David McNally, Andrea House, Ainsley Hillyard, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Go West, Youg Man. Guys in Disguise, photo by Ian Jackson, EPIC Photography.

Go West, Young Man (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The sheer fabulosity of drag queens can dazzle you into assuming that they aren’t born and “emerge,” but somehow spring to life fully formed, be-gowned and sparkling. And you’d be so wrong.

This funny, spirited new play by Darrin Hagen gets its bounce from that. And it springs lightly from a true story. (Hagen’s own drag queen roots, wrapped around Edmonton’s cultural history, are tapped in his seminal 30-year-old debut stage memoir The Edmonton Queen, running across town at the Roxy).

In 1963, a bespectacled teenage nerd, who’s taken the Greyhound from Port Perry, Ont. to Hollywood, arrives at the door of aging diva Mae West. And he’s ready for lessons in enchantment. Go West, Young Man is the origin story, the let-there-be-limelight Genesis, of Canadian drag legend Craig Russell, originally Russell Eadie. And as the opening scenes reveal, what’s already striking about him, in addition to the height to which his pants are hitched, is chutzpah, on behalf of single-minded ambition.

This new play pairs Hagen’s own gift for sassy one-liners much on display in the Guys In Disguise archive, with the 20th century queen of the aphorism. The Mae West catalogue of quotes is crammed with playful zingers about men, sex, diamonds, life.… “Men are like linoleum. Lay ‘em right And you can walk all over them for years.” And they suit the Hagen esprit de corps to a T, a pick-me-up like gin goes for vermouth, with an olive like “all discarded lovers should be given a second chance. But with somebody else.”

Russell, who has arrived in Tinseltown with a suitcase full of Canadian fan mail, is secretly taking notes, picking up pointers for his own stage career to come. And a wealth are available in Andrea House’s gloriously funny portrait of Mae. That signature come-hither wink, the knowing glance that makes everything double-entendre gold, that breezy nasal snarl, the classic chin-up diagonals, prow-forward, as she sails regally into a room … all there. And the way she says Canada, as an experiment in foreign pronunciation, will make you laugh out loud.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, a top-flight drag artist himself, plays wide-eyed 15-year-old teenage hick in a comic performance that takes into account both the fangirl-ism and the calculation. And the script makes room for thoughts about this wiliness: is it a betrayal of Mae West’s unexpected hospitality? is it an homage to magical transformations? And the play acknowledges the paradox of the genuine fake that’s built into drag, and wonders about it, a little. But then, like any drag artist, Mae West is a showbiz self-creation, too.

The household includes a monkey, played with inter-species worldliness knowledge by the agile and inventive actor/choreographer Ainsley Hillyard. And in a very funny comic turn, Mae West’s ridiculously muscled bodybuilder boyfriend is played by the sporting David McNally in succession of towels

The ending (actually there are several — what? Craig Russell is already doing an exit tour decades in advance? ) as Russell gets the boot and a benediction, is a bit over-extended and repetitive. Especially since we’ve always known the ending, in advance.

But it’s fun to see a sneak preview of the stellar career to come, back across the border. An homage in itself.