GLR November-December 2023

Lesley provides her story of her affair with Arthur and her dis covery of Robert’s affair with another man. She also relays all the salacious details of the murder trial of Ethel Proudlock, an other real event of the time. Proudlock was convicted of sav agely murdering her own adulterous paramour—an action that all of the coupled characters in the book probably had contem plated at least once—adding yet another infidelity gone wrong to the story. Throughout his career, Maugham denied being a “prose styl ist.” In fact, in his 1926 short story “The Creative Impulse,” he satirized self-conscious stylists whose works aimed to please only the literati: “It was indeed a scandal that so distinguished an author, with an imagination so delicate and a style so exqui site, should remain neglected of the vulgar.” He preferred in stead a short, plain, precise style. Summing up the general critical response to Maugham’s fiction, the critic Lee Wilson Dodd wrote: “Mr Maugham knows how to plan a story and

carry it through. Competence is the word. His style is without a trace of imaginative beauty.” Perhaps Maugham’s preference for plain-spoken writing stemmed from his success as a play wright. At one point he had four plays mounted on West End stages at the same time. In his plays, he sought to create dia logue that sounded like real, unadorned conversation. A frequent criticism levied against Maugham was that his casual, collo quial speech sometimes devolved into clichés. In House , Tan skillfully mirrors that competent, lucid style. There are no frilly flights of descriptive prose, no subplots, no psychological probing, no distractions from the rather simple plot: A famous writer travels to an exotic land to collect tales from the natives and writes a collection of six stories that tell those tales. Lesley’s telling of the Proudlock murder trial story unfolds like any straightforward detective story. Thus, in both content and writing style, Tan has paid homage to Maugham as one of the masters of unadorned prose.

Broadway Unbound

“I ’M TELLING YOU, the only times I really feel the presence of God are when I’m having sex, and during a great Broad way musical,” enthuses the rambunctious Father Dan to the eponymous hero of Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey (1992). While the randy priest casually lists Lerner and Lowe, Tommy Tune, and eleven o’clock numbers among the tenets of his faith, he also cau tions the emotionally distraught Jeffrey to remain clear-eyed about the reality of evil: “ Phantom. Miss Saigon. Sunset Boulevard ! Know ye the signs of the devil: overmik ing, smoke machines, trouble with Equity.”

I suspect that, were Father Dan an actual person able to read Ethan Mordden’s Gays on Broadway , he would make Mordden the new god of his idolatry. Mordden is hands down the single greatest historian of Amer ican theater, gay or straight. Stone cold sober, Mordden finds absolutely everything about theater fascinating—especially the near misses and offstage mishaps—and makes the reader who hasn’t seen most of the 389 (by my count) plays discussed in the book feel as though he or she has missed a fabulous party. The governing idea of Gays on Broad way is that theater both reflects and chal

R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN

GAYS ON BROADWAY by Ethan Mordden Oxford Univ. Press. 233 pages, $35. GENDER, SEX, AND SEXUALITY IN MUSICAL THEATRE He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night Edited by Kelly Kessler Intellect, Ltd. 323 pages, $135.

Writing at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when life had become “radioactive,” Rudnick promoted attending a good Broadway musical as one of the best ways to “lunge for any shred of happiness” in a dismal world, where psychic survival lies in performing “high kicks to heaven.” By linking arms with other combatants and dancing exuberantly in grand Rockettes style, one displays one’s defiance of the myopically judgmen tal moralists who touted AIDS as God’s vengeance on deviants. But even while seeking to promote an antidote to the crushing depression about AIDS that threatened to paralyze the gay com munity at the time, Rudnick highlighted an innate association between gays and theater. On some level, homosexuality has historically been a performance, whether because survival de manded that one attempt to pass as straight in a hostile world, communicating with other possible like-minded individuals through coded phrases, gestures or sartorial choices, or because one could unleash the fabulous diva within whose barbed quips wreak havoc on repressive, judgmental authorities. Raymond-Jean Frontain’s most recent book is Conversations with Ter rence McNally . 32

lenges prevailing ideas about sexuality, indulging stereotypes even while undermining them. Like Mordden’s earlier, never-to be-surpassed seven-volume history of the Broadway musical, Gays on Broadway is organized by decade, starting with the ready willingness of audiences in the 1910s to accept male ac tors headlining in female roles. Julian Eltinge was the highest paid performer of his day and, along with Bert Savoy, fashioned the persona of the bosomy, wasp-waisted woman who delivered some not very subtle double entendres, laying the groundwork for the stage persona that Mae West would later popularize to such devastating effect. Indeed, so raucous was New York theater in the teens and twenties that conservative lawmakers passed a draconian meas ure mandating the padlocking of any theater sponsoring the dis play of “sex degeneracy or sex perversion” on its stage. Bert Savoy’s and Mae West’s style of outrageous double entendre was forced to take cover in the devilishly refined lyrics of Cole Porter and the drawing room comedies of Noël Coward. The infamous Wales Law had such a far-reaching effect that in the 1930s and ’40s, homosexuals could only be presented as pred ators to be vanquished or as confused innocents to be reclaimed

TheG & LR