Typical tale of girl meets girl

When someone mentions America in the 1950s, the last thing that comes to mind is lesbian pulp novels. It was, however, during this characteristically repressed period that the genre of lesbian pulp fiction first emerged. Maya Gurantz, BR '98, has chosen to adapt one of those very novels for the stage for her senior project.

Even as the genre of lesbian pulp fiction defies the social model of the '50s, Beebo Brinker defies the literary model of the '50s lesbian pulp novel. Most of these torrid accounts of love between women were written by men and for men, and most of them ended in disaster and death, the price gay women paid for their deviant sexual behavior. Not only was Beebo Brinker written by a lesbian (Ann Bannon), it was also the only novel in its class with a butch rather than "fem" heroine. Even though Bannon was closeted throughout her life and trapped in the repressive role of a '50s housewife, she gave her readers a character who escaped from the conventions of not only the heterosexual model of the 1950s, but also the pseudo-scientific model of lesbian pulp fiction.

Beebo Brinker chronicles the adventures of its 18-year-old eponym (Jen Wilson, DC '01), a shy but determined young woman who has fled her provincial hometown of Juniper Hill, Wisconsin for the more liberating atmosphere of New York City. With the help of Jack Mann (Chris White, TD '98), a gay man who takes her in and introduces her to the lesbian subculture of the Village, she finds a word to attach to her previously feared and misunderstood attraction to women: lesbianism. Once liberated from the shackles of her misconceptions, Beebo becomes the butch sensation of Village lesbian culture, which brings with it a whole new set of pleasures and dilemmas.

The production is a delicious mix of melodrama and restraint. Gurantz has done an impressive job of adapting the novel and creating a careful vocabulary of verbal and visual elements that gesture toward more than they explicitly represent. "No one needs to see the pain and the horror of coming out," Gurantz argues. "What's important is that the representation of lesbians in this novel was the first open door to so many women. This is a story about coming to the city, having a whole world open up to you, and falling in love. It's a model we've all seen before in a heterosexual soap opera context, but in this case, the model gets queered."

Indeed, the production has a richly fantastic quality. The script is full of double entendres, subverted clichés, and tongue-in-cheek melodrama. Further, the performances are uniformly strong. Beebo's character is the most complex, and Wilson's performance is a mixture of equally fierce intensity and self-doubt. She is adept at the language of attraction, but she is by no means a slick seductress. What Wilson manages to convey is Beebo's discomfort with her own adeptness--her overconfidence reveals an insecurity familiar to anyone who has ever tried to play it cool.

The multi-dimensionality of Beebo's character is pleasantly offset by the one-dimensionality of many of the characters surrounding her. The caricatures of the first act are pure fun to watch: Clelia Peters, BK '00, as the fem vixen Mona Petry; White as the charmingly flamboyant Jack Mann; Ellen Blaine as the scarred and savvy Paula Ash; Micaela Blei, BK '00, and Thomas Pearson, BK '01, as Marie and Pete Pasquini, Beebo's comically ethni-cized employers.

In the second act, the characters and their relationships become more complex but still maintain their comically over-wrought quality. Heather McGhee, MC '01, delivers a stunningly sensual performance as the actress Venus Bo-gardus with whom Beebo is having an affair. Matt O'Neill, DC '00, and Brennan Gerard, TD '01, complicate the fairy tale of Beebo and Venus's relationship with their portrayals of Venus's husband and son, two characters that appear one-dimensional at first but go on to reveal a great deal of complexity and contradiction.

The calculated melodrama of each actor's performance and the complicated sexual tension between all of the players is what saves Beebo Brinker's often overly dramatic dialogue from being trite or tiresome. There is pleasure and sensuality in the exaggerated gestures of each character that makes them enjoyable to watch. Their humor and finesse make Beebo's earnest search for selfhood a lighter one. The split-second shifts in emotion and plot can be disarming, but rather than trying to hide this Hollywoodesque unreality, Gurantz capitalizes on it. The production gestures toward its fantastical nature, the actors take pleasure in it, and as a result, the audience has no choice but to be captivated by this "classy young butch on the make."

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