Iconic Charles Busch Discusses ‘Psycho Beach Party’ and Career
From an early age, Charles Busch was stagestruck, enamored with the idea of performing. He faced one tiny little problem, though.
“I wasn’t every good,” he told Georgia Voice. He had to move to a Plan B, one that came a bit unexpectedly, but has led to a legendary career as both a writer and performer, oftentimes in drag. Out Front Theatre Company closes its 2023–2024 season this month with Busch’s “Psycho Beach Party.”
In the play, Chicklet Forrest, a tomboy and teenager, craves to be a part of the Malibu Beach surf crowd in 1962. One thing stopping her is her split personalities, one of whom is Ann Bowman, who wants to dominate the world. Andi Stanesic stars as Chicklet in the Out Front version, directed by Paul Conroy, the company’s founder and producing artistic director.
Busch has lived in New York all his life, except when he attended Northwestern University and stayed a few years after in Chicago. Before that period, he had been sent to acting classes, but was also writing. Writing, to him, never seemed like something he could do, even though he was cranking out full-length plays at the age of 11. When he got to Northwestern and became a theater major, he was never cast in a play and realized that there might not be a place for him in commercial theater. That’s when writing took center stage.
“The things that made me un-castable — my androgyny, being obviously gay — rather than being a detriment, were my calling card,” he said. “I said to myself, in that case I have to write and create roles for myself that only I could do.”
In his senior year of college, he wrote a one-act play for his roommate and him to do, about a pair of Siamese twin showgirls. The idea was to stage it in the dorms on the weekends for their friends. Yet a colleague who organized a cult movie series at the student union auditorium, often screening films from the likes of John Waters and Andy Warhol, lost the rights to a title one weekend. Busch was asked to produce his play in the student union for the same amount of money that had been allocated for a film rental.
“Suddenly, we were really doing it,” Busch said. “From the moment we came out on stage, I knew this was who I am and this is what I will do.”
His drag started at around the same time. In the early ’70s, Busch was attending downtown New York experimental theater, in particular the work of actor-directorplaywright Charles Ludlam, who would occasionally play some of the female roles in his shows.
“That was very revelatory — to see that this was a possibility,” Busch said. “Maybe I, this androgynous kid, could write roles to use my eccentric talent at invoking actresses from the golden age of Hollywood.”