Featured photo by Eric McNatt.
As an artist, Bitch has lived a thousand lives. From fronting a queer indie music duo at the turn of the 21st century, to branching out as a solo artist and an actor, to now creating her own autobiographical play with music, Bitch has plenty of story to tell — and in B*TCHCRAFT: A Musical Play, she tells it all, no holds barred.
B*TCHCRAFT, which is now running at wild project in Manhattan, shares a name with Bitch’s most recent album from 2022. Its score includes a mix of the album’s songs, tracks from her Bitch and Animal era, and some new original music. “I just felt like I wanted to do something a little different than my regular rock tours,” she tells INTO. “I just had this sense that I wanted to somehow share my story in a bigger picture kind of way.”
Enter Bitch’s collaborator Margie Zohn, who directed B*TCHCRAFT along with co-conceiving the show and co-writing its book. Together, Zohn and Bitch took her life story and parsed it down to a few key moments — though selecting what made the cut wasn’t easy.
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“That’s the part that I was always overwhelmed by,” Bitch says of choosing what to bring from her life onto the stage. “When people say, like, ‘You can write anything!’ I’m like, I need limits, you know? Like, I need a container.”
So, what does the story of B*TCHCRAFT actually entail? “It’s basically about a very quiet child who was raised by English immigrants,” Bitch explains, “who then goes into the world and teenagerness and discovers the harsh boundaries of patriarchy, and has a mushroom-induced feminist awakening in college, meets her first bandmate, Animal, and names herself Bitch.”
If it sounds like a lot of ground to cover in an 80-minute play, that’s because it is. That’s not even accounting for the play’s second half, which follows Bitch on the road as a touring artist, her discovery of the since-closed Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and the controversy she sparked for continuing to play there despite the festival’s transphobic policies.
Bitch describes B*TCHCRAFT as a “one-woman, one-beaver” show. Though there are brief appearances from, yes, a stuffed beaver come to life and a spellcasting crone, the vast majority of the show sees Bitch alone on stage, telling her decades-spanning story through music, monologues, and occasionally tap dance.
That aforementioned crone opens the show by casting a spell, conjuring a broomstick that Bitch returns to throughout the play, ultimately wielding a bejeweled, multicolored version in the show’s finale.
“The broomstick is, for sure, a witch reference,” Bitch says of the show’s signature prop. “It’s also a comment on women’s work — and what we consider women’s work — and how that generally is free labor and very valuable labor. It’s that dichotomy of patriarchy, how we don’t value the things that are actually crucially important to everyone.”
The middle of the show puts the audience in the seats of several Bitch and Animal concerts as the duo tours America. It’s a window into another time, and into an earlier wave of feminism. Listening to Bitch sing their “Pussy Manifesto” and wail on the electric violin, it’s easy to see how she and Animal captured the feminist zeitgeist of the ‘90s and early aughts, and being part of her crowd is easily a high point for the production.
The show’s ending stays firmly in Bitch’s point of view, for better or worse. Watching her grapple with the ramifications of an off-color transphobic remark and her continued support of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival despite its “womyn-born womyn”-only policy is uncomfortable, to say the least, and Bitch’s turn from an endlessly rootable protagonist to a complicated anti-hero is challenging and compelling in equal measure.
Bitch clearly isn’t proud of how her actions hurt the trans community in the 2000s, but she doesn’t take full accountability for them, either — at least, not within the limited scope of B*TCHCRAFT. From a Gen Z perspective, Bitch’s quasi-apology in the play may not be up to par, but it’s nonetheless an authentic and personal take on cancel culture, direct from a queer woman who’s experienced it in full force.
For her part, Bitch’s portrayal of her own ending isn’t necessarily triumphant. Rather, it’s the story of a woman who has continued to make art for its own sake, even if her platform isn’t what it used to be.
“We want the audience to feel inspired to tell their own stories and to keep writing and keep making, especially now,” she says. “I never thought I would be doing this play in a Trump America. So it all also has a heavier feeling for me, and feels even more vital that we are visible, that we are taking up space, and that we’re allowing each other — and in community with each other — to be vulnerable and tell [our] stories and try to hold each other instead of warring within each other.”
B*TCHCRAFT: A Musical Play runs through March 1 at wild project. Tickets are available here.
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