Every Jewish kid I’ve known had an Aunt Belle in the family. My wife had one, I had one, and Charles Busch had one. Make that two. He also had an Aunt Lillian who along with Belle brought him up from age 7 when his mother died.
“Aunt Lillian was a cross between Auntie Mame and The Miracle Worker.”
The words belong to the author and star of such plays as Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, The Divine Sister, Swingtime Canteen and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which ran for five years in New York and is one of the longest running plays in Off-Broadway history.
Marcia Jean Kurtz in the title role of Busch’s latest comedy, Olive and the Bitter Herbs was, Busch insists, “not modeled after Aunt Belle. She wasn’t a sour pickle like Olive.
She was a tough Jewish woman who lived on the Upper West Side. She was ultimately a beat sort of person without a chip on her shoulder. She was very tough and feisty.
“A character for my play usually comes from a variety of sources. I think I speak for most playwrights, as for example Elaine May, Woody Allen and Neil Simon who never home in on just one person. It’s usually a cornucopia of ideas. I wish I could have the comedy precision of Neil Simon or the mad inspiration of Elaine May.
“The Harold Pinter influence came about because when I was trying to write The Allergist’s Wife, I had these Upper West Side characters in mind and I thought it might be interesting to try to place them in a Pinteresque world. The murky relationship of two women and a man Harold Pinter’s Old Times was a blueprint for The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Busch’s biggest commercial success and my own favorite Busch comedy. That does not imply that Harold Pinter is my great inspiration. It’s interesting that if you have a quote that’s haunting you it’s as if it was written in Day-Glo or Neon.” While the play was ruminating in his mind, Busch happened to see Linda Lavin in Death Defying Acts, who was devastatingly funny in the one-actors by Woody Allen and Neil Simon.
“Linda has enormous emotional resources. She’s like a Jewish Anna Magnani.” Far from monopolizing the laughs , Lavin’s character has a solid foil in the character of her mother Freida, whom Busch freely admits is a composite of Aunt Lillian and Aunt Belle.
“I had two very important experiences as a kid. The first “theater” as a patron I saw was really an opera which my father loved and he took me when I was about seven years old to the Metropolitan Opera House 1411 Broadway, occupying the whole block between West 39th Street and West 40th Street on the west side of the street in the Garment District of Midtown Manhattan, to see Joan Sutherland in La Sonnambula by Bellini . I think it informed my whole life. Not as an interest in opera but in theatricality. It really started in a life long interest in 19th century theater and the whole romantic epic feel of it. All of those images imprinted themselves on my imagination. You would think I would be interested in opera, but I never was. Around the same time in 1963 Aunt Lillian took me to my very first Broadway show, a musical version of Tovarich with Vivien Leigh and Jean Pierre Aumont. It wasn’t a huge hit musical but Vivien Leigh starred in it and won the Tony Award for it.”
“My aunts sent me to an all-boys sleepaway camp in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Camp Catawba, when I was 10. All the activities were based on Greek myths. The woman who ran the camp was a fascinating person named Vera Lachmann, who was a professor of the classics at Columbia University. She was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Every summer she would direct one play – whether it be Shakespeare or Moliere. I was one of the fairies in The Tempest.”
“Two of my favorite Busch plays are Swingtime Canteen and The Divine Sister. The first was a spoof of war time movies and The Andrews Sisters. During its run at The Blue Angel’s nightclub in Manhattan, I saw the production in which Busch replaced Alison Fraser. “In the middle of the run, we brought in the survivng Andrews Sister, Maxine Andrews. I was a real Andrews Sister fan so it was very exciting to work with Maxine and to know her so well. We really hit it off. I could never get over my chance to sing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy with Maxine Andrews.”
The Divine Sister was a delightful take on such movies as Sound of Music (Julie Andrews) and The Nun’s Story (Audrey Hepburn).
“In the late 70s when I was struggling as an actor I used to do portraits at weddings, bar mitzvahs etc. I worked two summers on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ. They weren’t caricatures – they were portraits. I didn’t have to do it in 1985 when things got better for me in theater. But about a year ago I went back to the easel for my own pleasure in doing paintings. It’s been a lot of fun; it’s nice to have another vehicle for self-expression. It’s non-collaborative. My career is in the most collaborative artistic form or film.”
As for films, what are your favorites?
I had no single favorite but I could make you a list of a dozen movies.
Let’s have them, I suggested.
Charles Busch’s Top 17 Movie List.
My list would include Gone with the Wind with female favorites Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland; Director Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier; Vivien Leigh again and Robert Taylor in Director Mervyn LeRoy’s Waterloo Bridge ; Le Roy’s Random Harvest with Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson, The Wizard of Oz, (with Judy, Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr and Jack Hale) Judy again in A Star is Born; Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager; Merle Oberon and Olivier in Wuthering Heights, Garland in I Could Go on Singing, Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette . Sometimes the performance sticks out rather than the movie itself. I very much admired Bette Davis’s performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane; Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, Garbo’s Camille; Director Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, Meet John Doe and A Pocketful of Miracles (Peter Falk was marvelous in that). I adored Capra.
What’s on your agenda?
“I’m working on a children’s musical for TheatreworksUSA. I’m also working on a theater piece Stars of David, an exploration of Jewish celebrities and their feelings towards Judaism. It’s kind of like Love, Loss and What I Wore for Jews. When Divine Sister was over in May I felt exhausted and mused, this is it for me. Not so, I’ve got a million things in the fire.“ |
