Jibz Cameron has spent more than 20 years building Dynasty Handbag. Now she’s putting both of them onstage at the same time. Hell in a Handbag arrives at EMPAC in Troy on Saturday, September 19: a memoir performance that has been selling out venues since its world premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles this past spring. The Lab in San Francisco sold out. The Bell House in Brooklyn. Time & Space Limited in Hudson. EMPAC is one of the last stops on the run.
About the Show
The evening combines autobiographical readings from Cameron’s debut memoir, published in April 2026 on Dopamine Books, with live performances by her alter ego Dynasty Handbag. Cameron and Dynasty appear onstage together; it’s a pairing her 20-plus-year career had never done quite this way before. The memoir follows her from a Northern California childhood with hippie clowns through the East Bay punk scene and into New York’s avant-garde theater world, addressing addiction, mental illness, and her mother’s suicide.
Critics have responded accordingly. Paul Reubens called the work “pure genius.” Paper Magazine called it “hilarious and extraordinarily original.” A third critic put it as “an immersion in unhinged queer genius.”
Cameron told Chronogram she initially imagined the show with “bells and whistles,” until co-producer Amanda Verwey pushed her toward a simpler approach. Seven to 10 performance pieces, alternating between readings and Dynasty’s turns onstage. Cameron’s own theory on why it works: “you’re funnier the more honest you are.” Dynasty Handbag’s territory covers, per Cameron, “the tragic absurdity of heterosexuality, queerness, the female body, capitalism, depression, art making, and life itself.”
Cameron is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, 2021 United States Artist Award recipient, and 2020 Creative Capital Grant awardee. Her film Weirdo Night, directed by Mariah Garnett, screened at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Dynasty Handbag’s work has been presented at The New Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and Cameron was included in the 2023 Made in LA Biennial at The Hammer.
Content note: The show includes mature themes, among them suicide and self-harm.
Venue & Logistics
EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) is one of the better purpose-built rooms in the Capital Region for this kind of work. It sits on the RPI campus in Troy. The show runs 7 to 8:15 p.m. with no intermission, so plan for a tight 75 minutes.
Tickets
Tickets are $5 general admission, or free with an RPI ID. For a show that has been selling out at every earlier stop on this tour, that is a genuinely accessible price. Buy tickets