you're the moon over Mae West's shoulder

The hilarity ensues immediately once you buy a ticket for Sex, the Mae West play which has been making the national rounds: do you write “Sex” on your appointment calendar? Do you tell people you’re going to see “Sex”? I generally settled for “the play at the Aurora Theater” in my discreet way, but you’ve got to hand it to Mae – you might think society has moved past her particular brand of naughtiness, but she’s already sauntered ahead of you, because her good-humored innuendo not only outsmarts our blunt ways, she’s also as aware as Jane Austen of social class and money.

The script is similar to those West wrote for her movies – she (called Margy LaMont this time around) is a good bad girl; a rich and innocent young man, ignorant of her background, falls in love with her down in Trinidad; when he takes her home to meet his parents, she realizes that his mother Clara is the ungrateful society lady she rescued in the first act from a misadventure in slumming. Margy eventually decides that her future happiness lies in marrying her old-time friend and lover, the recently retired Lieutenant Gregg, who knows all about her life and keeps proposing anyway, and moving with him to Australia, an ending which satisfies everyone except the love-struck young man, who will get over it.

The play is actually similar to most of Oscar Wilde’s plays; like them, it is basically an ironic melodrama about class boundaries leavened with sexually subversive epigrams. I don’t want to oversell the comparison; I’m not saying West could have written anything like The Importance of Being Earnest (though even Wilde only managed that once), and she never wrote anything like Salome (though I would love to have seen her version). And her play is a lot looser than, say, An Ideal Husband, which is a disadvantage or an advantage, depending on how you feel about plot machinery. Her play has plenty of vaudeville moments, and the first half ends with a very entertaining and very extraneous series of song and dance numbers (Robert Brewer as the lovestruck young man had a particularly nice voice, sounding at times remarkably like an actual 1920s Irish tenor – I guess I’m thinking of the John McCormack sound).

The Aurora is one of those tiny theaters (four rows in a U-shape around the open stage) that like to claim there are no bad seats, but I had one, at the right-hand tip of the U, behind the stage couch. For quite a bit of the play I was looking over the actors' shoulders or observing their necks. I would have just accepted this as my bad luck, but I saw a woman buy a discount ticket at the box office half an hour before the show started, and her seat was much better than mine. You’d think that buying in advance at full price would give you the better seat. Apparently I have a lot to learn about the ways of the theater.

Seating discontent aside, this was an enjoyable evening (oh, all right, I’ll give in and say it – I really enjoyed the Sex, thanks so much, the money is in the box office), though I couldn’t help feeling that if this had actually been a film from the 1930s, the class drama would have been more sharply delineated – there’s something antiquated and formal about the dress, movement, and speech of the upper classes in those films that is alien to our society, and difficult to convey with modern actors in a stripped-down set. I wish the Aurora had trusted the material a little more and relied less on its curiosity value and period charm. They opened and closed the show with unnecessary historical background – a sketch of the usual jazz age pizzazz, some shocked contemporary reviews, the eventual arrest for obscenity after packing the house for months. I’m not sure why they thought this fairly straightforward, enjoyable play needed all that – they wouldn’t have done the same for Lady Windermere’s Fan.

The attempt to recreate the atmosphere around the original play may also have been the reason for the production’s major miscalculation, which I’m guessing was the fault of Tom Ross, the director: having Delia MacDougall, the actress playing Margy, imitate Mae West. There are certain artists, like Gertrude Stein or Groucho Marx, who have such strong styles that attempts to discuss them usually end up as attempts to imitate them, which is always a mistake. You’re just not ever going to see a better Mae West imitation than the one Mae West did. And the exaggerated voluptuousity that is the West physique provides a built-in punchline that just can’t be supplied these days, since the red hot Mama body type seems to have disappeared with vaudeville.

The basic question is whether a star vehicle can survive without the star. I think Sex is a solid enough play so that it would have been worth trying, and MacDougall brought enough interesting flashes to her performance so that I wish she had been encouraged to form an independent interpretation. One of the best plays I saw last year was a star vehicle without the star – Charles Busch’s Red Scare on Sunset, performed by the student actors at the American Conservatory Theater. Usually it just seems to work out that I post late, and basically I’m OK with that, on the grounds that it’s all based on memory the minute you leave your seat anyway, and sometimes it helps to have things shake out over a few weeks, and also it’s not as if anyone is waiting to hear what I think before buying a ticket. But sometimes a little too much time goes by even for me (though never say never – I may paper over poverty-induced gaps in my upcoming schedule with reminiscences of past theatrical glories, like some superannuated theater ghost who can’t wait to regale you with the time he was the understudy Guildenstern for the greatest Hamlet of three generations ago), and I do wish I had posted about Red Scare, mostly so I could salute the genius of Charles Busch.

I think I just had a vague sense that he was one of those guys who put on a dress and did bad Bette Davis imitations; I have nothing against that, but on the rare occasions when I’m drunk enough to laugh at something like that I’m usually preoccupied with wondering how to make the room stop spinning. I didn’t even bother going to see Tales of the Allergist’s Wife when it played here a few years ago. I don’t know what tipped me off that I might be mistaken, but I have recanted my heresy. Busch recreates, subverts, and glorifies a grand tradition of theatricality that goes back to Bernhardt and no doubt farther; and if you doubt me put Die Mommy Die in your Netflix queue. About halfway through viewing it I thought, Sweet Jesus, this is the Oresteia! with suppositories!

Last year the young conservatory actors created a Red Scare that was true to his spirit but independent of his presence. It was not only probably the most consistently well-acted play I saw last year, it was hilarious from start to finish (assuming that you find funny, and I do, a plot that centers on a Communist conspiracy to abolish star billing and the Arthur Freed unit at MGM and replace them with black-and-white ensemble dramas). It also dealt in a deeper way than many more ponderous plays with the function of art and fame in a democracy, with the easy American way of switching personal identity and its confusing results, and with the American attempt to define a cohesive social identity through demonizing outsiders. People tend not to see comic cross-dressers as holding the mirror up to our profounder nature, but I’ve gotten more out of Busch’s work than I have out of a lot of Eugene O’Neill’s. Charles Busch and Mae West, raffish provocateurs on the far shore of the mainstream! Is it universal, or peculiarly American, that it’s the marginal who tell all the truth, but tell it slant?