Elżbieta Jodłowska, the author of the text, wrote a play about how farewells to youth are difficult and tragic. Yet at times they are extremely funny. It is better to laugh than despair. Even when there is no hope of ever fitting into size 36 again, because when squeezing into size 48 we realize with horror that a gusset needs to be sewn in for the garment to fasten.
High blood pressure, hot flashes, frequent urination, excess weight, cellulite and increasingly flabby muscles. All this happens to the heroines of the play “Menopause… and That’s It.” Do they break down over it? Quite the opposite. They are grateful to God that prostate problems have passed them by.
They still want to stop time. They exercise desperately, go on diets, visit health spas and opt for plastic surgery. But these desperate attempts to stop the inevitable also make them laugh.
“Have you been exercising?” one heroine asks another. “So, can you reach your toes with your hands yet?”
“No,” the woman addressed replies. “But I can finally see my own feet! Besides, I go walking with poles,” she answers proudly. “That is, we go with the girls from the neighborhood. When the weather is nice. And warm. And it doesn’t rain. But actually, we only intend to start walking. Tomorrow. If it isn’t windy…”
The heroines, all over fifty, dream of passionate encounters and desire sex. “Sex is a wonderful thing. If my memory serves me right,” one of them sums up the subject.
They lack wild lovers who do “fiku-miku, like a jumping jack on a wire.” They regret their affairs and “multiple orgasms on the hood of a vehicle.” At home, however, only the husband remains—the one who calls them “Mummy” and, although he cheats on them, is very jealous.
“My husband,” one of the heroines says, “said he would kill me if he caught me cheating.”
“Malina!” her friend cries. “You’ve been dead for ten years already!”
According to women entangled in menopause, a man is like a vestigial appendix. He can cause a great deal of suffering, but once removed, it turns out he was of no use whatsoever.
In Jodłowska’s play, four women over fifty laugh in the face of old age. They talk about embarrassing things that await every one of us.
“I don’t know when it happened. I woke up one day, looked in the mirror and was fifty years old,” one of them says.
“I haven’t woken up yet,” another quickly replies.
“Eventually, you will have to.”
“No. I suffer from insomnia!”
“Menopause… and That’s It” is a play that perfectly brightens women’s long, sleepless autumn-of-life nights.
(information by Grażyna Hanaf)