If you saw Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister at Stageworks nine months ago, you’re to be excused for assuming that the same author’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, currently at Jobsite Theater, must be equally entertaining. After all, Sister had an inventive plot, lots of clever allusions to film, theater and fiction, several delightfully off-center characters, and more good laughs than anyone could count. So why shouldn’t Sodom— with its very title suggesting a canny assault on fundamentalist homophobes — be just as successful? Wouldn’t that be logical?
So much for logic: Lesbians (which was first produced in 1984, more than 20 years before Sister) is little more than an extended sketch devoid of suspense, compelling dialogue, or interesting characters. Following a couple of supernatural rivals from ancient Sodom to contemporary Las Vegas by way of 1920s Hollywood, the play never develops anything remotely like a suspenseful plot, and no amount of mugging and mischief by the enthusiastic Jobsite cast can convince us that we’re seeing a fully imagined act of theater.
Even Zachary Hines’s performance as the vampire Astarte fails to make much of an impression — until he lip-syncs Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” Then we’re confronted with all the implications of good drag performance anywhere: the interrogation of feminine stereotypes, and the whole thorny problem of defining sexuality. But “I Feel Love” only lasts a few minutes, and then we’re back to feeling boredom, impatience, and the uncomfortable suspicion that we might more profitably have stayed home and watched old reruns of The Simpsons. At least Homer and Bart have something to tell us about the state of the universe.
Lesbians begins in ancient Sodom (though Brian Smallheer’s bare set might just as well represent ancient Athens or this morning’s Cincinnati) with the preparation of a reluctant Virgin (Hines) to be sacrificed to a voracious Succubus (Summer Bohnenkamp). The Virgin strives desperately to find a way out of her fate, even shouting for someone to break her hymen so she won’t be palatable. But the Succubus can’t be deterred, and has her way in some fashion — this wasn’t entirely clear to me — with the result that she creates an immortal rival for all time. We next see these two women in silent movies-era Hollywood, where they tangle verbally but not satisfyingly, and then suddenly we’re in Vegas, where the two continue to trade barbs. Finally, the show, which has been punctuated by somewhat-relevant songs like ”Bad Things” (from HBO’s True Blood) comes to an abrupt end. We’ve effectively spent 3,000 years going nowhere. And we’ve laughed a very little.
Not that the Jobsite cast hasn’t striven energetically to win our approbation. Hines’s drag performance is in fact capably done; and Bohnenkamp as the Succubus (later called the Condesa) has a charming self-satisfaction that might indeed be the result of happy flesh-hunting over thousands of years. In supporting roles, J. Elijah Cho, Jamie Jones, Spencer Meyers, Maggie Mularz, and Katrina Stevenson reach for laughs with wild abandon, and if they don’t garner half as many as they aim for, still you’ve got to admire their zeal.
Perhaps the most successful of the show’s artists is Stevenson as costume designer: what Lesbians lacks in a set is more than made up in imaginative clothing. Director David M. Jenkins characteristically keeps all areas of the stage busy at every moment, but his sound design is too eclectic, and Cho’s guitar accompaniment on some songs is incongruously folksy. If ever a comedy called for electric music, this is the one: its extremes just don’t meld with jangling acoustic chords.
There’s an idea underlying Vampire Lesbians of Sodom that I think needs rethinking — and that’s that cross-dressing is sufficient to give a production substance. When we see Hines as the Virgin, or woman Stevenson as the man Etienne, we’re apparently supposed to conclude that a deeply important statement is being made. Well, maybe that was true in 1984, and it certainly was a fact in 1947, when Jean Genet prescribed that the women in The Maids should be played by males.
But this battle’s been won: putting actors in drag now is insufficient to justify a production’s existence. If Matthew McGee was brilliant as the heroine of The Divine Sister, it’s because the play was complex and erudite and fun and asked for a top performance. But a play as flimsy as Lesbians can’t be saved by drag; at this level, it hardly matters who’s male, who’s female, who’s immortal — and who’s just killing time.