• • Set in New York City and mentioning numerous sites [such as Central Park, Times Square, Hell's Kitchen, Brooklyn's Navy Yard, etc.], "The Drag" by Mae West focuses on Rolly Kingsbury — — a judge’s son and the heir to the family ironworks business — — whose marriage is coming apart as he hides the secret of a past affair with a male lover, a nascent interest in someone new, and an affiliation with a colorful drag community that is campy, preening, and happily outrageous.
• • • • WINNIE: Fat! I should say not. I'm the type that men prefer. I can at least go through the Navy Yard without having the flags drop to half mast.
• • • • KATE: Listen, dearies — — pull in your aerial, you're full of static. I'm just the type that men crave. The type that bums 'em up. Why, when I walk up Tenth Avenue, you can smell the meat sizzling in Hell's Kitchen. ...
• • Since "The Drag" will be offered at the end of this month in Orlando, Florida, let's revisit "gay theory" commentary from two female college professors.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Writing in Comparative Literature Studies, Prof. Gail Finney offers this inisght: In The Drag, set in New York City in the 1920s, the voice speaking in defense of homosexuality is an authoritative one — a medical doctor who has informed himself sufficiently about the subject to know that some people are simply born homosexual and should not be blamed. The opposite position is represented by his old friend the judge, who regards homosexuals as an evil to be stamped out, declaring that they should all be banished to a desert island. As the viewer gradually learns, the irony at the heart of the play is that the judge’s son Rolly is in fact an active homosexual and has not consummated his marriage to the doctor’s daughter, whom he married merely for the sake of appearances. At the end of the play Rolly is shot and killed by a rejected male lover, and even if his feelings for Rolly support the thesis that “the gay plays contain the only love stories Mae West would ever write” (Introduction to Three Plays 27), the statement this ending appears to make about queer love is not a sanguine one. ... [SOURCE: "Queering the Stage: Critical Displacement in the Theater of Else Lasker-Schuler and Mae West" in Comparative Literature Studies — Volume 40, Number 1, 2003, pp. 54 — 71].
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • Writing in Women's History Review, Prof. Lillian Schlissel states: Mae West, a world-famous wanton of the stage, never disguised her intention to destabilize political arrangements, and while she was always regarded as a ‘dangerous’ woman, the danger she posed was not her flagrant physicality, or her harlot’s disguise. It was the language with which she turned sex into comedy. Speech was her weapon of choice. In the plays she wrote for the Broadway stage, she announced the battlefield she had chosen. In the heterosexual romp, Sex, and in the little known ‘gay plays,’ The Drag and The Pleasure Man, Mae West established herself as a seasoned practitioner of the guerilla warfare waged before the footlights. ... [SOURCE: Women’s History Review, Volume 11, Number 1, 2002, 71].
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• • WHAT: "The Drag" by Mae West
• • WHERE: John and Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center, 812 E Rollins St., Orlando, FL 32803
• • WHEN: January 29th — 30th, 2011
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • during her obscenity trial, March 1927 • •
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