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“Beebo Brinker” Comes to Off Broadway

This month the stage adaptation of Ann Bannon’s iconic and beloved lesbian pulp series, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, which debuted last fall at the Fourth Street Theater in New York, moves to Off Broadway for a 10-week run, with previews beginning Feb. 19. Given the rarity of lesbian-themed theater, the play’s success so far has been particularly sweet.

Out playwrights Linda Chapman and Kate Moira Ryan and out director Leigh Silverman have been on a mission, since 2001, to adapt classic lesbian fiction for the stage. They picked Bannon’s pulp novels for their debut. “There’s something in Ann’s writing; she captures something very, very, very, truthful about lesbian relationships – and about all kinds of emotional relationships, really. Because she touches on everything,” said Chapman.

Left to right: Linda Chapman, Leigh Silverman and Kate Moira Ryan

The Beebo Brinker Chronicles takes characters and stories from three Bannon novels set in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 1960s. The play follows Laura (Marin Ireland) and Beth (Autumn Dornfeld), former sorority sisters and ex-lovers, as they endure the repercussions of Beth’s conformist decision to dump Laura in order to marry a man, and Laura’s courageous decision to forgo marriage and move to New York City.

Housewife Beth suffers in her unsatisfying marriage, while Laura faces challenges living as a lesbian in the 1950s – including a passionately violent relationship with sexy butch Beebo Brinker (Jenn Colella), and a platonic marriage to a gay man, Jack (David Greenspan).

Friends for nearly 20 years, Chapman and Ryan are the kind of collaborators who finish each other’s sentences. Both have written acclaimed lesbian theater, most notably Ryan’s 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother (co-authored with lesbian comedian Judy Gold, now touring the United States) and Chapman’s Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving (co-authored with her partner, Lola Pashalinski, based on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas).

Chapman said she and Ryan began their research by rereading Bannon’s five novels, “breaking all three books down like you would a script, into beats.” Like a puzzle with a variety of configurations, they moved the characters and story lines around, rearranging the novels to find the right way to tell the story onstage.

The process took three years, from obtaining the rights to the novels in 2002 to producing a near-final version of the script in 2005.

In its final form, Beebo is an emotionally intense, 90-minute one-act play. It cleverly and nonlinearly overlaps the stories from the novels, interweaving Laura’s arrival in New York City (from the novel I Am a Woman) with Beth’s struggle 10 years later over whether to remain in her marriage or seek out Laura in New York (from the novel Journey to a Woman).

According to Silverman, who has directed two of the highest-profile lesbian-themed theater pieces in New York (Lisa Kron’s Well on Broadway and the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs), the current one-act form is a drastic change from the initial draft. That version was three acts long and covered many more characters and story lines.

“It felt to me sort of like an endless melodrama,” Silverman said. “It was like, we need more, or we need a lot less. And we opted for a lot less.”

Even in its distilled form, creating the iconic butch Beebo Brinker presented both an opportunity and a challenge. Butches like Beebo are a rare type onstage (or film or television, for that matter), and Chapman and Ryan felt a strong sense of responsibility to bring this romantic fantasy figure to life – including both her irresistible appeal and her harsh flaws.

“I think that in a certain way, that’s the next frontier of gay types out there in the world,” said Chapman. “There are very few actual butches that are represented [onstage]. If they are represented, it’s as a joke.”

Finding an actor who could embody Beebo was extremely challenging. In the Off Broadway production, the part of Beebo Brinker will be played by Jenn Colella (pictured left). “I think that there are just no butch actresses, really, because there are no roles for them,” Silverman said. “So even if you are butch, you look really femmey because that’s how you’re going to get work.” According to Chapman and Ryan, most actors, even lesbians, are hesitant to take on a butch role for fear of how they’ll be viewed.

In addition to finding the right Beebo, one of the biggest challenges for the three creators was establishing the tone of the play. With language and situations so specific to the 1950s, it could be tempting to camp it up, to allow modern audiences to laugh at the struggles and dilemmas of Bannon’s characters. But Chapman, Ryan and Silverman had another goal in mind.

