The Nance by Douglas Carter Beane (review)

Douglas Carter Beane’s 2006 satire The Little Dog Laughed nimbly critiqued contemporary Hollywood’s hypocrisy when it comes to both its cinematic depictions of gay characters and the politics governing the sexual orientation of those celebrities deemed best suitable to “act” these roles. As the scheming agent Diane lectures her high-profile client Mitchell, whom she is perfectly willing to “out” onscreen while guarding the closet door of his private life with the ferocity of a pit bull: “If a perceived straight actor portrays a gay role in a feature film, it’s noble, it’s a stretch. It’s the pretty lady putting on a fake nose and winning an Oscar. If an actor with a ‘friend’ plays a gay role, it’s not acting, it’s bragging.” For Mitchell to get to play “gay,” he must first convincingly play “straight.” In his latest work, The Nance, Beane again examines the construct of playing gay, but from the perspective of a remote theatrical past. In its premiere production, Beane and director Jack O’Brien moved beyond presenting a mere period piece, using their subject matter both to draw contemporary parallels and evoke significant markers of gay and theatrical history.

Beane’s title refers to a stock character of burlesque, the popular theatrical genre that had reached its zenith at the time of the play’s setting, the late 1930s. A nance was a flamboyantly effeminate character given to hysterical utterances like “Oh, you brutes” or risqué double entendres, such as “I love, love, love when the organ swells.” Although nances were traditionally played by heterosexual men, Beane makes his a homosexual named Chauncey Miles (Nathan Lane).

Even as he expertly minces about the stage, entertaining audiences with his trademark “Hi, simply Hi!,” the sociopolitical ramifications of caricaturing his sexual orientation are not lost on Chauncey. He bitterly observes that a gay man playing a nance is “kind of like a Negro doing blackface,” and identifies with W. C. Field’s assessment of Bert Williams as “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” Throughout the play, Chauncey’s meticulous focus in perfecting his stage persona remains at odds with society’s treatment of gay representation both onstage and off. For example, Mayor LaGuardia, in his campaign to clean up New York in preparation for the world’s fair, cracks down on theatres that feature the nance and the “nance crowd” that its bawdy material attracts to its balconies; navigating the furtive environment of the automat in search of sex, Chauncey risks harassment, and even violence, from the police. And despite for the first time achieving a seemingly stable, although ultimately doomed relationship with Ned (Jonny Orsini), a younger man he initially picks up for casual sex, Chauncey exemplifies the kind of internalized homophobia reminiscent of such pre-Stonewall dramas as The Boys in the Band (1968). Furthermore, Beane compounds Chauncey’s selfloathing by making him politically conservative. Ironically, Chauncey presages the modern rhetoric of certain Log Cabin Republicans who excuse conservative displays of homophobia as necessary to appeasing the base constituents: desperate to continue performing, yet unwilling to compromise his artistic integrity, Chauncey deludes himself into thinking that “things will quiet down” after the election.

The production vividly evoked the visual and performing style of the period. John Lee Beatty’s revolving set, including an automat resembling a Hopper painting, and Ann Roth’s costumes, including appropriately seedy costumes for the theatre’s strippers, established both the grit and faded elegance of its theatrical milieu. Even the choice of the Lyceum Theatre to stand in for the play’s primary location, the old Irving Place Theatre, and O’Brien’s incorporation of certain features of this historic, early-twentieth-century structure enveloped the audience in authentic period detail.

However, the numerous burlesque songs and sketches featuring the nance and company are the play’s thematic core, and the production showcased them with a superb mix of expert comic timing, joyful performing...