She Done Her Right

There are many ways to get over a man. But for Claudia Shear the prescription for a disastrous end to a perfect love affair was to write and star in a play about Hollywood legend Mae West, who summed her attitude toward love this way: “Don’t cry for a man who’s left you--the next one may fall for your smile.”

“I was absolutely devastated, and the fact that Mae had this persona of never having been devastated, of no one ever having broken up with her, that was very powerful and attractive for me,” Shear says. “Just having to take her on, to play her, was empowering. You couldn’t schlump out, act heartbroken, saying, ‘I hate myself, I’m ugly’ and pull off Mae West.’ ”

Shear’s therapy resulted in “Dirty Blonde,” a new comedy that has been nominated for five Tony Awards, including two for her--one for best play as author and one for her leading performance. The Tony winners will be announced next Sunday.

Shear’s acclaim comes after a triumphant off-Broadway showcase in January at the New York Theatre Workshop, the 189-seat theater where “Rent” started. Earlier this month, the show reopened on Broadway at the Helen Hayes, and the critics’ reviews were even more glowing this time. “Stand up, boys, and take your hats off. Mae West is back on Broadway,” raved Ben Brantley in the New York Times, referring to the fact that the iconic star of such 1930s classic movies as “She Done Him Wrong” and “I’m No Angel” had, in fact, first bowled over the Great White Way. “West is proving she still has the power to shake things up. She has also, not incidentally, provided the inspiration for what is hands down the best new American play of the season.”

Shaking things up, of course, is becoming something of a Shear specialty. The 38-year-old actress-writer blew onto the national stage five years ago in her one-woman off-Broadway hit “Blown Sideways Through Life,” a sardonic journey through the 64 jobs the actress either quit or was fired from, including answering phones in a massage parlor, waiting tables and mopping bathrooms. The piece, which also played the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, was a humanist celebration of the common laborer and his or her dreams and aspirations. Or, as the feisty Shear says, “nobody is just a typist, just a dishwasher, just a cook, just a porter. . . .”

Shear’s on similar populist ground with “Dirty Blonde.” Not with West, of course, who is always presented as uber-Hollywood royalty, but through the two other characters in the play. There’s zaftig Jo, an unsuccessful actress (also played by Shear), and schlumpy Charlie, a cross-dressing librarian--two misfits who meet at West’s Brooklyn grave and, through their shared obsession, grow into an unlikely romance.

“Dirty Blonde” time-travels three periods: the early part of the century as West, then in vaudeville, perfects the sexy siren that will enter legend; the 1980s, which sees West calcify into a grotesque version of her youth for “Sextette,” her 12th and final film; and present day, in which the myth of West works its magic on Jo and Charlie in a way not dissimilar to the effect it had on Shear. Both are attracted to Mae because she is a “tough girl,” the kind of girl you don’t bring home to mother. A “tough girl” doesn’t care because, as Jo says in the show, “she doesn’t want you to bring her home to mother, she doesn’t want to meet your mother.”

“Jo and Charlie are attracted to Mae because she has the power of somebody who has the temerity to believe in themselves,” Shear says. “That’s why famous people are so attractive, not because they’re famous, but because they have that temerity.”

A broken heart (and a private life she guards fiercely) notwithstanding, Shear appears to have some of that same belief as she lounges on a couch in her dressing room, dressed in flowing thrift-shop black and bargain open-toed pumps, her Botticelli locks framing her face against a backdrop of congratulatory floral bouquets.

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Like West, Shear was born in Brooklyn (where she still lives in a fourth-floor walk-up.) Her intellectual references to Jean-Paul Sartre, Dante and Shakespearean scholar Jan Kott stand in contrast to the rapid-fire working-class cadence of her speech (her father was a fireman, her mother a cosmetics firm executive).

The brainy chatter also stands in contrast to the anti-intellectualism of West, who gleefully fractured her syntax. “It was not so much being anti-intellectual for Mae than not being a phony,” Shear says. “You didn’t pretend to be what you weren’t. She could be quite a bit of a grande dame and a tough girl.”

“Tough Girl” was the working title of “Dirty Blonde” for many years, and Shear does not dispute that toughness and drive are two of the characteristics she shares with her subject.

It’s not entirely coincidental that “Dirty Blonde” is, perhaps, the first time a woman has successfully written a Broadway play (not a one-person show) as a starring vehicle for herself since West did it in the 1920s with “Diamond Lil.”

She also shares an impulse to rise to the defense of anyone who doesn’t appear to fit in to the mainstream, as West did when she hung out with gay men, blacks and hoodlums. When Shear was asked in a recent interview with USA Today about Elizabeth Hurley’s remark that “I’d kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe,” Shear had a venomous reply: “Most of us would kill ourselves if we were as talent-free as Elizabeth Hurley.”

Shear refused to talk about the quote, which was widely seized upon and repeated in the press, because she didn’t want it to be construed as picking a fight with Hurley. But she did say that the media-saturated idealization of perfect models unhealthily leads less-than-perfect women into “a greater spiral of self-loathing and comparison.”

