attempt to resist dominant culture readings of the piece. While the objective remained the same as that of WOW productions, Dress Suits marks a significant departure from the style and some of the strategies that distinguish WOW theatre work.
