Charles Busch

Charles Busch is the author and star of such plays as The Divine Sister, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset, The Confession of Lily Dare and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom; one of the longest-running plays in the history of off-Broadway. His play The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife received a Tony nomination for Best Play and is the longest-running Broadway comedy of the past 25 years. He wrote and starred in the film versions of his plays Psycho Beach Party and Die Mommie Die!, the latter of which won him the Best Performance Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Mr. Busch has been honored with a special Drama Desk Award for career achievement as both performer and playwright and received the Flora Roberts Award for Sustained Achievement in the theater by the Dramatist’s Guild. He is the subject of the documentary film The Lady in Question is Charles Busch.

SETTING

Present Day - Spring

Olive’s apartment in Kips Bay, NYC

THERE WILL BE ONE FIFTEEN-MINUTE INTERMISSION.

SPECIAL THANKS

MPOnStage, Terri Bentley, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Erin Leder,

Ellin Leder, Lynn Baskin, Rob Norman, Hans Peters

Jake is just like any other 4-year-old: he loves drawing, playing with his friends, and watching his favorite movies. But unlike his peers, Jake prefers Cinderella to G.I. Joe and dreams of being a princess. When his parents, Alex and Greg, begin the application process for a slew of rigorously competitive private schools, his “gender-variant play” becomes a source of division in their relationship. As Jake’s behavior becomes more erratic and perplexing, Greg and Alex’s marriage begins to fracture in A Kid Like Jake, Daniel Pearle’s “searching, keenly perceptive” (Time Out NY) study of intimacy and parenthood.

High school senior Anthony gets more than he anticipated when he shows up at his classmate’s house, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in hand, to complete an assignment. Sardonic Caroline has been homebound for months with an illness that’s left her tired and lonely, and she's leery of her visitor. As the young pair let their guards down and begin to really see each other, Lauren Gunderson’s I and You taps into the deeper mysteries of youth, love, and human connection in a play offering “the best thing a play can offer: we might be better people after seeing it” (DC Theatre Scene).

At an elite New England college, Professor Laurie Jameson accuses her student, Woodson Bull III, or “Third,” of plagiarism. A jock from a red state, Third is not the typical student for Laurie’s feminist lectures on demasculinizing Western literature. But is Laurie’s feud really with Third, or with the increasingly unstable world she finds herself occupying as she enters her own third act? The last play completed by the late Tony and Pulitzer winner Wendy Wasserstein, Third  asks the audience to “acknowledge their fears, their limitations and the possibility that they might be wrong on subjects they were once sure about” (New York Times)

Note: There are no performances the weekend of Labor Day

Native Gardens is a comedy that follows a young Hispanic couple, lawyer Pablo and pregnant doctoral candidate Tania, who move in next door to Frank and Virginia, two white stalwarts of the DC community. A feud over a property line that will destroy Frank's perfectly manicured garden while restoring Pablo & Tania's legal land ownership spirals into a hilarious war of class and privilege in Karen Zacarias's "biting, perceptive, and ultimately hopeful sendup to our fraught relationships with those around us" (DC Theatre Scene).