The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife and Other Plays
The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife and Other Plays
CHARLES BUSCH
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom
Psycho Beach Party
The Lady in Question
Red Scare on Sunset
The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife
The collection copyright © 2001 by Charles Busch
Introduction copyright © 2000 by Charles Busch
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom © 1985 by Charles Busch
Psycho Beach Party © 1988 by Charles Busch
The Lady in Question © 1989 by Charles Busch
Red Scare on Sunset © 1991 by Charles Busch
The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife © 1999 by Charles Busch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset, and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife are subject to a royalty. They are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the Berne Convention, and all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional/ amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, DVD, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. In their present form the plays are dedicated to the reading public only.
The stock and amateur live stage performance rights to Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset, and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife are controlled exclusively by Samuel French, Inc. No professional or nonprofessional performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Samuel French, Inc., 45 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10010, and paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.
Stock and amateur royalty quoted on application to Samuel French, Inc.
First-class professional applications for permission to perform the plays in this volume, and for those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to Jeff Melnick/Marc H. Glick, c/o Glick and Weintraub, P.C., 1501 Broadway, Suite 2401, New York, NY 10036.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Busch, Charles.
The tale of the allergist’s wife, and other plays / Charles Busch.
p. cm.
Contents: Vampire lesbians of Sodom—Psycho beach party—The lady in question—
Red scare on sunset—The tale of the allergist’s wife.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9641-5
I. Title.
PS3552.U813 T3 2001
812’.54—dc21 00-048376
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Always to Aunt Lil
CONTENTS
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom
Psycho Beach Party
The Lady in Question
Red Scare on Sunset
The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife
INTRODUCTION
I was never in a school play, and for a good reason: I couldn’t remember a line of dialogue. I nearly hyperventilated the moment I hit the stage. It was because I loved it too much. To be “up there” was almost too magical to imagine. Ever since the age of seven, when I was taken by my father to the old Metropolitan Opera House to see Joan Sutherland in La Sonnambula, I’ve been obsessed by the image of that magnificent redheaded lady drifting ethereally through a painted nineteenth-century landscape. It’s not unfair to say that my entire career has been an attempt to re-create that first impression.
I was desperate to be a child star, only there was no one willing to exploit me. I went so far as to send a snapshot of myself to the producers of the film version of Oliver, offering my services for the title role. Growing up in Manhattan was helpful. Sometimes after school, I’d go to the Palace Theatre and persuade the stage doorman to let me go onstage. I can’t even imagine what old “Pops” thought of this fragile twelve-year-old boy belting out “The Man That Got Away.”
All but one of the plays in this volume were written to allow me to be “up there.” I started out as a performer who needed lines to say and, through necessity, grew to be a writer. Along the way, I discovered that the pleasure I derived from writing nearly equaled the joy I received from being onstage. From 1984 through 1991, I was the leading lady and playwright-in-residence of “Theatre-in-Limbo.” We were very much a throwback to the acting troupes of the nineteenth century. Considering that the group was assembled merely on the basis of who was available and willing to work for free, it was rather remarkable that each of us filled a very specific role in the traditional stock company. Arnie Kolodner was the handsome stalwart leading man. Ken Elliott, our director, played the effete villains. Theresa Marlowe was always the ingenue. Andy Halliday was our character man, Julie Halston the comic soubrette, Bobby Carey the juvenile, Meghan Robinson the dark villainess—and I was the leading lady, a Sarah Bernhardt of Avenue C.
The advantage of writing play after play for an ensemble is that you’re never facing a blank page. There are so many givens to constructing a plot. There must be a role for everyone in the company. The playwright has to take into consideration everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. If an actor played a small role in the last play, he’s owed a better opportunity in the next. In Theatre-in-Limbo, if an actor was in drag in the last play, he might feel the need to butch it up in the next. My early plays were Chinese puzzles constructed of promises and budgetary considerations. The style of the plays was dictated by our performing venue. The Limbo Lounge was an art gallery/after-hours bar (sans liquor license)/performance art space. There were actually two Limbo Lounges that we performed in. The first was a small floor-through on Tenth Street off First Avenue. Several months after our first show, the Limbo Lounge moved to a large garage on Ninth Street between Avenues B and C. It was impossible to store scenery or costumes in either place, so I wrote plays that required no set and collected shopping bags to schlep the costumes back and forth.
