Sunday, October 05, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

When Dame Edna is coming to town, the preview writer has a choice: I interview her or Barry Humphries, but not both -- not in the same phone call.

	"A Night With Dame Edna" Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown. When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6:30 p.m. next Sunday. Tickets: $42.50 to $54.50; 412-393-4900.

My preference would have been a phoner with Humphries and then a glamorous in-person lunch with Edna, but the Post-Gazette wasn't about to fly me to London, where Edna was then appearing.

So I opted for a phone chat with Humphries, the man behind the phenom. After all, Pittsburgh is about to get a great deal of Dame Edna, when "A Night with Dame Edna, The Show That Cares" arrives Tuesday for its week at Heinz Hall. Humphries, meanwhile, will be nowhere to be seen.

Which will be fine with Dame Edna, who has often categorically denied that anybody plays her, as if anybody could possibly "play" such a distinctive, effulgent personality. She has even implied that Humphries is a faintly embarrassing hanger-on whom she has to discipline with an occasional lawsuit over mishandling of funds.

Such talk doesn't faze Humphries, who acknowledges that Dame Edna is a role he plays, though he's careful to speak of her in the third person. After all, Dame Edna is so real on stage, how could she not be real, period? Isn't "real" just one of those modern critical terms for vivid, electric and completely herself?

"We're certainly meant to believe in her reality," says Humphries over the phone from London, sounding like just what he is, a skilled Australian character actor of some 69 years with a pretty shrewd idea of what he and Edna are up to. He is insistent that Edna is not drag:

"In drag performance, the brilliance is a tension between Marlene Dietrich and the young man who's shaved very carefully [to play her]. But Edna is Edna, seamless. You're not meant to see the acting."

And Humphries is an actor, not a drag queen. He began in revue comedy in Australia, and he starred in the Australian premiere of "Waiting for Godot." In London, he worked with Joan Littlewood's famous Theatre Workshop and played Fagin and Long John Silver. He and wife Lizzie Spender, daughter of English poet Sir Stephen Spender, have four children.

When we talked, he was packing to return to Australia before heading to the United States. "I've been tearing around the world," he complains. "Everybody else I know has their feet up. I'm still working."

Now, this is mostly due to Dame Edna Everage, who, her surname notwithstanding, is not average at all -- witness her title, Dame, which is, in Great Britain, the female equivalent of Sir for men, as in Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Maggie Smith.

The title is awarded by the queen on the recommendation of the government in power. Why was Edna so honored? "There's a lot of dispute about that," Humphries says. "Edna herself is evasive. The title was actually bestowed on Edna by the [Labour] prime minister of Australia some years ago, but Edna says the queen has since endorsed it."

Nonetheless, the title also refers obliquely to "The Dame" in the English tradition of panto, lavish holiday entertainments in which the mature woman was (and still is) usually played by a man. Humphries agrees: "Edna does belong to that very old-fashioned tradition." Asked about his reported suggestion that Edna is "possibly Jewish," he allows it is probable, but that she also is "probably Catholic," when, for example, she has a largely Italian audience. "She's really all things to all people; there's a bracing skepticism and flamboyance about her."

Humphries started out as an actor in Melbourne. He first wrote Dame Edna in the 1950s as a sketch for Zoe Caldwell, then played it himself. "If Zoe had played it," he told The New York Times in 1999, "she would be doing the ["Dame Edna"] show at the Booth and I'd be doing 'Master Class.'"

Dame Edna was a hit in Australia, so in the 1960s Humphries decided to tackle a bigger theatrical world, which then meant England. At first he had a mixed response, though he had such fans as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. "I generally felt England wasn't my thing." Then he did a film and couple of talk shows in the '70s and became a huge success in the West End, London's Broadway.