“I just felt like, how can you turn these people into a joke?” Silverman said. “I mean, these people are real people! Why would I direct a play where I held the characters in some sort of contempt or felt that they were ridiculous? We are allowed to do something else besides camp.”

Chapman agreed. “You know what? If we had sent this up …” Ryan completed the thought for her: “It wouldn’t have the veracity that it does.”

The creators were also wary of taking the material too seriously. Chapman admitted the two of them are “laugh whores,” and said, “the comedy [in the play] comes out of the way people talk and think about themselves. And we laugh at their painful existence, because we’re out and out, and we can laugh.”

Even after three years of writing and refining, staging readings and workshops, it took two more years to get Beebo in front of an audience.

Like many who create lesbian-themed plays, Chapman and Ryan struggled to find producers or theater companies that were interested in developing or producing the play. In the end, they decided to self-produce a four-week tryout production at the Fourth Street Theater last fall, working with the Hourglass Theater Company to raise the $60,000 production budget through grassroots fundraising within the lesbian community.

“We went to every single theater I had a relationship with,” Ryan said. But no one was interested in producing the play. “And does that make me angry? No. Because all we have to do is just be inventive. And Linda and I have been in this business for so long we can self-produce, we can be inventive.”

Ryan didn’t miss the irony of David Mamet’s November – with its lesbian lead character – being produced on Broadway this season. “Lesbian work written by men will get placed on Broadway, and we have to raise all the money ourselves for a showcase production, getting the space for free,” she said. “Isn’t that interesting?”

Lesbian writers producing a lesbian-themed play face a question that a famed writer like David Mamet does not: Will it appeal to mainstream audiences?

Making money in theater is so challenging that producers are apt to hedge their bets wherever they can. Many producers avoid controversial topics and plays by writers without a long and successful commercial track record. Most lesbian-themed work falls short on both counts. To win over investors and the mainstream audiences vital for financial success, some lesbian theater artists have chosen to reduce the lesbian content in their work, and have wound up appealing neither to lesbians nor mainstream audiences.

In their work, Chapman, Ryan and Silverman have instead embraced lesbian subject matter.

“I think you work on the stuff that moves you, first and foremost, as an artist,” said Chapman. “You try to express something. Whatever it was in this material that we were touched by, we felt that this was a story that people needed to see. It’s hard to convince people why they need to see an adaptation of a pulp [novel] from the ’50s and make them feel that it’s going to ring true today. And I think that that’s the beauty of the play and the strength of the play is that it feels so immediate, and so current.”

Silverman said she feels one of the responsibilities of lesbian artists is to depict lesbian stories authentically, in a way that will engage and attract non-gay audiences as well: “It’s our job as people who make art to open the door so that people can find a way in, while holding on to the integrity of our content.”

The self-produced showcase production of Beebo opened last fall with a bang: rave reviews and a totally sold-out run. The line of theatergoers hoping for a ticket cancellation was out the door. On the final night of the four-week run, lesbian producer Harriet Levy saw the play, fell in love with it, and offered to move the production Off Broadway.

“To just think that a play like this, which felt like it could so easily stay in the lesbian ghetto, could have as big of a life as it did downtown and then transcend to a commercial run – it gives me so much hope, it really does,” said Silverman.

The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is just the first of what the three creators hope will be many lesbian literary adaptations. Chapman and Ryan promise they have a long list of lesbian novels they want to adapt, although Ryan added that whatever they write next will probably have just as long and hard a road to production as Beebo has had.

While the future of lesbian theater depends on mainstream audiences, it also requires the lesbian community to actually buy tickets and go to a show. The success of lesbian-themed theater will build on itself, until lesbian writers and directors have David Mamet-level clout, creating a world where the rare lesbian theater production can thrive. Only then, said Ryan, will we get “the next lesbian Terrence McNally,” a gay playwright with gay and straight Broadway credits galore.

Meanwhile, an uncompromised, emotional, distinctly lesbian story is happening onstage eight times a week over at 37 Arts. If lesbian and mainstream audiences continue to support the show, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles will extend its 10-week run, hopefully for a long time to come.

The Beebo Brinker Chronicles runs through April 27, 2008, at 37 Arts. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster or at the 37 Arts box office.

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