At the root of ‘Dirty Blonde’

James Lapine and Claudia Shear are sitting in a corner of a swank Beverly Hills hotel bar, putatively to be interviewed about how they put together “Dirty Blonde,” one of the most glowingly reviewed and widely produced American plays of recent years.

The show is finally getting its L.A. area premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse, starting tonight. Shear wrote it, and she’s here to perform the dual roles she has played off and on over the last four years. She is Mae West from ages 18 to beyond 80 -- armored in ego and sexual indomitability, throwing off pheromones with every stylized sashaying step, but in the end a self-caricature. Skipping into the present, Shear becomes Jo, an obsessive Mae West fan, a tart-tongued, heavy-set, seldom-employed actress who worships her idol’s toughness and humor and tries to appropriate some of that Westian grit to get through difficulties of her own.

Lapine, a playwright himself -- he’s best known as Stephen Sondheim’s librettist for “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods” -- is “Dirty Blonde’s” director and godfather. More than six years ago he had the idea of a play about Mae West and handpicked Shear to write it and bring it to life. He had seen “Blown Sideways Through Life,” Shear’s 1993 one-woman show, an autobiographical screed against the callous bosses and pampered, inconsiderate snobs who mistreat people stuck in the menial kinds of service jobs that were her lot for years. Lapine made a mental note that this was someone he might want to work with someday.

They seem, on the surface, not to have much in common. Lapine, 55, is low-key and self-effacing, with a nip of dry humor on the side. Shear, in her early 40s, is a presence, an effusive monologist whose stories stream ahead like linguini from a pasta grinder, flavored with a sauce of minutely remembered detail and dialogue. But now they not only finish each other’s sentences but interject subordinate clauses. They take the interview where they will, turning considerable stretches of it into their own Q&A; for two because they enjoy playing back the details of a working relationship that’s clearly become a friendship.

Shear’s total recall extends to what she had on the stove when Lapine phoned out of the blue in 1997. “I was making pasta e ceci. With chickpeas. Delicious. Fresh parsley. You said, ‘Would you like to work on a project?’ I said, ‘I would be the dirt for you.’ ”

“You’d be the what?” Lapine asks.

“The dirt for you. Like the bottom of the stage.”

An article on Mae West in the New Yorker had sparked Lapine’s interest. “We live in an era of reinvention, Madonna and everybody desperately trying to change their persona. And she was the opposite.”

Shear immersed herself enthusiastically in research at film archives on both coasts, and watched West’s movies incessantly.

“I would hand James reams and reams of facts that to me were the most interesting things in the world, and James would go, ‘I don’t care.’ And he would pick out the one pertinent thing that would actually mean something to an audience.”

At first, Shear wrote what she calls “a biopic.” One night, in Lapine’s Manhattan apartment, she burst into tears when he told her it wasn’t working. Anybody could write what she had done, Lapine said. She should try writing in the first person, to get her own distinctive voice into it. Shear was dismayed. “Blown Sideways” was a monologue, and she didn’t want to be typecast. No, Lapine said. First person is just a storytelling tool; you can use it for invented characters too.

And so she invented more than a dozen, to be played by just three actors. Jo and Charlie are the main ones, two isolated, pudgy New Yorkers brought together by their mutual adoration of Mae West. Shear realized she needed to fashion a romance between them -- not just for plot reasons, but because she was hurting after a depressing breakup and needed to tell herself a hopeful love story. She was glad to have Mae West to lean on. “I was obsessed with her because I had been heartbroken, and here was a person who, to hear her tell it, had certainly never been heartbroken. Who had such sexual confidence, swagger and self-love.”

Left to her own devices, Shear says, she might have put West on a pedestal: “I would have made the entire play about the Godness of Maeness.” Lapine was under no spell and made sure that the play, which includes musical numbers backed by an old-time player piano, sounded some cautionary minor chords about the cost of encasing oneself in an impregnable and unchanging persona.

“Dirty Blonde” has played all over the country with other actresses as Mae West and Jo, including Kathy Najimy in the Old Globe Theatre’s production last year in San Diego. Shear says she has been “cherry-picking” her own spots since the show ran for more than a year on and off Broadway in 2000-01.

L.A. was a cherry Shear and Lapine would have picked sooner. But they turned down a feeler from the Mark Taper Forum, Lapine says, because its thrust stage would have forced a redesign of the show. “Dirty Blonde” takes place in a distinctive pink box of a set that makes it seem like a play in a dollhouse. A good chunk of the show is set in L.A., at the Ravenswood Apartments in Hancock Park, where West lived for decades after emerging as the highest-paid film star of the 1930s. The Pasadena engagement offers opportunities “show-bizzy” as well as sentimental, Shear says -- she and Lapine hope to interest producers in a film adaptation of “Dirty Blonde.”

Shear noticed something during recent previews -- her first performances of “Dirty Blonde” since the summer of 2002, when she did the show in Leeds, England. Some of the emotional memories she was used to pouring into one angry speech weren’t working for her, because the heartbreak was over and she was in love again. She had to think of something else to muster the required ire.

She’ll play a real-life wedding scene on May 1 in Scotland when she exchanges vows with Harry More Gordon, a British manufacturer. Their first date was an after-show dinner the night she opened in Leeds. Now she’s obsessing over plans for a wedding party for 250, and an Italian honeymoon.

“We’re hoping against hope that Mr. Lapine will come and dance the obligatory Scottish reels,” Shear says.

Lapine says it’s fitting that his collaborator, an Italian American raised in Flatbush, is marrying into an old-line family of the English upper crust. “We’ve been calling her Dame Claudia all along. Now she’ll actually be Dame Claudia.”

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‘Dirty Blonde’

Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: April 4

Price: $34.50-$49.50

Contact: (626) 356-7529