“Different times, different prohibitions,” says the proprietress of The Well. It’s 1956, and this daughter of a Prohibition-era bootlegger runs a Chicago nightclub catering to lesbians. Vivian is one of the five characters, all women, in Pulp, a musical fashioned after the lesbian pulp novels of the ’50s and ’60s. It will be performed next weekend in a dinner theater setting at the Blue Heron Restaurant in Sunderland.
Director Marissa Elkins says she was attracted to the show because of its witty score, written in the style of 1950s lounge music, and its dialogue, which mimics 1940s noir films as well as the lesbian paperbacks. The script is stocked with lines like this one from Bing, the club’s resident chanteuse: “When I’m onstage, I want something soft and pink against my skin. And when I’m offstage, I want it even more.” And the debt to lesbian pulp fiction is made explicit in the staging, which occasionally replicates poses from the novels’ steamy covers.
Elkins says she also appreciates the play’s more serious undertone. It recalls an era when almost all homosexuals were firmly closeted and lived in fear of exposure. “In those days,” Elkins says, “police would go into bars and arrest women who were wearing button-fly jeans for cross dressing. Women who were considered ‘butch’ for the time—that is, wearing pants—would wear really frilly underwear in case they got arrested. It’s played for laughs to some degree in this show, but the anguish is real—how terrible it was to be closeted like that.”
A verse in one of the songs wryly reflects that constricted time: “I know they say life should be gay/ But every day hope fades away.”
The script also touches on other women’s issues that were swept out of sight in the post-World War II era. One character is a kind of airborne Rosie the Riveter who flew with the WASPs, the Air Force women’s auxiliary, but found few opportunities to continue her passion for flying after it was disbanded at the end of the war.
Pulp, written by Patricia Kane with music by Amy Warren and Andre Pluess, follows the lives and loves of its characters who, at the beginning anyway, are at various point on the “out” spectrum. Terry (Kelsey Flynn) is “a lesbian, pure and simple. I don’t make any bones about it.” Winny (V Haddad) is trying very hard to be straight, but is also the most popular male-drag artist in the club’s floor show. Vivian (Amanda Levereault), for whom the club is purely a business venture, is totally hetero (or is she?). Bing is played by Stephanie Carlson and Rachel Braidman plays Pepper, the club’s bartender, whose idol is the reputedly bisexual movie star Barbara Stanwyck.
The upstairs room at the Blue Heron, where Pulp will be performed, is well suited to stand in for The Well. Its proscenium stage serves as the club’s bandstand, and its banquet seating recalls the nightclubs of the era.
Pulp: June 10-12, dinner seatings Thursday-Saturday plus dessert seatings Friday and Saturday, Blue Heron Restaurant, 12 North Main St., Sunderland, (413) 665-2102, pulp.yolasite.com.
