Theatre in Review: Sex Variants of 1941: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (The Civilians/NYU Skirball)

	Jo Lampert. Photo: Greg Kessler

The title of this new entertainment sounds like a Broadway revue series from the between-the-war years, say Earl Caroll Vanities or George White's Scandals. (One instinctively conjures images of Sex Variants of 1942 or 1943.) In reality, it alludes to a study, published in 1941, that compiled, for the first time in a systematic way, information about male and female homosexuals, including lengthy, candid interviews. This occurred years before Dr. Kinsey started handing out questionnaires and, at a casual glance, it must seem a treasure trove of information. But behind it lies a checkered history, involving dueling agendas, representation, and erasure.

The book's fraught history and mixed legacy are explored in Sex Variants of 1941, which adopts a revue format, alternating dramatic scenes with monologues drawn from the original text and anachronistic rock numbers. It's an intellectual extravaganza with an uncertain structure and certain elements that work better than others. Following The Civilians' typical methodology, Steven Cosson and James La Bella's script is seemingly the product of deep research, resulting in a panoramic view of its subject that will be revelatory to anyone who thinks queer life began with the Stonewall riots.

The most compelling aspects of Sex Variants focus on the book's creation. It begins with Jan Gay, a journalist and lesbian nudist -- she loves nothing more than skinny-dipping in the Central Park Reservoir -- who, in the 1930s, compiles interviews with 300 like-minded women, exploring every detail of their lives. (She is inspired by the pioneering work of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The show includes a pit stop at Hirschfeld's Berlin-based institute, packed to the rafters with valuable data soon to be torched by the Nazis.) Failing to get published, Gay teams up with Thomas Painter, a disgraced seminarian who has initiated an up-close-and-personal study of male hustlers, particularly in and around Times Square. One of the script's more amusing passages details Painter's ideal man; his list is so packed with requirements that one is amazed that such an ideal exists. (Among his top requirements, the young man in question should have "no suggestion of homosexuality about him" and must display "a lack of cooperation." He adds that some of his most satisfying experiences have been with partners who were "asleep throughout the entire process.")

Gay and Painter are eventually taken up by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, a group of physicians and scientists, under the direction of George W. Henry, a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of homosexuality. Gay and Painter's project, now being coordinated by a team of professionals, apparently begins as a fearless, intellectually honest investigation of homosexuality. But Henry is a eugenicist at heart and his instincts ultimately pervert the material in ways that Gay, in particular, finds untenable.

There's surely a solid two-act drama in this material but Gay, Henry, and Pinter come and go, sidelined by a parade of supplementary elements. The production is defined by a kind of lateral thinking: An epicene creature in a green jacket (elegantly impersonated by the great David Greenspan, holding his cigarette just so), complains about the prevalence of "pansies," which leads to a sequence about the "pansy craze," a national fad for drag performers in the 1920s and '30s (The silent screen star William Haines, who didn't do drag but perfected a comically effeminate persona, may have benefited from this trend, also documented in Douglas Carter Beane's poignant Broadway comedy The Nance.) We hear about drag balls in Harlem so popular that parents brought their children, lesbians quietly raising families, and bizarre scientific theories averring that homosexual men are identifiable by the way they angle their arms when walking. There's also a discussion of "circuses" live sex shows featuring multiple performers in fearsomely geometric displays.

These digressions will fascinate neophytes, but they may feel overly familiar if you've read George Chauncey's Gay New York or Lillian Faderman's Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. The episodes whiz by in scattershot fashion, occasionally interrupted by numbers written by Stephen Trask, Martha Redbone, and Aaron Whitby. These are of variable quality. Greenspan stuns in "Artist, Philosopher, Queer" (by Trask and the late Michael Friedman), the testimony of a sexual outlaw delivered in a thundering deadpan that suggests the actor would be an asset in the next revival of The Threepenny Opera or Happy End. But Robert M. Johanson, fine in his dialogue scenes as Painter, muffs his solo number thanks to his poor diction. This cannot be the fault of sound designer Drew Levy, as everything else is intelligible. A finale, "Naked and Gay," is marred by an endlessly repetitive lyric.

The rest of the production design is creatively realized, including David Zinn's clinical set, Amith Chandrashaker's lighting, and Emily Rebholz's costumes. Video designer Jessica Mitrani combines shots of book burnings, Hirschfeld's institute, and illustrations from Henry's book with title cards that amusingly reimagine the lives of George, Joy, and Painter, as vintage feature films. The rest of the company -- Whitney Andrews, Jo Lampert, Irene Sofia Lucio and Heath Saunders -- nimbly work through a multitude of characters.

The show concludes on an ironic note, following a falling-out between Gay and Painter about the book's ultimate aim. (This shouldn't be surprising, as, among the lives documented onstage, the women are, on the whole, much more psychologically integrated than the men.) The final published edition is disappointingly unreformist in many ways, not least for its lurid illustrations, which include graphic drawings of vaginas and naked photos of the interview subjects, reducing them to laboratory samples. Yet, in noting that sexual identity exists on a spectrum, Sex Variants sets the stage for more progressive ideas in the years to come. If it earns a mixed verdict, that is suitable for a show that is, ultimately, a jumble of the good, the bad, and the warmed-over. In the current climate, anyway, it should find plenty of allies. --David Barbour