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THE WICKEDLY FUNNY FORCE BEHIND THE DIVINE SISTER

  Sublimely ridiculous is a perfect description of Short North Stage’s next production—The Divine Sister. It also describes the unique style of its author, Charles Busch, one of theater’s most absurdly funny authors and performers. Busch’s best known work is The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, which was nominated for the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and ran for more than two years on Broadway. But Busch is also famous for such farcical works as Die, Mommy Die!, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, and Psycho Beach Party. He typically performs the leads in his plays, impersonating women who will remind movie buffs of some of Hollywood’s great actresses, notably Joan Crawford. As the New York Daily News describes him, he “never met a film genre he couldn't spoof or women's clothing he couldn't flatter.”

  While Busch is well-known on the East and West Coasts, his works seldom get performed in the country’s heartland. Short North Stage is happy to bring his wacky humor to the Garden Theater in what might be his funniest work to date.

 The Divine Sister is Busch at his finest. Says the Daily News: “He's ransacked nun movies — from "The Trouble With Angels" to "Doubt"…Devoted Busch disciples and novices will laugh themselves silly at this always irreverent comedy that finds him rocking a habit and working his signature facial expressions and vocal growls as the Mother Superior in a 1960s Pittsburgh convent.”

The New York Times called it a “gleefully twisted tale of the secret life of nuns,” and cited it as Busch’s “freshest, funniest work in years, perhaps decades.”

Busch, 59, was a shy boy whose mother died when he was seven. He then went to live with an aunt in Manhattan who cast an Auntie-Mame type of spell on him. He developed a fascination with classic 1930s and 40s movies and their heroines. He majored in drama at Northwestern University, but had trouble being cast in roles. “Too thin and too light,” he explains. So he began writing his own material. He toured the country in the late 1970s and early 80s in a non-drag one-man show called Alone with a Cast of Thousands.  He returned to New York after his bookings declined, and had to work a variety of odd jobs to survive.

  He wrote a skit for a gay bar in 1984 which evolved into a huge off-off-Broadway hit—Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. “The audience laughs at the first line and goes right on laughing at every line until the end,” wrote the New York Times. And from that point on Busch has kept on making audiences laugh through his inventions of comic characters, most of whom he plays as a impersonations of bigger-than-life movie stars.

   “When I first started drag,” he has said, “I wasn't this shy young man but a powerful woman. It liberated within me a whole vocabulary of expression. It was less a political statement than an aesthetic one." But his concept of drag differed from the idea that drag had to be tacky to be good.

  Busch has not always performed in drag. In fact, he did not even perform in his big Broadway hit, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife. Nor does he always categorize what he does as drag. "I'm an actor playing a role... A lot of drag can be very offensive, but I like to think that in some crazy way the women I play are feminist heroines.”

  He returned to female impersonation with The Divine Sister in 2010, playing the ingenious creation named Mother Superior. Movie buffs just might see a similarity to her and Rosalind Russell in the 1966 film The Trouble with Angels.

   Busch’s heels are tough to fill, which may be one reason regional theaters hesitate to produce his comedies. But Columbus has an actor up to the challenge—Doug Joseph, who has performed in dozens of productions locally, in roles as varied as Captain Hook in Peter Pan to Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the flamboyant Roger DeBris in The Producers. Doug has been featured at Short North Stage in Follies and as the hilarious Southern gentleman named simple “Mr.” in the recent Sunday in the Park with George. In next week’s eblast, Doug will talk about what it’s like to fill Busch’s mantle—or perhaps habit is the more appropriate garment in this case.