The play is essentially a lesbian love story told in the overheated style of film noir,[2] also drawing upon images from pulp fiction;[3] The show has been revived several times since its premiere, with the original cast of Peggy Shaw (Deeluxe/Little Richard) and Lois Weaver (Michigan) reprising their roles.
[4] Described as a "lesbian noir" piece, Dress Suits tells all about two women, Deeluxe and Michigan, who are shacking up in the lobby of a clothing rental shop in the East Village.
As the action begins, the more butch partner, Deeluxe (Peggy Shaw), slips on a pair of nylon stockings while singing a love song in a husky baritone.
“She’s hell on heels, a twisted sister— a character from the timeless, tasteless world of dyke noir as imagined by Holly Hughes.”[7] "While Ms. Hughes's more poetic writing recalls Sam Shepard, the campy B-movie side of her sensibility shows her to be equally in tune with John Waters's movies and Charles Busch's drag extravaganzas.
But in portraying female sexuality - and lesbian seduction in particular - as a carnivorous free-for-all, it scrapes away decades of encrusted decorum from a subject that is too often treated with a hushed sentimentality.
Dress Suits to Hire allowed the audience to revisit and contrast the value of lesbian performance art against a vastly different historical moment.
Weaver and Shaw irritate the nerves as a theatrical device for presenting or awakening the dormant, suppressed, or ignored aspects of the process of engendering our lives.