The Twentieth Century Way, presented by The Theatre @ Boston Court, opens May 8; plays Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through June 6. Tickets: $32. Boston Court Performing Arts Center Main Stage, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; 626.683.6883 or bostoncourt.org.
In 1914, W. H. Warren and B. C. Brown offered their “acting” services to the Long Beach Police Department. They would hang out inside the public bathrooms at the beach and entrap men who agreed to have sex. This “social vagrancy” forms Tom Jacobson’s play The Twentieth Century Way as it looks at this month-long moment in history.
Tom Jacobson
“This is the first instance of entrapment I had ever read of and it was two actors doing it. It seemed rife with metaphor.” Jacobson explains the metaphor. “Since they’re actors, we explore whether they were acting when they pretended to be homosexuals in the restrooms or when they were the policemen who entrapped the other men. Was their job an act? Or were they?”
Oh, theatre, where art thou virtue?
Jacobson’s interest in the subject was ignited when he read the book Gay LA. “It’s much like Gay New York,” he says. “It has a history of gay and lesbian people from a couple of centuries ago; really, dating back to Native Americans and spanning the centuries until just a few years ago. I’ve lived in LA for 25 years so that’s my history, too.” This story, he says, jumped at him.
“It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to sign up to entrap others like this,” Jacobson says. “That’s also something to explore. I’ve given them the motivation that the film industry was just starting. These guys were basically broke and this was a way to get some money. They invented this idea of entrapment and took it first to the LA Police Department which passed on it. But then Long Beach jumped at the chance.”
“And by doing so,” says Boston Court Co-Artistic Director Michael Michetti, “they created the model for entrapment of gay men which continued in southern California for most of the 20th century. Tom has told this story wrapped in a kind of framing device in which two men are playing out a dangerous game of competition, a thriller in which sexuality is a greater threat than violence.”
The two men made a believable pair, says Jacobson: one rather pretty; the other, more masculine and rugged. “They sold themselves to the cops as a viable team in that they would appeal to both kinds of gays. They targeted what were known as the wolves or jockers — men who were primarily straight but occasionally would seek sex from other men.
“Altogether, the pair nabbed 31 guys,” Jacobson points out. The crime was committed, he understands, when a stranger would expose an erect penis and offer it to the “actor” but it wasn’t quite the success the city had imagined. “It generated very negative press for Long Beach. It wasn’t so much a celebration of this purge of vice; rather, it pointed out how much vice was lurking there.”
The pair offered their services to other cities throughout California, even as far away as Portland, Oregon. “But no one else took them up on it,” says Jacobson, noting no other city figured it needed that kind of publicity.
That’s not to say cities were not taking notice of homosexual behavior. Jacobson found there had been quite a lot of attention paid to it in New York and Los Angeles. “In fact, The Sacramento Bee sent an investigative reporter to southern California prior to these two actors’ pursuits. A reporter named Eugene Fisher came down to dig up dirt on these sins, this vice. In Sacramento, they’d already found lots of ways to arrest gay people.”
The McClatchy-owned newspaper, Jacobson claims, spent “a lot of time digging up an incredible amount of documents. They were obsessed. The paper regularly reported on gay activity, particularly when there was a gathering near the river where boxers went to have sex with each other. McClatchy gave this all kinds of very strange attention.”
So, in this sense, the story that erupted in Long Beach was almost media prompted. “There was great interest. This was all new.”
The word homosexual first appeared in print in the latter half of the 19th Century. Sure, gay sex dates back millennia but only recently did gay oral sex take hold. “Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people weren’t very clean,” notes Jacobson. “It wasn’t until the advent of the bathhouses that we, as a society, were set up to clean the ‘unwashed masses’ that moved here. Once people were cleaner, oral sex became more palatable.” And that, says Jacobson, became known as the 20th Century Way, lest you think it referred to entrapment.
Will Bradley and Robert Mammana
Homosexuals were seen in a new light around the turn of the century. “It had been considered a vice that anyone could fall prey to. It was a sin,” Jacobson notes. “But people were just coming to hear about the notion that someone could have a gay orientation for reasons other than choice — for many, this was something they had never heard of.” And, he found, this story prompted the first use of the word “homosexual” in a newspaper.
The play includes a letter to the editor of The Los Angeles Times from a woman who lived in South Pasadena. She responded to the story in Long Beach by leading others to believe her husband had to explain it to her. Jacobson says the woman “never imagined a thing like this could happen.” He says the letter was so effusive of the reportage that, “I wonder if The Times didn’t send itself the letter. It came across as naïve and stupid.”
He says her language was very formal, almost high-falutin’. “She wrote with long sentences yet was clearly coming from a place of ridiculous naïvete.”
If the audience walks in naïve, it likely will leave less so. “There is some nudity,” Jacobson explains. “But that’s metaphoric as well. It’s about stripping away the layers of acting to get to the core. One of the characters is trying to get the other guy to reveal his true self during the play. The other is more about adding layers on himself to cover up even more.”
Director Michetti adds, “Because sexuality is such a dominant theme in the play, Tom doesn’t shy away from it in the writing and we don’t in the production either. But the play requires an increasing danger and tension surrounding the sexuality so we’ve been careful not to give away too much too early. There is a scene, for instance, midway in the play set in a public bathing house that is written quite explicitly but in the production you see virtually nothing — it’s all implied.”
“It was a remarkable time in history,” says Jacobson. He points to the turn-of-the-century drag culture in New York and Los Angeles. “There were drag balls or costume parties, for example. There’s a scene, in fact, in which one of the characters infiltrates such a party, where people wore kimonos, wigs, makeup and slippers. That’s all described in the research.”
A masquerade of masquerades.
Actors Will Bradley (Camelot at Pasadena Playhouse) and Robert Mammana (Broadway and national tours of Les Miserables) play between eight and 10 roles each in the world premiere of this 90 minute production. Jacobson has had more than 60 productions of his plays in Los Angeles and around the country including Sperm at Circle X Theatre Company, The Orange Grove at Playwrights’ Arena, and the award-winning Bunbury, Tainted Blood and Ouroboros at The Road Theatre Company, the latter two directed by Michetti.
Some of the themes in The Twentieth Century Way are more political, notes Michetti. “There are resonances to Prop 8 and other gay civil rights issues; others are more personal, including universal questions about identity and repercussions from the actions we take in life.”
Feature image of Mammana and Bradley and story image by Ed Krieger
