New play on the groundbreaking Mae West creates a 1920s backdrop for today’s culture wars

There s an incredible courtroom scene in the film I m No Angel written by Mae West which she starred in with Cary Grant West s character Tira tells her lawyer she wants to cross-examine all the onlookers herself She brings her quick-quip banter to the proceedings seductively eyes the judge and charms not only the jury but the defendant she s suing played by Grant who sheepishly agrees to pay up what she says he owes her West knew a thing or two about courtrooms after getting mixed up in a number of legal cases The greater part famously she was sentenced along with James A Timony her manager and legal counsel and Clarence William Morganstern a theatrical producer to days in jail for corrupting the morals of youth with West s play Sex in They were also fined each In Mae West and the Trial of Sex Walking Shadow Theatre Company in Minneapolis mines the events surrounding West s Sex trial and puts a microscope to censorship proponents during the time period That includes the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice a group that also was responsible for banning James Joyce s Ulysses in America until as well as the lawmakers who passed New York State s Wales Padlock law allowing leadership to shut down theaters that were unveiled to produce immoral productions Joe Swanson Kayla Dvorak Feld and Emily A Grodzik in Mae West and the Trial of Sex at the Crane Theater in Minneapolis Credit Dan Norman Photography Written by John Heimbuch and directed by Allison Vincent the play resonates with this day s current heritage wars what with book bans going after authors writing LGBTQ or other diverse content drag story hour artists getting harassed around the country and the Trump administration s censorship of artists via executive orders and national initiative Heimbuch s script draws on not only West s performance of Sex and its aftermath but also another one of her plays a melodrama called The Drag That play proved just as controversial as Sex due to its gay characters and closed after productive trial runs in Connecticut and New Jersey Playing Mae West Emily A Grodzik gets the walk and delivery just right With her Brooklyn accent and cool timing she mirrors the persona that made West famous but she s also adding an element we don t see when we watch West act in films her creative power This Mae West is fearless confident and utterly ruthless in pursuit of her creative goals and she s absolutely in charge of the show And while her movie roles are mostly concerned with the various romantic relationships her characters pursue we don t see much of that in the play There are a couple of characters in the play that West was romantically linked to in life her manager Timony played by Joe Swanson for one and Irish-American gangster Owney Madden Jack Bechard but their interactions here are for the greater part part business The script works best when it leans into the West-ian banter Heimbuch sprinkles in lines West was known for throughout the script and others that sound like they could have been written by West Structurally the play takes a Brecht-like approach with direct address mixing with dialogue and quick episodic scenes where the actors switch between a number of different parts and change costumes in dressing room stations on each side of the stage The play does have a couple of songs but I wished more The script is just begging for a minimal showstopper big cast numbers with audacious set pieces and maybe a drag ball or two And while I think Mandi Johnson did an admirable job with the costume design I d love to see more of the outrageous outfits West was known for wearing Emily A Grodzik as Mae West in Walking Shadow s Mae West and the Trial of Sex at the Crane Theater in Minneapolis Credit Dan Norman Photography I was a bit confused at why the script spent so much time with a plagiarism matter West faced before the indecency trial In a young man named John J Byrne sued West her manager and her company called Moral Producing Co alleging she essentially copied his one-act script Following the Fleet We find out in the program of three scenes that West essentially hired Byrne to write up a script based on her idea Not liking the final copy they paid him and ultimately produced a different version of the idea as a three-act play To me the plagiarism incident wasn t as absorbing as the censorship trial and The Drag production but after a while I realized Heimbuch included it for two reasons Firstly it establishes West as an artist who had no predicament appropriating from others where she saw fit In another example we see her explicitly telling one of the gay actors in The Drag played by Neal Beckman that she wants him to contribute material for the script without credit We also learn she s appropriating heavily from not only queer tradition lifted from the Greenwich Village scene but also African American practices In fact West caused a sensation early in her stage career performing the shimmy a dance she picked up from watching Black dancers in Chicago The plagiarism matter which West won also established an central record that would have implications in the morals incident The judge called the play undeniably salacious In the last plagiarism trial scene we see Grodzik slump with the knowledge that his words will impact the strength of her matter against censorship By calling the play salacious the judge is establishing the description has precedent West s battle over Sex wasn t her first encounter with censorship Despite her enormous success in Hollywood in the s her bulk risqu lines would often get cut due to the Motion Picture Production Code otherwise known as the Hays Code and she was banned from NBC radio in Yet despite this she stayed true to her bold liberated spirit throughout her life even starring as a sex symbol in her final film Sextette at the age of Ultimately Mae West and the Trial of Sex celebrates West s efforts to combat the moral panic of her day that feared female sexuality as much as it feared gay people and people of color As this same sort of crackdown rears its head in in contemporary times s world it s good to remember the fighters for creative freedom of yesteryear Mae West and the Trial of Sex runs Thursday June through Saturday June at p m Monday June at p m through June at the Crane Theater Kennedy St Minneapolis - More information here The post New play on the groundbreaking Mae West creates a s backdrop for nowadays s values wars appeared first on MinnPost