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NEW YORK — For all their freedoms and frank carnality, the movies of Hollywood’s pre-Code era — roughly 1929 to 1934 — were often about sacrifice. A woman’s sacrifice, to be sure: her honor in exchange for a man’s, her happiness for her child’s.
As the Depression took grip, such stories taught America to reframe deprivation as duty, just as Hollywood, entering the sound age, was teaching itself how to speak. One result of the coincidence was the emergence of a new kind of actress, emoting vividly in a stagy accent acquired somewhere between Bryn Mawr and Broadway.
Those clipped tones and eccentric pronunciations eventually became part of the drag vocabulary — and they certainly are part of the joy of “The Confession of Lily Dare,” Charles Busch’s delicious mashup of pre-Code weepies that opened Wednesday at the Cherry Lane Theater. Only when spoken in the manner of a woman fudging her origins could words like “feminine” (fem-i-neen) and “avalanche” (ah-vuh-lonzh) become such pungent punch lines.
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Yet Busch, himself a feminine avalanche — and a reluctant “drag legend” — doesn’t really impersonate Ruth Chatterton, Miriam Hopkins, Helen Hayes and the other stars who played harlots, murderesses and mothers forced to give up their children in movies like “Madame X” (1929), “Sarah and Son” (1930), “The Sin of Madelon Claudet” (1931) and “Frisco Jenny” (1932). Nor when Busch adds bits of Mae West, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford into the mix does he bind himself to the style of any one of them.
Instead, playing Lily at various ages and in various predicaments, he offers something of a group portrait of these divas, always hovering at the midpoint between spoof and homage. Beyond the externals that echo each woman in particular roles — the accents, the gestures, the hairstyles and gowns — there is an insider’s bemused love of them all.
So, too, with genre. “The Confession of Lily Dare” is not based on any one mother-love film but rather, it seems, on a hundred.
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The turn-of-the-20th-century plot naturally begins with an orphan, Lily, whose mother is killed in an ah-vuh-lonzh. After showing up at the San Francisco home of her only remaining relative — Rosalie Mackintosh, a tough-as-nails madam (Jennifer Van Dyck) — she befriends the help: Mickey, a gay piano player (Kendal Sparks); Emmy Lou, a plucky prostitute (Nancy Anderson); and Louis, an upstanding bookkeeper (Christopher Borg).
Louis is not upstanding for long; after getting Lily pregnant, he promptly dies in the 1906 earthquake. To support her fatherless baby girl, Lily appeals to Blackie Lambert (Howard McGillin), who describes himself with a twinkle as “a shady character from a once prominent family who adds a veneer of class to whatever room he’s in.” He remakes Lily as Mandalay, a cabaret sensation whose big number is a spot-on Dietrich pastiche (by Tom Judson) called “Pirate Joe.” But before long Mandalay winds up in jail, taking the rap for Blackie over the theft of some diamond earrings.
I hardly need explain how the baby, Louise, is adopted by a pair of wealthy San Franciscans, and how Lily, now going by Treasure Jones, reinvents herself post-prison as a madam like her aunt, but kinder. (She scrapbooks.) Suffice it to say that when Louise (Van Dyck again) grows up to be an opera star, Lily refuses to ruin the girl’s career by revealing her besmirched maternity, even unto death.
Still, mother and daughter are somehow bound: When Louise cannot find in herself the required sensuality to play the courtesan Violetta in “La Traviata,” Lily, in a marvelous double lip-sync to the aria “Sempre libera,” “teaches” it to her telepathically.
You could call this camp heaven, and indeed “Lily Dare,” a Primary Stages production, offers both the euphoria and the shabbiness that term can suggest. As in earlier works like “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” which ran for five years off-Broadway, Busch doesn’t fuss over logic or continuity. Here, he simply lets Mickey and Emmy Lou, visiting Lily’s grave decades later, escort the story from scene to scene with bald narration. The visual transitions are likewise written the way they would be in a movie, begging for quick dissolves that can’t be achieved and leaving us to twiddle our thumbs while the stage crew resets the furniture.
But these clunks are essential to the Busch style, and not just because his plays, with the exception of his Broadway hit “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” have usually been niche-taste, shoestring affairs. A slight lack of professional polish is part of their aesthetic, one Busch shares with longtime collaborators including the director Carl Andress, who blithely suggests the earthquake with little more than a few falling books; the set designer B.T. Whitehill, who has fashioned a proscenium out of pink plastic Frisbees; and Jessica Jahn, whose hilarious outfits for Lily have more than a hint of the thrift shop about them. (The apt costumes for everyone else are by Rebecca Townsend.)
In the same way, the multiple roles that some cast members play (though Anderson and McGillin are perfect in just one role each) function as both thrift and humor. Borg, for instance, is not just Louis the accountant but a pervy German baron, an Italian vocal coach and an Irish priest with a taste for opera. Having to distinguish them from one another pushes each to riotous extremes.
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Where Busch never stints is in the diamond precision of the overripe patois, studded with boneyards, gin blossoms, the clap and the “agony box.” (That's a piano.) As Treasure Jones, Lily refuses to let her doughboy clients get drunk: “We owe it to their mothers to protect their livers.” And awaiting her final fate she imagines the shame she might have brought on her daughter had the truth been revealed. “My mother a bordello madam. My mother a murderess. My mother … a cabaret performer.”
That’s the Busch touch: mordant and winking (he has often been a cabaret performer himself) yet oddly, genuinely moving. If he is unafraid of the clichés of disowned genres, and inhabits so lovingly the women who uttered them, perhaps that’s because they actually had more to say than the dismissive term “weepies” (or, for that matter, “camp”) implies.
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Turns out that sacrifice is something we really did need to learn. Who’s weeping now?
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Production Notes:
‘The Confession of Lily Dare’
Through March 5 at Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, primarystages.org. Running time: 2 hours.
By Charles Busch; directed by Carl Andress; sets by B.T. Whitehill; costumes by Rachel Townsend; lighting by Kirk Bookman; sound by Bart Fasbender; Mr. Busch’s costumes by Jessica Jahn; wigs by Katherine Carr; song and arrangements by Tom Judson; production stage manager, Carolynn Richer; general manager, Dean A. Carpenter; associate artistic director, Erin Daley; production manager, Will Duty. Presented by Primary Stages, Andrew Leynse, artistic director, Shane D. Hudson, executive director, Casey Childs, founder, in association with Jamie deRoy and Ted Snowdon.
Cast: Nancy Anderson, Christopher Borg, Charles Busch, Howard McGillin, Kendal Sparks and Jennifer Van Dyck.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .