"An Affectionate Satire"; or, Roasting Nancy Drew

The scene looks familiar to Nancy Drew fans as the lights come up on chapter one of The Clue in the Old Birdbath. Three young women in a convertible are setting forth, one of them tells the audience, "on a carefree excursion in Tansy's green roadster."

"Tansy?" we are thinking. What happened to Nancy's blue roadster? We're baffled, but we've only a moment to wonder, before the same young woman—"an attractive girl with a boy's name" who strongly resembles Nancy Drew's tomboyish friend George Fayne—tells us that Tansy's "admirable qualities have led her into one adventure after another, beginning with a thrilling plunge into the sinister world of obstetrics gynecology in The Secret of the Old Doc!"

Now we know something is up. But the plot gets thicker. Behind the wheel in the roadster, Tansy turns to the audience and explains,

We're divided up into types of females. Bets [like Nancy Drew's chubby chum Bess] is supposed to be giddy and excitable and say golly and gosh all the time. Joe here [like George Fayne] is the tomboy—likes to play sports, go for tramps in the woods, that sort of thing. She says "jeepers" frequently.

When Tansy sits back, Joe Payne adds informatively, "Tansy, on the other hand, is the perfect WASP female—blonde, blue eyes, slim figure, the works. She speaks correct English and never uses slang." And plump Bets concludes the introduction to the scene by noting cheerfully, "In Tansy True mystery stories, only the villains are dark-skinned, fat, say ain't or speak with foreign accents."

It's all becoming clear to us now: The Clue in the Old Birdbath by Kate Kasten and Sandra de Helen is a Nancy Drew spoof. In Kasten's words, "It's an affectionate satire. We did it because we liked Nancy Drew."

Recently performed by Stage Left Theater and The Body Politic in Chicago, The Clue in the Old Birthbath takes on sexism, racism, and classism-for, as Kasten points out, "Nancy Drew has them all"—in a musical comedy featuring original tunes composed by Sandra de Helen and Bev Standish. Its sharp-witted dialogue and song parody everything from Nancy's "inquisitiveness" (when the girl-sleuth's hostess joins the three chums in spying on the neighbors with binoculars) to the predictability of the plots. The play turns Nancy's father, famous criminal lawyer Carson Drew, into Carlson True, a criminal; it answers the nagging question of what really happened to Nancy's—that is, Tansy's —mother; and it provides an ending in which loyal housekeeper Hedda Bruen (also known as Hannah Gruen) finally gets a life. Affectionate though it may be—and funny, too—this satire nevertheless makes it audience aware of holes in the "feminist" armor in which some of her more ardent and grateful fans have tried to clothe Nancy Drew.

The Clue in the Old Birdbath was written in 1978 and performed for the first time in Kansas City by the Actors' Sorority, a women's theater company founded by Kate Kasten and Sandra de Helen in the midseventies. Since that time, the play has been produced, chiefly by women's theater groups, all over the country. In Iowa City, where she's lived for the past three and half years, playwright Kate Kasten explained how the play came to be:

I read all the old Nancy Drews back in the fifties when I was a preteen. I was already worried then about whether boys would like me, carrying that whole burden, and so a big part of Nancy Drew's appeal was that here were three young women out there on their own, solving mysteries. They cared about each other, and they obviously were not worried about what the boys thought. I remember reading the books—I had the ones written in the 1930s, which are really wonderful in their way—and then running around outside, dragging my little brother after me, looking for clues. Later, as...