Island City Stage founding artistic director Andy Rogow had always wanted to do a play by the legendary Charles Busch.
The New York-based playwright, who crafted an inimitable style of theatrical drag, stars in plays that he writes for himself, portraying over-the-top female divas who appear to be trapped in time in the golden age of Hollywood. But how to find the right actor to play one of Busch’s femmes fatales?
Rogow’s wish to produce a Busch play came to fruition when his path crossed with Fort Lauderdale-based actor Kris Andersson, who for nearly two decades has been touring as Dixie Longate with his one-person show, “Dixie’s Tupperware Party.”
Now, for the closing show of Island City Stage’s 12th season, Andersson is stepping into Busch’s character in “Die, Mommie, Die!” — as Angela Arden, a fading Hollywood cabaret singer who plots to kill her husband to be with her younger lover.
The show, which runs from Thursday, Aug. 22, through Sunday, Sept. 22, at the Wilton Manors theater is a send-up and a tribute to 1960s melodramas that became known as Grande Dame Guignol Cinema, sometimes nicknamed “hagsploitation” and “hag horror” flicks. The genre kicked off with 1962’s “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” starring real-life archnemeses and grand dames Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. They were two of many silver-screen stars who signed on for a melodramatic type of horror film in an effort to boost their fading careers.
“I think our audiences will relate to the movies of the 1960s that starred Crawford, Davis, Susan Hayward. It was when these aging divas were basically doing melodramatic soap operas but still playing the 1940s acting style that was overly dramatized,” says Rogow.
Much thought went into styling the living room of Angela Arden’s L.A. home, drenched in the glamour of old Hollywood, the couch and chairs upholstered in a French-lime green.
When asked if that is part of his directorial stamp that he’s putting on the show, he agrees: “I definitely think the way it looks visually is what I am putting into it for sure.”
He added, “it was very important to me that the set sort of made its own comic statement. I wanted to make sure that when audiences look at the set, they know it’s a comedy.”
Still, making sure Arden comes off the way Busch intended is a balancing act, according to both Andersson and Rogow.
Andersson says playing Arden is “an easy hill to climb for me. I’ve done drag for so many years as Dixie. I’m not saying that it’s not a challenge to do the role.”
Rogow believes the nuance of the character is born of the playwright.
“I don’t think of it actually as an actor playing it in drag. … It is just that a male is taking on this female character,” he says. “[The playwright] was obsessed with these movies as a kid and he was just able to absorb who these women were … That’s why I realized that I had the right person for the role in Kris. You can’t just hire a drag queen because they will make it a drag show.”
What makes the play so different, Rogow adds, is that while the audience knows it is a man, the way it is written makes it so the characters are relating to Angela Arden as a woman. “Then there are these sexual innuendos and relationships that make it just a little funnier that it is a man,” he says.
Veteran South Florida actress Elizabeth Dimon plays one of the pivotal roles: the Bible-verse-spouting, whiskey-flask-touting, Richard Nixon-supporting maid Bootsie Carp, who has some secrets of her own.
Dimon says she was “a little nervous” when she was cast in “Die, Mommie, Die!”
“I was like, I haven’t played this kind of role,” she says referring to the over-the-top melodrama that’s called for in the script. “And the reciting of the many Bible passages that are written for Bootsie? Well, I was a Presbyterian preacher’s kid.”
For his part, Andersson says he’s enjoying not being alone on stage, as he’s been with his one-person show.
“I kind of forgot how fun it was to work with a cast and a director, because I haven’t done it in so many years,” he says.
Other characters include Arden’s film-producer husband Sol Sussman (played by Troy J. Stanley), her young lover, Tony Parker (Clay Cartland), daughter Edith (Susanna Ninomiya) and gay son Lance (Kevin Veloz).
Busch has said the plot was influenced by Sophocles’ 5th-century Greek tragedy, “Electra,” where a woman and her lover kill her husband, then her children exact revenge.
“Yes, this is a Greek tragedy … unknown identities, children and parents and their love-hate relationships, and the violence that those can engender,” Rogow says. “While the play is set in the 1960s, the story itself is really kind of timeless.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Die, Mommie, Die!” by Charles Busch
WHEN: Aug. 22-Sept. 22.
WHERE: Island City Stage, 2304 N. Dixie Highway, Wilton Manors
COST: $40, $45, $55 (Mimosa Sunday, Sept. 8)
INFORMATION: 954-928-9800; islandcitystage.org
This story was produced by Broward Arts Journalism Alliance (BAJA), an independent journalism program of the Broward County Cultural Division. Visit ArtsCalendar.com for more stories about the arts in South Florida.
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