When I say “no set,” I mean an empty stage, no furniture. These were “stand-up” plays. I learned a great deal about doling out exposition. In the first few lines of every scene, I had to make perfectly clear the location and time, and in an unobtrusive and entertaining manner. Our acting style was also affected by the venue. A large percentage of the audience was standing and drinking Rolling Rock beers. To command their attention, we had to be highly energized and emotionally intense. Th
is fit perfectly with my perversely French fin de siècle melodramatic aesthetic. Indeed, two of our shows, Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium and Pardon My Inquisition or Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets, were directly inspired by the plays of Victorien Sardou, author of many of Bernhardt’s greatest roles.
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom was the first play I wrote for Theatre-in-Limbo. I like to say I wrote it in four hours while working as a temp receptionist. In truth, I did a little rewriting the next day. But not too much. It really was meant to be just a sketch performed over one weekend. I had no idea it would become my calling card for years to come. The historical periods of the play were chosen because they lent themselves easily to cheap improvised costumes. Everyone knows that the women of Sodom and Gomorrah sauntered around town in G-strings and spike heels.
The three scenes that make up Vampire Lesbians of Sodom were written very much to showcase various characters and performance styles that I had been playing with for the previous eight years. The first scene, set in ancient Sodom, is written in the form of a burlesque sketch. The Succubus and the young virgin were played as aging strippers performing a bawdy scene between strip numbers. Scene Two, set in Hollywood in the early twenties, gave me the opportunity to play a theatrical grande dame on the order of Mrs. Patrick Campbell or Nazimova. The third and final scene, set in contemporary times, allowed me to create a world-weary, hard-boiled showbiz dame somewhere between Lucille Ball and Lauren Bacall.
For a long time I was embarrassed by what I considered to be the flimsiness of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Rereading it recently, I was struck by how entertaining a little sketch it is. Never meant to be considered a play at all, this little decadent dream achieved its goals quite well. It was created merely to entertain a late night crowd on a hot summer night in the East Village. The crazy miracle is that the play has had such an incredibly long life.
Each of us in our troupe had struggled long and hard for a place in the theatre—and with little success. How extraordinary it was for us to see the campy little Vampire Lesbians of Sodom develop such an intense cult following. Lines formed hours early in the crack-infested neighborhood. Once inside, people would be seated on top of the ice machine, crammed into the corners, and sometimes standing in the hallway, where they could only hear the play. On the heels of such hoopla, we tried to find a commercial producer to move the play to a real theatre. No one would touch it. My director, Ken Elliott, decided that we should produce the play ourselves. With herculean effort, we raised what was to us the astronomical sum of $55,000 and opened at the historic Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street on June 19, 1985. After the opening-night performance, all of our friends jammed downstairs into the Green Room just in time for the early edition of The New York Times to be read aloud. It was an incredible rave that left no one out. I slipped away from the crowd and retreated to my dressing room, shut the door, and wept. I knew at that moment that I could finally achieve my hard-won goal, which was to earn my living in the theatre.
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom went on to run five years and is one of the longest-running plays in Off-Broadway history. Apart from a pretty fantastic title, one of the reasons for its longevity was, oddly enough, a sweet innocence that made people feel good. The two ladies of the title bitch and compete against each other for two thousand years, but at the end realize that the intensity of their relationship is what has sustained them. They belong to each other. I like to think the sweet innocence of our original company and our affection for each other played a great part in the show’s success. We were an old-fashioned troupe of players.
Very early on, Ken Elliott and I decided to create the Pirandellian conceit that our East Village audience was actually watching a slightly faded theatrical star on tour with her somewhat seedy stock company. I was always, in effect, Charles Busch playing an aging actress playing the vampiress Madeleine Astarté or whatever the current role in her vast repertoire was. We heightened this concept through the use of footlights, a show curtain decorated with the titles of our many plays, a delayed star entrance, elaborately staged curtain calls, and lastly, the curtain speech. It was a curtain speech that inspired Psycho Beach Party.
After each performance, still in my “actress” persona, I’d make a curtain speech graciously imploring the audience to sign our mailing list. To make my pitch more entertaining, I’d improvise the titles of future plays they might see. One night, the title Gidget Goes Psychotic popped into my feverish brain. It got a big laugh and I used it as the punch line of my curtain speech for quite some time. Eventually, Ken said, “You know, we’ve been promoting this play for years. Maybe we should do a show called Gidget Goes Psychotic.” Initially, it didn’t appeal to me at all. I found no glamour or fake grandeur in the Frankie and Annette beach party movies or in the film and television series Gidget. The shows I was writing for Theatre-in-Limbo were built on fantasies of who I’d like to play. A Byzantine empress, yes; a teenage surfer girl—I don’t think so. Then it occurred to me that if Gidget were indeed psychotic, perhaps that would manifest itself in multiple personalities. These other selves, particularly her main alter ego, the dominatrix Ann Bowman, would give me the flamboyant acting opportunities I sought.
