NEW YORK — The year his Broadway hit “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” was up for the best-play Tony Award, Charles Busch figured he wasn’t going to win, and he was right. He lost to David Auburn’s “Proof” — but so did Tom Stoppard and August Wilson, which was some consolation. Awards night, Busch said, was magical.
What still gives him a twinge, though, is that the beloved aunt who raised him, who was never comfortable with his work as a drag performer, wasn’t there to savor his glittering, mainstream success as a playwright.
“The thing that breaks my heart — and I still get very emotional about it — is that she died just before ‘The Allergist’s Wife,’ ” Busch, 60, said on a recent afternoon at his duplex in Manhattan’s West Village. “She’s been dead now for 14 years, and yet when I watch the Oscars or the Emmys or the Tony Awards, when somebody brings their mother on the red carpet, I just get very choked up. That would’ve been the ultimate gift I could’ve given her to show my gratitude for everything she gave me. She would’ve come with me to the Tony Awards.”
“The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” which premiered off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 and transferred to Broadway that fall, was a career breakthrough for Busch, who until then was best known for downtown plays he wrote and starred in, like “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Psycho Beach Party.”
Advertisement
“The Allergist’s Wife,” aimed at a more conventional crowd, is also a play Busch has had to keep tweaking as topical and technological references that were up-to-the-minute in the original script become outdated. A Lyric Stage Company production directed by Larry Coen, running Friday through Dec. 20, will use a revised version.
Advertisement
“I’m never finished writing that damn play,” Busch said. “It was my first contemporary comedy, and everything changes so quickly.”
Set in a well-appointed apartment in a doorman building on the Upper West Side, the play centers on Marjorie Taub, a frustrated woman in late middle age who is unfulfilled by an existence crammed with volunteer work and cultural dilettantism. She has intellectual pretensions and creative ambitions but no career of her own; the allergist of the title is her husband, Ira, a do-gooder with a colossal ego. When Marjorie’s long-lost friend, Lee, appears, spinning tales of adventure, she’s a disruptive force in their settled lives, urging the couple to be more daring.
As he spoke about the play, Busch was about to set off on an adventure of his own: The next day he would leave for London, then Paris, with his cabaret show. In his scarlet-walled living room, which is both glamorous and cozy, family photos are clustered on a table near a couch. Talk of “The Allergist’s Wife” led to affectionate talk of his sisters; his mother, who died when he was 7; and his aunt, who took Busch in when he was 13 and troubled, he said, and “just developed me and cultivated me like I was one of her African violets.”
“I’m from this matriarchal family of very fascinating, very articulate, witty, emotionally complex women,” he said. “I guess some people might think I’m kind of flamboyant or something, but I’m Marilyn Munster in my family.” He laughed. “I’m the quiet one, observing.” And, he added, taking notes on “all those crazy, awful things that I heard them say in extremis.”
Advertisement
“I’m fascinated by the tensions a woman goes through, their frustrations and strivings. I grew up with it. I identify with it,” Busch said. “I kind of am Marjorie Taub in some ways. Tennessee Williams was Blanche DuBois. I mean, every writer is some of all their characters. In therapy at one point, I was recently carrying on with the shrink and I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m just totally being Marjorie Taub.’ ”
Marjorie was a sort of spin-off of Miriam Passman, a character Busch had such success playing in a solo show in the mid-1990s that he wanted to write a full-length piece around her. But Busch, who still plays Miriam today, didn’t write Marjorie for himself to perform. Linda Lavin’s voice was the one he says he heard in his head. He wooed the actress for months — “I kind of stalked her and wrote her the most outrageous letters, comparing her to Bernhardt and Duse” — until she agreed to take the part in New York.
But whereas he envisioned Lee as a “slightly dumpy woman” with an interesting haircut and “primitive jewelry,” the producers cast Michele Lee — a move that, Busch said, “made it a sexier play.” It also set a template for subsequent productions, including Lyric Stage’s, which stars Marina Re as Marjorie, Joel Colodner as Ira, and Caroline Lawton as Lee.
Advertisement
“Our Lee is on the glamorous side,” Coen said.
Busch saw and is complimentary of Coen’s production of “The Divine Sister,” which he directed at SpeakEasy Stage Company and in Key West, Fla. But the playwright doesn’t see many productions of his work aside from those he’s personally involved in. He has a hard time liking them.
“Kind of rightly so,” Coen said. “People have an image, this kind of like ‘craaazy’ image, of how to do a Charles Busch play. Charles’s work walks that line where it has to be done with some intensity and sincerity and emotional honesty. I think when people produce the work of Charles Busch when he’s not involved, oftentimes they miss those points, and they kind of try to make it a romp. And it’s not a romp.”
Busch, whose tender emotions seemed, the other day, not very far from the surface, said he’s spent a lot of energy reevaluating his life recently — a product of turning 60, “a birthday I didn’t really care for very much.” When the topic of subsequent productions of his plays came up, it didn’t take long for him to liken his stance on them to his aunt’s refusal to see his drag performances.
“She and I had this strange kind of deal,” Busch said. “She said to me at one point, ‘I could go, but I’m so connected to you that I couldn’t just sit there objectively. The whole time I’d be a nervous wreck. And then I’d come backstage afterward, and if I didn’t like it or if I was disturbed, I’d have to sort of lie, and then you’d see that I was being withholding, and that would cast a shadow between us, and it’s best I just don’t go.’
Advertisement
“I thought that was remarkably wise. And it was painful in a certain sense, because her praise would have meant so much to me, but realistically, she was a complex lady, and I would have known immediately [if she was] withholding, and that would have bugged me. So I think it was best the way it was.”
Laura Collins-Hughes can be reached at laura.collinshughes@gmail.com.