“Red Scare on Sunset,” the Charles Busch play that premiered this spring at the W.P.A., has recently reopened at the Lucille Lortel. This is good news indeed—both for fans of Mr. Busch (including those of us who missed the play the first time around) and for anyone who might happen to blunder into the little theatre on Christopher Street. (It’s the old Theatre de Lys.) At his best, Mr. Busch is a first-class satirist and farceur, and “Red Scare” is definitely Busch at his best. A send-up of Red-menace Hollywood (on- and off-screen), it’s his funniest play so far, and also his most cohesive and deeply felt. After the writing, the two best things about it are probably Kenneth Elliott’s direction of the Theatre-in-Limbo company and Julie Halston’s performance as Pat Pilford, an acid-tongued radio personality who suffers from the delusion that everyone she knows is part of a Communist plot to take over the film industry.
Ordinarily, the two best things about a Charles Busch play (after the writing) are Mr. Elliott’s direction and Mr. Busch’s own performance. That Miss Halston manages to eclipse him here is purely a function of the role he’s created for her. Mr. Busch’s performance as Mary Dale, the wholesome best friend who gradually discovers that everyone Miss Halston knows is part of a Communist plot, is characteristically restrained, intelligent, and beautifully timed—like all the performances in the ensemble. But, according to the terms of drag theatre, the kind of passive acting required of Mr. Busch (in a Norma Shearer–type role) and the kind of flamboyant acting required of Miss Halston (in a Bette Davis–type role) leave her very much the show’s star.
For a drag artist to write a play showcasing the talents of someone not in drag is, if you think about it, a mark of extraordinary integrity. But then, in the context of New York theater, where drag tends to be about celebrating excess, Mr. Busch is an anomaly in a number of ways. He pretty much introduced downtown drag and subtlety to each other. He resists playing to an audience. And he doesn’t overpopulate his work with drag characters. For the most part, the men of the Theatre-in-Limbo company play men and the women play women—a device (if you can call it that) that keeps Busch’s audience thinking about why, as a playewright, he uses drag when he does, and marveling that, as an actor, he can hold his own among real women.
Where most downtown drag aims at parodying this or that genre in a manner that will please a coterie audience, Mr. Busch typically uses genre parody as a stepping-off place for something more interesting and complex; and he resists crude sexual jokes. What humor there is about drag in “Red Scare”—a man almost striking a woman played by a man; a man playing an actress who’s starring in a movie musical about the life of Lady Godiva—is gentle, and acts as a kind of signature or flourish, like the internal rhymes in a clever lyric.
You get nowhere trying to explain what’s funny about a man playing an actress playing a woman famed for nudity, just as you get nowhere trying to explain why “Red Scare on Sunset” is ultimately moving. The play is serious without being pretentious, because Busch uses transvestism as a metaphor for the experience of being trapped between two worlds. There are different ways of being in limbo: you can be on the verge of madness, like the Julie Halston character; on the edge of virtue, like the Charles Busch character; or caught in a twilight land between male and female, art and self-indulgence, acting and playacting, like the drag artist himself. You can also dwell on the line between evil and right-thinkingness, like almost everyone in the play: in “Red Scare on Sunset,” there aren’t any villains—or, rather, everyone is a villain. To come up with a take on 1950s Hollywood as objective as this one, I think you would have to be so accustomed to ambivalence and moral dilemma as to experience them as a natural state. I can’t help feeling that the play is at least partly about the phenomenon of “outing.” What else can the closing image—a slow fade on the heroine (Busch himself) as she begins mouthing soundlessly through a list of names, beginning with that of her own husband—be alluding to?
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, August 5, 1991