Peggy Shaw

It all started with the perfect car. Actor, playwright, and three-time Obie winner Peggy Shaw, a co-founder of the adventurous New York theater troupe Split Britches, had been going places for decades with wild and creative autobiographical pieces. Her new one-woman show, To My Chagrin, which debuted to acclaim in New York last fall, motors in to Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on Wednesday, and it puts the emphasis on the auto part of autobiography with a 1977 Chevy Luv truck that sits centerstage.

"You should see the car," Shaw exults over the phone from her Catskills house. "We found it in a ‘Pick and Pull’ in Texas." Of course, getting the Luv was an adventure in itself. "The guy in the junkyard said, ‘I don’t like theater,’ but we got him to take out the engine and the wheels, the brakes and tires — the heavy stuff." The shell, which was also the centerpiece of the New York production, was then cut into 10 pieces, and it will be shipped to Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.

Other venues declined to pick up the pieces, however. "Seattle and Alaska decided it wasn’t worth shipping," Shaw explains. "But it is worth shipping. Everyone loves it, even the theater technicians. People get really excited about cars." Especially Shaw, who uses the Luv as a potent emblem in the latest installment of her theatricalized memoirs. These are based on conversations with her nine-year-old half-Jamaican grandson Ian, her "dual-heritage, bi-racial, mixed-metaphor, well-bred sweet island boy." Ian, as it turns out, is car-crazy. As is his grandmother, a self-described "mixed-up second-generation first-cousin-combo-inbred Irish grand-butch-mother."

To My Chagrin also includes paeans to the soul music of the ’60s. "Everything in my life goes into the show. People who’ve seen my shows in the last 30 years say, ‘I feel like I’ve lived the last 30 years with you — I know every intimate thing.’ " Shaw, who will turn 60 this summer, grew up in Belmont. "I’m like Boston Irish with too many kids. My mother had 11 breakdowns and would be gone for a year, but I’d come home from school and nobody would ever mention it."

Despite this repressive and chaotic environment, Shaw came out to her family in the early ’70s after having worked as a go-go dancer in the Combat Zone. "In Boston, I was raised with James Brown and Wilson Pickett," she says, and her love of soul infuses To My Chagrin, which also includes her performing partner, Vivian Stoll, on percussion. "It’s a celebration of me going along as my butch masculine self, and then my grandson is put into my lap, and how do I talk to him? Car talk, I guess." But car talk fused with other cultural influences. "I looked up the words to ‘I Feel Good,’ and Vivian made it like a Bach song that I’m singing to him as I’m closing up the car. So I’m taking my whiteness and turning it into a lullaby to Ian."

For Shaw — whose previous shows include Menopausal Gentleman, Throws Like a Girl, and, with Split Britches, Upwardly Mobile Home, Lesbians Who Kill, and Little Women, The Tragedy — theater has provided a platform for political ideas as well as a creative outlet. As for Massachusetts’s recent legislation regarding gay marriage, she comments, "It will flush the devils out of the woods. Having lived through Clause 28 in England or Anita Bryant here, all you need is one hateful person to bring out the hate. I think the Bush government is misjudging the American people. All the Spanish kids on my block are saying, ‘He was great on the war, but how come he doesn’t believe gay people have the same rights?’ "

To My Chagrin is presented by Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, at Town Pier in Wellfleet, June 30 through July 24. Tickets are $23 and $25; call (508) 349-6835 or visit what.org