Threads of complementary and fascinating histories are interwoven in The Nance, Douglas Carter Beane's play about show business, politics, sexual taboos, and moral grandstanding. The setting is New York of the late 1930s, as Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's missionary zeal against corruption, patronage, crime, and Tammany Hall found room to include burlesque in his crusades. For a performer like Chauncey Miles, it was a double whammy. Not only is the theater where he performs threatened with closure, but also his carefully honed comic character has become a lawbreaker. And since that character is essentially an extension of himself, it's as if his whole life has been declared null and void.
New Conservatory Theatre Center is presenting the regional premiere of the 2013 Broadway play, an ambitious undertaking that director Dennis Lickteig and his cast serve up with impressive results. It's ambitious on several levels, first for combining backstage comedy and pathos with burlesque-show replications. And then there's the matter of filling the title role, written specifically for and played by the prodigiously talented and particularly apt Nathan Lane on Broadway.
In burlesque parlance, the nance was a stock character, a professional pansy, who lisps double entendres in bawdy sketches before leaving the limp wrist at the stage door to return to, in most cases, a heterosexual life. But Chauncey happens to be as gay as the character he plays, an irony he recognizes: "Kind of like a Negro doing blackface." While Chauncey's character merrily prances on stage, offstage he morosely prowls familiar cruising grounds in search of gay sex from men who proclaim to be straight. It's a life of self-loathing only occasionally enlivened by his cynical wit and acceptance within his theatrical family.
If Nathan Lane seemed destined to play Chauncey Miles on Broadway, in San Francisco, that destiny most reasonably falls to P.A. Cooley, whose performances have been compared to Lane's in the past. But far from being a default local stand-in for Nathan Lane, Cooley breathes his own life into the character as he draws us into Chauncey's complicated world, in which he may be a sad clown but he is definitely not a pushover. If he's going to be miserable, it's on his own proud terms.
Cooley is in good company at NCTC, where Shay Oglesby-Smith, Courtney Hatcher, and Mia Romero bring warmth to the roles of the strippers at the Irving Place Theatre, an actual venue that was part of a sweep in 1937 that closed 11 burlesque theaters overnight. Brian Herndon plays the theater's quasi-homophobic manager with welcome nuance, and Nathanael Card has a guileless charm as the broke bumpkin whom Chauncey thinks he seduces, only to find that Ned isn't the type of trade he needs to feed a heart looking to be broken.
The play can fall into some uneasy tangents that don't always line up with the principal story �" including Chauncey's truthful but unlikely courtroom manifesto on sexual hypocrisy �" but director Lickteig keeps the action flowing and energized even as scenes are constantly shifting among locales and onstage and offstage realities. Kuo Hao Lo's set, Jorge R. Hernandez's costumes, Christian V. Mejia's lighting, and Scrumbly Koldewyn's pre-recorded musical accompaniment help draw us into a bygone world of burlesque that, through the lens of The Nance at least, seemed like harmless local color not needing to be destroyed.
I kept thinking about New York's 42nd Street of the 1980s that even my randy young self grew fearful to traverse. Now it's all blandly safe, but I have a nostalgia for the kind of cultural grit that seems to be falling away in ever-growing haste in so many places. If brazen greed rather than pious crusading now fuels it, the results are very much the same. The value of the tradeoff can only be tallied decades from now.
The Nance will run through Nov. 1 at New Conservatory Theatre Center. Tickets are $25-$45. Call (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.