So Dame Edna set her sights on New York. In the late '70s, Humphries brought his show to off-Broadway, where he received what he remembers as "abysmal" reviews. "I was reviled by The Times. Richard Eder [then, briefly, the Times theater critic] wouldn't get anything vaudevillian -- nothing like female impersonation, if you call Edna that."

Eventually, though, Humphries gave the United States another try, beginning in San Francisco, which seemed an Edna-friendly place, "because I'd had lots of invitations from there -- if the audience is entirely in black leather, who cares?" A two-week booking extended to four months. From there it was just a transcontinental hop to Broadway and a special Tony Award in 2000.

"I suddenly found I had this new public." That has had a lot to do with TV, which Humphries acknowledges is "the best instrument of publicity." He especially enjoyed Dame Edna's appearances on "Ally McBeal," for which he credits his dresser, Judy. Dame Edna was appearing in Los Angeles and she said "David Kelley's in." "Who's that?" Humphries asked. Properly prepped as to the identity of the creator of "Ally McBeal," he worked it into his stage show, saying: "I'm litigating Barry Humphries, who's been embezzling from me. I'm thinking of hiring Ally McBeal."

Kelley promptly called, "so I gave Judy a bonus." A guest spot turned into a continuing role. "I probably single-handedly brought the series to a close." He enjoyed it especially because so much of his performing career is now spent alone on stage: "I don't see other actors except at funerals and charity benefits. ... 'Ally McBeal' was like being in a sort of rep company. I'd look at the next makeup chair, and there was Calista [Flockhart], then that lovely Jane Krakowski, and Christina Ricci, giving me a funny look."

Humphries took his Broadway show, "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour," on a swing around America, unfortunately missing Pittsburgh. More recently, he's been in Australia, doing 78 performances of a different show, where Dame Edna is confined to Act 2. In this, Humphries opens as himself, "talking about my childhood, showing home movies that anticipate Andy Warhol in their uneventfulness." Next he does an Australian politician, Les Patterson, "a bit like a character in Aristophanes ... lecherous and vulgar. He'd be instantly recognized in Texas." With another quick change he becomes a corporate CEO, defending "huge payouts and scandalous happenings. It's the most satiric piece: I talk to the audience as if they're angry shareholders." Finally, he appears as a ghost, Sandy Stone, "an old man of the suburbs -- an extremely dull, uneventful monologue, wraith-like."

Then, after the intermission, it's "bright lights, singing and dancing and Edna," ending with Edna's traditional barrage of gladioli.

Not to worry, though -- Pittsburgh will get a regular Dame Edna, both acts. In every case, Humphries says, "I give pretty good value. I like to do a show, not just stand-up. I'm really an old-fashioned vaudevillian -- that's the tradition I belong to."

"A Night with Dame Edna" is not purely a solo -- it includes several dancers, one of them Michelle Pampena, a native Pittsburgher. "She's very, very pretty," Humphries says, "and she's toured with me for a very long time. We're all like a little family on the road."

America is still getting to know Dame Edna, and Humphries enjoys having a new world to conquer "late in my career. ... I enjoy the whole variety of your country, not just [a handful of] cities, like Australia." After Pittsburgh he goes on to Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Atlanta. "I get to explore the cities, to find the decent restaurants, the museums."

You may have seen Dame Edna on Jay Leno. It's a gig Humphries likes, because Leno is himself a comedian, "and not a selfish one, not one worried about effacing himself a little." His most recent appearance was Thursday, leading right into his trip to Pittsburgh.

If you want to know more, Dame Edna has been well documented. Humphries has written two autobiographies, "More Please" and "My Life as Me." Dame Edna has her own autobiography, "My Gorgeous Life" (1992), and there is a biographical study by Peter Coleman, "The Real Barry Humphries," and a fine critical work by John Lahr, "Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization."

Humphries praises the Lahr book but jokingly apologizes: "Sometimes he waxes a little analytical." He's also heard, "to my dismay," of a 750-page tome by a Seattle academic.

Dame Edna is a force, no doubt about that.

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