Charley’s Aunt, Candlelight’s Forum Theatre.
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A chestnut worth roasting in any season, Brandon Thomas’s 1892 drag comedy still bends the genders with contagious glee. The farcical plot provides the perfect excuse for female impersonation, here genteelly described as a “pious fraud.” College chums Jack and Charley, both courting young ladies, recruit Lord Fancourt Babberley as their “chaperon”–Charley’s aunt from Brazil (“where the nuts come from”), a role “Babs” must preserve even when he’s courted by two elderly gentlemen and finally exposed by the real aunt. The pleasure comes in watching this amateur thespian discover the power of flirting (as Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie would decades later) as he runs the thrilling risk of being found out. Though Babs seems frustrated to be stuck in a dress, especially when his beloved appears, it unleashes possibilities in him that pants never could.