West’s self-respect for herself and her short, fleshy body is by contrast an emancipation proclamation from the straitjacket of such thinking. “It’s a really tremendous political statement,” Shear says. “Though self-help was never Mae’s point--everything was always about her--that courage to be herself was inspiring.”

“Both Mae West and Claudia are originals,” says James Lapine, director of “Dirty Blonde,” who closely guided Shear through the four years of the play’s development. “Both are smart and brassy and brave and very savvy in their own way; they’re not what you would classify in terms of the norm.”

Shear’s outsider status that she celebrated in “Blown Sideways” was what made Lapine think of the actress when an agent approached him about doing a show about West. He felt that, as an actress and writer, Shear could capture the essence of West and not just mimic her.

He also conveyed to her one central image with which he wanted to end the play: a couple--a man and a woman, both dressed as Mae West--kissing. That the drag West would eventually evolve into one expressed by a cross-dressing heterosexual male was a “weirdness” that Lapine said he wanted in the work and that Shear was open and brave to the challenge of making it work theatrically. “She’s very straightforward about what she wants, but she’s also willing to experiment and explore.”

Shear was receptive when she received the call. Since “Blown Sideways,” which had been made into an American Playhouse special, she had been a guest star on such TV sitcoms as “Friends,” had a development deal with DreamWorks that had gone nowhere, and had written a screenplay for Meg Ryan that was passed on. Shear says she was ready for a new challenge.

“The moment James said the name Mae West, a faint, cold thrill went through me. There was a frisson, a connection, a click, and I thought, ‘Why had I never thought of that?’ ” she recalls.

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Shear already had a background in vaudeville, stemming from her own obsessions with the Marx Brothers and, particularly, Buster Keaton. She was also familiar with almost the entire library of the silent films of Harry Langdon, the baby-faced melancholy American clown of the 1920s who never made the jump to talkies. Echoing a line from “Dirty Blonde”--”obsession grants one the patience to really fine-tune the details”--Shear says she spent weeks researching, watching old movies, going to the library, wearing light gloves to protect the archival material. “Obsession’s a fine kind of madness,” she says.

The character of Mae West came easily; more problematical was creating the character of Jo, the ordinary, overweight New York actress who doesn’t have much going on in her life--she scares men away and is something of a drama queen. Because, like Charlie, Jo talks directly to the audience, Shear says she worried that audiences would think that the character was just another spin on her own life, as in “Blown Sideways.”

“They think because it’s first-person, I can’t write, I can’t act, it’s just me,” she says. Shear makes a point of distancing herself from the character: “I made her up. She’s not me.”

But while Lapine says that “Claudia is much more together than Jo, she’s already arrived at where Jo is searching to be,” Shear’s two co-stars, who’ve also been nominated for Tonys, see similarities. Kevin Chamberlin, who plays Charlie, says Shear’s enthusiasm, her passionate likes and dislikes and her over-dramatizing are consonant with Jo. Bob Stillman, who plays various characters in Mae’s life, from her first and only husband, Frank Wallace, to Edward Elsner, a foppish director who helps shape the West persona, says that Shear shares Jo’s willingness to mock herself--something West would never do.

“One of the reasons audiences love Claudia so much is because she trots out the negative things about herself. There’s a self-awareness that’s very much in contrast to Mae West’s self-absorption,” Stillman says. “Claudia’s very honest in that way.”

That, Shear says, is just a way to reach a diverse audience. “People simply respond to the flawed, the imperfect, standing up, raising the flag and yelling “Excelsior!’ ” she says. “Look at ‘The Full Monty.’ Almost everybody feels they’re not perfect. They can relate.”

Indeed, “Dirty Blonde” is most effective in intercutting scenes between the perfectionism of the West-ian cosmos--in which sex has no consequences, one always wins, and love is a commodity--and the clumsy world of Jo and Charlie. Yet, as the all-too-human couple move toward connection and intimacy, the image of the calcified West, now in her 80s and living in a dream world in her Hollywood apartment, is revealed as ludicrous and false. The play quotes from a scathing review of “Sextette” in the New York Times that Mae was “like a plump sheep that’s been stood on its hind legs and smeared with pink plaster.” But Shear is adamant that the play does not mean to judge West’s choices. “I wouldn’t presume to judge her, to analyze her,” she says fiercely.

In fact, says Shear, one of the points of the play is to be nonjudgmental about human behavior. Of all the responses she has received from the play, one of her favorites came from a woman who was part of two middle-aged couples who’d just seen the show. “She said to me, ‘You know, I must tell you, we all were talking about this as we came out of the theater: So, he dresses up in women’s clothing, so what?’ ” recalls Shear. “That was such a sweet thing to say. If I were to strive for anything, not in any preachy or sentimental or perky way, it would be this: not to be too quick to judge. I have a lot of flaws, but being judgmental is not one of them.”