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Laura Benanti is one of the lucky Broadway actors who is able to sustain her theater work with steady TV & film gigs. Most recently that screen time included a supporting part in No Hard Feelings with Jennifer Lawrence. Dipping back into theater, Benanti just performed a one-woman show in New York over the weekend called Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares. One of the topics she discusses in the piece that (historically) nobody (in charge) has cared about is perimenopause, that rip-roaring prequel to menopause that I’d honestly never heard of until Naomi Watts started the conversation, and Halle Berry and Gillian Anderson kept it going. Benanti is in the thick of it now, and she doesn’t mince words when she says it’s “been f–king horrible.” I’m sorry for her pain, truly, but she was still absolutely hilarious when talking to People Mag about it to hype her show:
Nobody Cares: Laura Benanti’s new solo show, Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, finds the Tony-winning actress taking a self-deprecating look at fame, friendships, romance, pregnancy, motherhood and a bevy of other things she says she’s come to learn as a self-titled “recovering ingénue.” But there’s one lesson that’s been a bit more difficult to find out than others. “I talk about perimenopause, which has just been f–king horrible,” Benanti tells PEOPLE when discussing the show… “It’s one of the many things we’re told to just shut up about as mothers because people are like, ‘Eww, gross, lady bodies!’”
Surprise! The 44-year-old star says she had no idea what was happening to her when she first started experiencing perimenopause, the often years-long transition prior to menopause when hormones fluctuate. … “It was a total mystery to me because in all the years of being a functioning woman, it was never explained to me once,” Benanti says. “Menopause, they’re like, ‘Okay, we got to acknowledge this is real.’ But perimenopause is just a surprise party! And I don’t know why. So I call it ‘the menopause appetizer that nobody tells you about,’” she jokes. “It’s ‘the amuse-bouche to an old cooch.’”
‘You’re fine’: “Can you imagine if this happened to men?” she teases to PEOPLE. “In perimenopause, our hormones are changing as rapidly as they were when we were in middle school. If men experienced that, scientists would be like, ‘To the Galapagos we go! Find every endangered plant and animal and use them to make it into man medicine!’ And meanwhile, women are over here with a swarm of bees in our uterus and our skin falling off. And everyone’s like, ‘You’re fine.’” They say, ‘Mothers are strong,’” Benanti adds. “F–k you! Yeah, we are. But also, we could use some help once in a while.”
The advantages of recording a live show: It will stream at a later date on Audible, for those unable to make it there in person — something that drew Benanti to the project when she was first approached by the audio streamer to create a show for them. “The thing I love about theater is that it’s ephemeral and there’s a magic to that, but that’s also the thing that makes it sort of sad because it’s so temporary,” Benanti says. “So I’m really excited about people being able to listen to it. And who knows, maybe we’ll be able to turn this into a TV special one day. You gotta dream big.”
She had me at “the amuse-bouche to an old cooch.” Poetry. Part of me feels like an imposter weighing in on a perimenopause story, since I am pre peri. At worst I’m two years away, or at significantly-less-worse, 20 years away from meeting Ms. Peri myself. But I can relate to the symptom of being hot. All. The. Time. I have a theory that this stems from my having a winter birthday: my parents bundled me up as a baby so I wouldn’t be cold. But they noticed that as soon as I was coordinated enough, I would strip off everything I could manage. Then they got the message. And here I am now, what Benanti would call “a functioning woman,” and I still feel like I’m at least ten degrees warmer than everyone else. Given this is my baseline, I am in sheer terror of what my perimenopause will be. No really, I have visions of myself flopping around, clad in a fig leaf, making increasingly paranoid pleas to Boreas — Greek god of the north wind and winter — to pay a visit to the American east coast. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for Benanti’s show to drop on Audible so I can learn what else I have to look forward to. And yeah, she’s right about how different things would be if men went through perimenopause, but I’m already too hot and bothered to get into that now.
photos via Instagram and credit: Robin Platzer / Twin Images / Avalon and Getty
