"I walked down the Bowery and turned right on Bond Street... and for a minute I thought, 'Oh my God, I don’t know where I am!'"

This week Time Out interviews Lois Weaver (on left in photo) who, with partner Peggy Shaw, opened the now-iconic WOW Café Theater on East Fourth Street and founded the Split Britches performance troupe. They're unveiling their latest piece of edgy queer theater, "The Lost Lounge," at the new Dixon Place this Friday.

Their new work is, in part, about the changes in the neighborhood. "We call it a tribute to the last holdouts, to the people who kind of hold on or resist or fight or just hold on in the face of the kind of real-estate development that’s been going on in the Bowery. It's shocking, what’s been going on there," said Weaver, who still lives in the East Village.

Weaver had more to say on the area in a Q-and-A, including:

Do you feel like strangers in the East Village now?
"I walked down the Bowery and turned right on Bond Street the other day, and for a minute I thought, 'Oh my God, I don’t know where I am!' I just didn’t recognize it. And so one of the themes that we’re working on is how memory is tied up with landscape, and what happens when you lose your landscape — how identity is tied into place and how it feels like we’re losing part of our identity by losing those places."

Image via.