Menopausal Gentleman

Menopausal Gentleman (1996)

Menopausal Gentleman is Peggy Shaw’s bluesy, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness lounge act about a butch lesbian going through “the change.” Shaw riffs on the hormonal effects of menopause complete with hot flashes, cold sweats, humor and tears.  She is a tough-speaking film-noir soul performed in Shaw's trademark drag patois (a self-conscious and artificially low New Yorkese), or to put it simply: a tough guy in a swell suit!

Peggy thought of the name of the performance when she was in a bar with some students and wrote the title on a bar napkin. I always believed that like shows, titles needed a cadence. With Menopausal Gentleman, she became more confident as a solo performer and incorporated more of the Split Britches methods of irony and appropriation with her own performance style. Talking about what she was going through and translating it to a poetic framework helped Peggy work through personal struggles. She embraced her suit wearing masculinity and worked on the ways her physicality could be poetic with choreographer Stormy Brandenburger and director Rebecca Taichman. This had a commercial cross over, winning her second Obie Award for Performance (1999) and becoming the title of the book which was published in 2011 (A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw, ed. by Jill Dolan).

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This show is dedicated to James Neale-Kennerley.

Menopausal Gentleman was commissioned and produced by Dixon Place in New York City. Funding provided by the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation and the Heathcote Art Foundation. The performance premiered at Dixon Place, and was subsequently produced off Broadway at the Ohio Theatre in a co-production with the Ohio Theatre and Ellie Covan.

Full footage of the performance can be found here.