Mae West: Ahead of her Time?

Mae West. Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag, The Pleasure Man. Ed. Lillian Schlissel. New York: Routledge, 1997.

First, full disclosure: this was a suprisingly expensive book. I'm not sure why a collection of 3 plays costs this much. Especially since it's not particularly well bound and I, after a month or so of not too vigorous sporadic reading, already have pages falling out of my volume. Hmmm.

With that said, for a series of plays written in 1926, these are suprisingly entertaining, and certainly risque! Sex is about a prostitute and addressess frankly some of the concerns of a woman who has to work to make a living, although she does take the noble route in the end. Mae West originated the lead role herself. It's an amazing play in the fact that in 1926 it centered around a strong female character and her sexuality. Drag: A Homosexual Comedy in Three Acts is about gay men. Fairly explicitly so. Once again you get the stereotypical ending, but it's rather emotionally ambiguous and complex. And The Pleasure Man, which is I think my favorite, and a pretty startling (and slightly grotesque) ending, actually. It's a backstage drama that includes female impersonators, extramarital affairs, and gay men. It has quite a few characters and at times it's hard to tell them apart, but I think for the most part this would be a fascinating play even today, although it is a bit of a circus (literally). The three plays are fascinating and complex and I highly enjoyed them; I would recommend them, even if they are at moments a bit dated.

And the book itself includes fascinating (if slightly simplicistic) introductory essay and an appendix containing the legal documents surrounding the censorship of West's plays and especially The Pleasure Man. It's actually a fairly interesting academic volume disguised as a collection of plays, although I must admit that I've only skimmed the academic portions (especially the legal documents, which are pretty dry) in my curiousity to get to the plays. What I did learn, however, that West wrote several other plays, and that they're all archived at the Library of Congress, so my question is: where are the rest? Why are only these 3 published? And Schlissel claimed that Drag and The Pleasure Man were intended to be performed by a company of gay actors. But instead of details, she tells us that "the gay plays contain the only love stories Mae West would ever write" (27) which is a little too sentimental and reductive for my taste.