The Legend of Georgia McBride

Written by Matthew López
Directed by Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola
Producing Consultant: Javier Bustillos

May 30 – June 20, 2026 | 7:30pm

Performers

Miss Tracy Mills………………………………………………….Jimmy Janowski
Casey………………………………………………………………..Anthony Alcocer*
Miss Rexy……………………………………………………………Michael Blasdell
Jo……………………………………………………..Christine Turturro-Beausoleil
Jason………………………………………………………………………Michael Seitz
Eddie………………………………………………………….Annette Daniels Taylor

*Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and
Stage Managers, appearing under a special agreement with Actors’ Equity Association.

Production Team

  • Co-Directors – Dan Shanahan, Melissa Meola
  • Producing Consultant – Javier Bustillos
  • Production Manager – Carly Kulak
  • Stage Manager – Mary Margaret Keenan-Brown
  • Scenography – Kristina Siegel
  • Choreography- Michael Blasdell
  • Lighting Designer – Matvey Kitchen
  • Assistant Lighting Designer – Frank Napolski
  • Sound Design – Justin Rowland
  • Video Designer – Brian Milbrand
  • Costume Design – Jimmy Janowski, Michael Blasdell, Zoe Dillinger 
  • Facilities Manager – Daniel Toner
  • Audio Engineer – Dan Neveu
  • Construction Coordinator – Sean Kulak
  • Construction Assistants – Jim Sikorski, Travis Armbruster, Brian Jascur
  • Wardrobe Manager – Zoe Dillinger
  • Draper – Gabrielle Hall 
  • Scenic- Thea Duskin
  • Box Office / House Manager – Jennifer Carter-Tillapaugh, Joey Ryan

Special Thanks: The Adam Mickiewicz Library and Dramatic Circle, Obermeier Kraatz Creative, Buffalo State College, Tom Makar for the use of his song, “I Was Lost,” Kalub Michael Thompson.

Director’s Note

In The Legend of Georgia McBride all identity is performance. 

Identity is fragile. What is the core essence of an individual? 

Identity throughout the play is unstable and continually rebuilt. Each character tries on, discards, rebuilds a sense of self. 

Roles are not simply played when we enter drag. Each scene reveals shifts in performance that occur in everyday life; the roles we perform at work, at home, and within relationships.

Cleo’s on Panama City Beach, Florida is a laboratory for identity construction. It is also a business where Casey as a struggling performer must adapt to survive, to endure in a world defined by supply and demand. Each character must adapt to survive. The economic realities of despair, survival, and reinvention create the conditions for transformation. 

When discarded we need mentors to bring us back in from the cold. Traci coaches, constructs and from this, a new family structure emerges.

Home should represent safety and stability, yet in this play it becomes another stage where identities are constructed, and pressure accumulates. The domestic world transforms into a site where gender, labor, and expectation collide and where a pizza can act as a financial death spiral because it is tied to overdraft fees and bounced checks. One false step and this all goes away. The walls are a continual feed of normative expectations. 

Visually and sonically, this production draws from underground club culture, where fantasy, vulnerability, glamour, and escape coexist and create a place for people who are on the margins.

The Legend of Georgia McBride is about the possibility of reinvention and the freedom that can emerge when performance does not conceal identity but reveals it.

I want to thank Javier Bustillos for bringing this remarkable production to my attention and for his support, the fantastic dynamic cast who brought so much to this show and were creative partners throughout, the production team who works so hard to bring a project like this to life and the designers who develop imaginary worlds that are both thoughtful and totally unique.

