Mae West: Californication

MAE WEST [1893 — 1980] returns to California soon when her pages take the stage.
• • Did you know that the San Francisco Chronicle just published their fall arts preview? Entertainment reporter Steven Winn reminded his readers that, in November 2007, a local playhouse the Aurora Theatre will offer a production of Mae West's controversial play "Sex."
• • When she wrote it in 1926, Mae West deliberately distanced her characters from the American way of life by setting the action in a Montreal brothel.
• • This play confronts the issue of women who are separated by class and their attitudes about sexuality. West's character Margy learns the painful lesson that women are not bound in sisterhood simply because they have both shared the betrayal of men.
• • Happily, these plays finally appeared in printed form [on 13 August 1997] a decade ago.
• • This might be a good time to get Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag, and Pleasure Man edited by Professor Lillian Schlissel [Routledge, August 1997].
— — Excerpts from editorial reviews: — —
• • This volume gives a glimpse of the real Mae West by publishing her three radical, melodramatic, but quite hilarious plays for the first time. — Booklist
• • No mere strutting sexpot, West's capacity for scathing satire comes into full view in Three Plays by Mae West, edited by Lillian Schlissel... Filled with the saucy argot of the New York streets, the plays still crackle and cook. — Publisher's Weekly
• • These plays are important, original and fun. Anyone interested in theatre and gender is going to have a new and bold face to deal with. — Michael Cadden, Director of the Program in Theatre and Dance, Princeton University
• • Mae West was many things — — sexual outlaw, wildcat feminist, actress, icon. The publication of these plays proves that she was more complex than her movies suggest. The only thing she did straightforwardly was to insist that her convictions were worth fighting for... She was as close as any woman has ever come to being one of the great American queens. ... we can look back at Mae West with new eyes, and admire the fun she had with sex and the control she exercised on her image and her career. — The Boston Book Review
• • I would recommend this book to anyone interested either in the history of gay theatre in America or in how gays were perceived in the early decades of the twentieth century. — Marsh Cassady, Lambda Book Report
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West in "Sex" • • 1926 • •
NYC
Mae West.