Tag Archives: Charles Busch

A Broadway Queer Matrix for Jurgen

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This was a tough one, which I submit with a heavy caveat.

When it comes to theatre, musical theatre in particular, I think any work could be considered queer.

Beyond the clichés—gay men love show tunes, stage divas, and melodrama—what I mean to say is that it’s a medium in which performance can trump the playwright’s intention.  A queer character can be played as villainous, heroic, insipid, wise, stereotypical or multi-textured, depending on the actor’s point of view.  Queer subtext can be suppressed or inserted based on the director’s or the actors’ preferences.

The same choices are there for film or television screenplays, but I find there to be a greater degree of nuance and experimentation in theatre.

Theatre has also been a welcoming community for queer artists, all the way back to its creation in ancient Greece.  Sophocles, one of the greatest Greek tragedians (e.g. Oedipus, Antigone, etc.), has been biographized as queer by historian Thomas Hubbard in Homosexuality in Greece and Rome.  While queer themes were not commonly overt in the time period, we know of plays that told the stories of male/male relationships, including Sophocles’ intriguing title:  “The Lovers of Achilles.”

Furthermore, theatre is a queer concept in itself:  you can wear a mask and take on a completely different identity from your real life.

So, enough of taking myself too seriously, here’s what I came up with.

Per Jurgen, I put some thought into Shakespeare, a steady source of queer and non-queer literary debate, and picked out two plays which present queer themes in different ways.

Of course, there’s lots of cross-dressing in Shakespeare productions, and the steady device of a woman falling in love with another woman who is disguised as a man.  The Merchant of Venice is one example.

Here, I chose Twelfth Night.  But I put Twelfth Night in the Queer Content/NonQueer Sensibility quad because all the fun, experimental stuff gets sorted out in the end, with Viola marrying the Duke.  Heteronormativity wins out again.

In contrast, I’ve always thought of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as queerly ambiguous, even though all the characters are in opposite-sex couplings.  There’s Puck, the fey master of ceremonies, and a disintegration of social conventions—characters falling in love with people they shouldn’t.  I couldn’t quite put it on the upper half of the Matrix due to Puck’s famous apologetic Act V speech:

“If we spirits have offended, think but this, and all is mended…”

But a lot has to do with the delivery, I think.  Is he really sorry that he interfered with the young, starchy aristocrats’ lives?

andrewjpeterswrites.com goes dark next week while I’m attending Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2011 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices!   

Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister

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Previously books and movie reivews, this week Broadway.

It’s been a little while since my partner and I went to a show, last spring actually, to see the silly, contagious ode to 80’s headbanging Rock of Ages.  Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister is equally tongue-in-cheek in tone but a lot more clever and satisfying.

Busch has a cult following.   His theater and film projects haven’t made it to the marquee’s of Times Square or the strip mall multiplexes (with the exception of his Tale of the Allergist’s Wife). But his admirers will follow him wherever he goes from Off Broadway to the community theaters across the country.

He works in the medium of 50’s/60’s screen diva reincarnation: Die, Mommy, Die! (Bette Davis), Psycho Beach Party (Joan Crawford), which perhaps has a limited audience, but for those of us who could imagine few pleasures greater than snuggling in for the night to watch All About Eve, he delivers big time.   There’s absurdity galore, and emoting doesn’t begin to describe Busch’s stage performance, but I wouldn’t classify his portrayals as send-up or parody.   As ridiculous and vulgar as things can get—his sexually voracious Angela Arden in Die, Mommy, Die comes to mind—he manages to walk that difficult line between caricature and misogyny. He is, after all, a gay man in make-up and a dress who loves the campy female characters he recreates. The send-up is in the subversion of the sunnied, homogenized family-friendliness of 50’s and 60’s screen hits.

In The Divine Sister, Busch plays Mother Superior at St. Veronica’s, a convent on the skids. The buildings are falling apart, there’s no money to rebuild the community, a visiting German nun is up to something nefarious late at night, and young Sister Agnes–a derivation from the movie Agnes of God–is having miraculous, and likely, fictitious visions that have attracted the interest of a Hollywood screenwriter.

It’s hard for Busch to stand out amidst the phenomenal comic cast. Julie Halston is the hard edged Sister Acacius who is steadily unraveling from a guilty conscience. Alison Fraser channels Marlene Dietrich cum Frau Blucher as Sister Walburga, and Jennifer Van Dyck is a snooty heiress prone to lapse into absurd, meandering reminiscences.   Busch’s deference to his co-stars is a triumph.  Everyone has their “moment,” and you find yourself rooting for everyone no matter what their bizarre motives.

Best of all is how the actors play off each other with perfect comic timing. A string of double entendre insults delivered to Sister Acacius (too dirty to repeat here) was a highlight. Good for full-body laughter.