  • Dan Shanahan, Director

Producing Consultant’s Note

There is a particular satisfaction in watching one of my long-held artistic dreams finally lock into place. For years, as founder of Buffalo United Artists (BUA), Buffalo’s longstanding queer theater company, I have spoken with Torn Space Theater’s Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola about creating a project that would bring BUA’s queer sensibility into conversation with Torn Space’s avant-garde aesthetic. On the surface, the two companies might seem to inhabit very different worlds, one explicitly devoted to LGBTQ+ stories, the other known for bold, visually driven performance installations and reimaginings of classic and contemporary works, but our conversations always circled the same questions: identity, perception, and transformation.​

That shared curiosity has now found its home in The Legend of Georgia McBride, realized with the cast I first envisioned on the night I saw this play in August 2015: Buffalo stage legend Jimmy Janowski as Tracey, joined by Anthony Alcocer as Casey, Michael Seitz, and Bebe Bulgari. All four are artists deeply connected to BUA and to Buffalo’s queer theater history, and to see them together on Torn Space’s mainstage under the direction of Torn Space founder and co-artistic director Dan Shanahan is both exhilarating and deeply affirming. It marks a convergence of communities, aesthetics, and histories that have shaped queer performance in this city.​​

Matthew López’s play is frequently described as a comedy about drag and reinvention, following Casey, a struggling Elvis impersonator who unexpectedly becomes a drag performer to support his growing family. Yet it is equally a play about how “normal” and “queer” are defined and policed in everyday life. 

Every character in The Legend of Georgia McBride can be read through both lenses, depending on who is looking: the straight man entering the world of drag, the seasoned queens who teach him their craft, the wife forced to renegotiate her sense of home and partnership, and the bar’s patrons challenged to accept a new kind of show.​

Consider Casey himself. From one angle, he is the “normal” one; a working-class husband, soon-to-be father, clinging to respectability even as his Elvis act fails. The world of drag represents everything he should resist: femininity, queerness, financial desperation masked as art. But shift the lens slightly, and Casey has always been queer: an artist performing masculinity through Elvis, already in drag, already failing at “normal” life. His transformation into Georgia McBride isn’t corruption; it’s liberation into a truer performance.

Jo, his wife, presents the same instability. Is she the voice of heteronormative responsibility, the pregnant woman trying to anchor her husband to conventional manhood? Or is she the radical one, supporting his gender transgression, prioritizing survival and artistry over respectability, refusing the script of the disapproving wife? She queers motherhood itself by embracing what most would see as a threat.

Tracy Mills and Rexy/Anorexia appear to be the “obvious” queers, the drag queens representing everything outside mainstream life. Yet they are also consummate professionals: skilled performers, generous mentors, small business entrepreneurs with work ethic any “straight” world would recognize. They embody artistic excellence and community care. Who, exactly, is outside the norm here?

Even Eddie, the struggling bar owner, created as a man but here played by the marvelous female actor Annette Daniels Taylor, shifts depending on where you stand. S/he’s making desperate capitalist decisions, yes, but s/he’s also creating space for queer performance, defying conventional business models, operating outside mainstream success. Is s/he exploiting the drag queens or enabling their art?

This is López’s brilliance, and what makes this play essential: these categories: normal, queer, straight, gay, masculine, feminine, are never stable. They depend entirely on who is looking and what they need to see. The play asks: What if “normal” is simply the performance we don’t call out? What if we’re all doing drag, but only some of us get caught?

Torn Space’s work has long inhabited this territory, even when the titles are not explicitly queer. In productions such as The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Scenes from a Marriage, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Far Away, and The Homecoming, the company has probed gender, power, domesticity, and desire, core themes in queer experience and in any exploration of what passes for “normal.” For me, this makes The Legend of Georgia McBride feel less like a departure and more like the natural next step in Torn Space’s ongoing investigation of identity through image and performance. That Dan and Melissa have chosen to realize this vision with these artists and on this stage, is both an honor and a homecoming.

  • Javier Bustillos, Producing Consultant

“This is a play that exposes “normal” not as a stable category, but as a performance enforced by shame, and undone by those who refuse it.” – Anthony Chase, Theater Talk

THE THEATER TALK REVIEW

 

The Legend of Georgia McBride was originally commissioned by The Old Globe, San Diego, California (Louis Spisto, Executive Producer)
Originally developed and produced at the Denver Center Theatre Company (Kent Thompson, Artistic Director)
New York Premiere at the MCC Theater September 9, 2015 (Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey, & William Cantler, Artistic Directors; Blake West, Executive Director)

 

Production Photos Credit: Nickel City Headshots