We originally performed Gidget Goes Psychotic as late shows at the Limbo Lounge while we were performing a full eight-show-a-week schedule of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Provincetown Playhouse. As soon as the curtain came down on Macdougal Street, we’d jump into cabs and race across town. Our audience would be waiting outside the club before we got there. It was exhausting but exhilarating. The response was so overwhelming that we decided to transfer that play Off-Broadway as well.
There was some concern that there could be copyright problems with the title Gidget Goes Psychotic and that I should think of an alternate. Frankly, I was glad to retitle it Psycho Beach Party. What had begun as strictly a spoof of a specific movie and TV series had become a very personal piece of writing. I don’t imagine I’m alone in having experienced as a young person a feeling of being a different person in each facet of my life. My heroine, Chicklet, learns that each of the various roles she plays in life are all part of one being, and that they only make her stronger. It was fascinating for me to realize that all creative writing is “personal.” The campiest theatrical spoof full of movie references could be a revealing self-portrait that others might identify with.
In 1989, Ken Elliott and I met with Kyle Renick, the artistic director of the WPA Theatre, to discuss the possibility of doing a play there. There was never a question of doing an already-written play from my trunk. The trunk has always been empty, except perhaps for wigs, shoes, and corsets. I only wrote when I had an opening-night date set in my calendar. We were tossing around story ideas for possible plays when I remembered that I had a gorgeous 1940s gown gathering dust in the closet that had been made for me to wear at a charity benefit. It had always evoked for me Joan Crawford or Norma Shearer in an anti-Nazi war melodrama. I pitched that idea to Kyle and it turned out that he, too, had great affection for embattled heroines skiing to safety across the Alps. It was assumed that we would do this play in the same burlesque-sketch style and on the same bare stage as we had before. However, this would be my first opportunity to write a play to be specifically performed in a real theatre and not in a club. I felt free to write it in two rather leisurely acts. Though it was a film spoof, we were performing it on the stage, and so my frame of reference also ran to such stolid theatrical wartime fare as Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine and Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night.
Besides being a movie-genre satire, the play also had something to say about the New Age philosophy popular in the late eighties. I was very disturbed by the idea that everything that happens to us happens because we have somehow created it. While I certainly believe that we can affect our fates, this enlightened selfishness exhibits a dangerous lack of sympathy for those whom fate turns against, and has been the essence of many faddish religions, certainly from the
mid nineteenth century onward. I had my myopic wartime heroine, Gertrude Garnet, falling under the sway of a somewhat suspect swami.
The genre we were satirizing was definitely not a B movie. It was a luxurious, star-driven vehicle and, now that I was no longer writing for the Limbo Lounge, I wanted a set. Indeed, I wanted a divan and a fireplace to dramatically lean against. The play being produced before us was Larry Kramer’s Just Say No, which took place in an opulent Washington, D.C., town house. It had a lavish double-decker set complete with a massive staircase leading to the upper level. With some paint and a moose head, there was no reason why it couldn’t be transformed into a Bavarian Schloss. I rewrote my play to accommodate all seven doors and a portrait hiding a safe. It may not sound like a lot, but it was a genuine thrill to finally be able to sit onstage.
I have such intense nostalgia for The Lady In Question. At the risk of sounding like one of my own pretentious heroines, I believe it to be the apotheosis of my years with Theatre-in-Limbo. Everyone was perfectly cast and working at a highly skilled level. I can’t imagine any other production of that play being more definitive in its set, costumes, lighting, sound, direction, and performance.
We had established a great relationship with the WPA Theatre, which continued with my next play, Red Scare on Sunset. Once again, I sold Kyle Renick with a one-line description of the plot: “I play a 1950s movie actress, filming a movie about Lady Godiva, who gets beaned on the head and dreams that she’s back in medieval England.” I suppose I found it comic fodder for me, a drag performer, to play a woman famous for being naked. As Ken Elliott and I developed the story, it became clear that he was more interested in the McCarthyera framing device than the saga of Lady Godiva. Before I knew it, we’d concocted a 1950s red-scare melodrama with a short medieval dream sequence. I’m very grateful it turned out that way.
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