Sleepaway Camp

Die Mommie Die! is Charles Busch’s play (made first into a film) about a has-been 1960s singer with homicidal tendencies. Watching it on one side of me was my partner—ambivalent except when Busch had a particularly tart line or director Carl Andress displayed crafty staging. On the other materialized the ghost of Susan Sontag. (She looks great, by the way). Since she communicates telepathically now, nobody minded when she asked if I’d read her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” I said yes, but I thought it strange to single me out with so many other critics in the theater, equally eager to laugh. “Because you love camp—and no one listens,” she replied, slightly confused, and returned to the play.

Like me, she wanted to revel in the camp spectacle that is Busch. Over 20 years have elapsed since his Vampire Lesbians of Sodom moved from the East Village’s now-defunct Limbo Lounge to a five-year Off-Broadway run at the Provincetown Playhouse and such plays as Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset and Shanghai Moon have only burnished his reputation. A Busch play to me—if he’s in it—is the Lunts in a two-hander, Tandy and Cronyn doing Albee. The plot riffs on cinematic silliness: Angela Arden (Busch) aims to ditch her California manse (great set by Michael Anania) and fly to a New York aerie with her peacock of a lover, Tony Parker (Chris Hoch), to launch her comeback. All she needs is to kill her kvetch of a film producer-husband Sol (Bob Ari) with a poisoned suppository. Angela’s lonesome in La-La Land: daughter Edith (Ashley Morris) is a daddy’s girl to the point of pederasty while son Lance (Van Hansis) likes trying on mommy’s tresses.

Watching the play, Sontag telegraphed that Die Mommie Die! was disappointing her, and not because of Busch. Indeed, during the acid-trip scene, in which Edith makes Angela admit that she killed her twin sister—the real Angela—along with Sol, Sontag stared at me, eyebrows furrowed. Except for Bootsie, the boozy Irish maid (the ever-funny Kristine Nielsen), the supporting cast, seemed bushwhacked by Busch, for whom camping comes naturally. Yes, his Barbara Stanwyck growls and all those hints of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are time-tested tics and tricks—shtick that his fans adore and his detractors find a bore. But Busch is the epitome of camp, and should be treasured as such.

Camp, Sontag wrote, needs “flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation,’ ‘gestures full of duplicity’ and much more. She suggested to me that the production’s lack of it—from Ari, Morris and especially Hansis—was why so much right in the world of Busch was falling so flat.

Maybe Ari, as the harried husband, is right to play it straight: He’s an outsider in Busch’s world, thus well worth whacking. But Morris and Hansis bring mirth only when the play is funny, not their characters; with Busch it’s the other way around. And unlike Busch, whose love for cheesy mid-20th century films and film goddesses fuels his plays and performances, Morris and Hansis haven’t internalized camp into their art and soul. On them, Jessica Jahn’s mod-ish costumes are adornments, visual gags. On Busch, in costumes beautifully designed by Michael Bottari and Ronald Case, they’re satiric sapphires bejeweling a queen.

“Die Mommie Die!—that awful film—I had to give it a chance on stage,” telegraphed Sontag. “Good for you,” I replied, as I saw poor Hansis, who plays a gay teenager on “As the World Turns,” miss yet another comic opportunity. “Maybe no one up there but Busch has ever read my ‘Notes on Camp,’” she mourned. What could I say? We both know it’s true.

Through Feb. 27, 2008. New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-239-6200; $35-$91.50.