Shear madness
The writer and star of "Dirty Blonde" talks about channeling Mae West and the uses of celebrity worship.

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By Susan Emerling

May 22, 2000 | Mae West is headed for her longest run on Broadway since her own play "Sex" landed her in jail on obscenity charges in 1927.

Actress and playwright Claudia Shear re-incarnates the original Hollywood diva to hilarious effect in her new Tony Award-nominated play, "Dirty Blonde," which chronicles the rise of Mae West from second-tier vaudevillian to full-fledged star. West accomplished this feat by adopting her now-famous parody of sexy persona and confounding Hays-era censors with a suggestiveness they couldn't quite get their code around.

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Forget about Madonna's chameleonic transformations, Mae West figured out her magic formula and then packaged and preserved it the way Procter & Gamble might have, forever. She even turned down the Norma Desmond role in "Sunset Boulevard" to keep the legend intact. West also knew her audience: In 1971, the 78-year-old legend told Playboy magazine that "camp" could be defined as "the kinda comedy where they imitate me."

Shear plays both Mae West and Jo, an out-of-work actress, who meets Charlie, a movie archives librarian (played with comic sweetness by Kevin Chamberlin), while laying flowers at West's crypt in a Queens, N.Y., cemetery. The two tentative soulmates bond over a shared obsession with the actress and find happiness by unleashing their "inner Mae Wests" in all her taboo-busting sexuality and self-invented glory.

Shear, who also wrote "Dirty Blonde," already demonstrated her comedic talents in "Blown Sideways Through Life," a one-woman show about holding and losing 64 different jobs -- from law firm temp to whorehouse receptionist -- before inventing steady work for herself in the theater.

Shear, like West, has made an asset out of setting herself apart from the "clean blondes" of her era. From her "Dirty Girl" bubble bath in Brooklyn, N.Y., Claudia Shear demonstrates that she has more in common with Mae West than just their Brooklyn roots.

Why Mae West?

James Lapine, who is a very famous theater director and writer, called me on the phone and said, "Would you like to work on a project with me?" And then he said the words "Mae West," and I really did feel a thrill go through my body and I thought, my God! Why didn't I ever think of that?

It really is a perfect fit for you. You seem to have inhabited her.

They would laugh in rehearsal, I will say. Kevin turned to me one day and said, "It's like you're channeling her." One of my favorite lines in the play -- not that you should quote yourself, it's so irky -- is "Obsession grants the patience to really fine-tune the details."

Dirty Blonde seems to celebrate celebrity worship ...

That's what people say, but I never analyzed it to that point. I think what it celebrates is not celebrity worship, it's really the obsession with anything. It just happens to be celebrity worship. To me obsession is a grand thing, and I don't mean where you get into madness, but obsession in its most wonderful way is very pure, because it is something that does not involve you and your ego. If you are obsessed by Buster Keaton, it's not about you, who you are, how much money you have, what your thighs look like, what you got, what somebody else didn't get -- it's about Buster Keaton. There's nothing I can't become obsessed with; it's just that the obsession happens to be Mae West.

Is there something particular about Mae West's persona that frees Charlie and Jo from their earnestness and their self-imposed exile from society?

When I was writing the play, if I wrote something that James thought was really spelled out, he would tap his nose. I spent two and a half years writing the play so it wouldn't be too on the nose, so I'm not going to now sit in interviews and explain the whole goddamned thing away.

In fact, the only time the Mae West character talks about her inner self in the play -- she talks about her colonics!

Mae was very obsessed with colonics. That's totally true. Once, she was at some Hollywood mogul's house with the Hollywood mogul's wife and she told her that colonics would make it smell like hot soup when she went. She even said it in her book, "Sex, Health & ESP," which must be read to be believed. It has things in it about how to massage a man's prostate with a condom on your finger. I didn't even put that in the play. Okay? Okay.

It was great to see the history of how Mae West invented the "Mae West" persona for herself as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. She tried everything. She was the nut case, the "it" girl, the Eva Tanguay type. She would do everything in vaudeville -- and it just didn't work.

Why do you think this persona stuck?

I think because her sexuality was very predatory, very masculine and when she put on her mother's clothing, so to speak, when she put on the Gay '90s thing, it gave it a nostalgic tint. What is it that John Fowles said? "The past is a different country, they think differently there." It was a different country that she was living in, so they could accept what she was like more. And on a purely pedestrian level, she just looked better in the dress. I mean, you couldn't really find anything that I'd look worse in than a flapper-style 1920's dress.

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