Based on a play by Lois Weaver, Split Britches is the story of the grim, often hilarious relationship of three Appalachian women. Drawing on family history, Weaver tells the Depression-era tale of a woman and her two nieces who live on an abandoned family homestead in Virginia. The older sister rules the others with an iron hand, condemning them to a life of virtual isolation in a kitchen cluttered with memorabilia and livestock. In staging the work for video, Geller goes against the convention of "opening up" the drama. Shooting in a studio, he stresses the artifice and theatricality of the narrative, elevating the drama through the grand gesture and the close-up. Evoking the women's self-contained existence, their claustrophobia and suppressed emotion, sepia-toned photographs are used to freeze the action, as each woman steps out of her role to speak to the camera.