Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag and Pleasure Man PDF
Preview Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag and Pleasure Man
THREE PLAYS by MAE WEST 2 Shubert Aichive Page from Playbill of Sex, 1926. 3 THREE PLAYS by MAE WEST Sex The Drag The Pleasure Man Edited by Lillian Schlisse 4 Published in 1997 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 Introduction and notes copyright O 1997 by Lillian Schlissel. Sex, The Drag, and The Pleasure Man copyright O 1997 by the Estate of Mae West. All inquiries concerning performance rights to these plays may be addressed to the Roger Richman Agency, Inc., 9777 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. CA 90212. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in 5 any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data West, Mae. [Plays. Selections.] Three plays by Mae West : Sex, The drag, The pleasure man / edited by Lillian Schlissel. p. cm. Previously unpublished plays. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-90932-5 (hb).--ISBN 0-415-90933-3 (pb) 1. Women--Social conditions--Drama. 2. Sex customs--Drama. I. Schlissel, Lillian. 11. Title. PS3545.E8332A6 19976 812'.52--dc21 97-24425 Publisher's Note 6 The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. 7 CONTENTS Introduction by Lillian Schlissel Sex: A Comedy Drama (1926) The Drag: A Homosexual Comedy In Three Acts (1927) The Pleasure Man: A Comedy Drama (1928) The Case Against Mae West 8 INTRODUCTION BY LILLIAN SCHLISSEL Mae West’s plays, Sex, The Drag, and The Pleasure Man are published here for the first time. Sex, which opened at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre just north of Broadway in 1926, gave West her first starring role in the theatre and marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary American careers. Mae West began writing as a teenager on the vaudeville circuit She wrote encores to her songs because she was so sure audiences would call her back. She wrote night club acts, two novels, scripts for her Hollywood films, and, of course, her stage plays. She was a writer as much as a performer, and the likelihood is that if she had not written her own material, there would have been no stellar career. The Mae West scripts are part of the Manuscript Collection of the Library of Congress—The Ruby Ring (1921), The Hussy (1922), The Chick (1924), Sex (1926), The Drug (1927), The Pleasure Man (1928), Diamond Lil (first and second versions, 1928, 1964), Frisco Kate (1930) and The Constant Sinner (stage version of the novel Babe Gordon, 1931), Catherine Was Great (1944), Come On Over (also called Embassy Row), 1946), and Sextette (first and second versions, 1952 and 1961). Sex and The Drag were copyrighted under the pseudonym jane Mast, but it was an open secret that the plays were Mae West’s. 9 She was never an original writer. Critics accused her, as they had accused Brecht, of “pirating, plagiarizing, shamelessly 1 appropriating.” Writers who claimed she had stolen their work often pursued her in the courts, but she defended her claim. Once she had “borrowed” a script, she was convinced that even the original idea had always been hers. On the stage, Mae West played the “tough girl.” In Sex, her self- congratulatory bravado and cocky invitation to sexual adventure carried the play, but unlike other “fallen women” of the day, the sexuality she displayed was closer to comedy than to passion. Critics who applauded her smart-mouthed quips sometimes suggested that the flamboyant sexuality that became her trademark was a disguise. No real woman could be so brazen, so self-contained, or so funny. That a woman who played the bawd for half a century should have stirred debate about her sexual identity is part of the intrigue that has surrounded Mae West’s style and career. The “gay plays,” The Drag and The Pleasure Man, are at the heart of the question. Readers have searched the yellowing pages of the scripts in the Library of Congress as if the leaves were written in some ancient hieroglyphic that would reveal a secret if rightly deciphered. The trouble is that The Drag and The Pleasure Man heighten questions of sexual transformations; they do not resolve them. For one thing, the scripts refute West’s statement that she wrote because she needed material for the stage. She never appeared in The Drag, and she never appeared in The Pleasure Man. Each play was meant to be performed by a company of gay actors while 10
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