The memory came back recently as Mr. Lane sat in his dressing room discussing the first scene of his new Broadway play, “The Nance,” a project that cuts unusually close to home for its creative team and, with its mix of broad comedy and pathos, promises to be one of the most ambitious works of the theater season. As the play begins, Mr. Lane’s character, a 1930s burlesque performer named Chauncey Miles, is discreetly picking up a man in a Greenwich Village automat by using gay code — language like “I dare say” and gestures like facing away while speaking. It’s the sort of playfulness that Mr. Lane himself became comfortable with only as his self-loathing eased. For him and for the play’s author, Douglas Carter Beane, “The Nance” has not only been a research expedition into the early 20th century, but also a reckoning with their own memories of growing up gay in an era more akin to Chauncey’s than to today’s marriage-minded moment. “At school or at home no one used phrases like gay life, gay culture, gay history — what I heard was, ‘I saw this fag on the street’ or ‘This fag was following me,’” Mr. Lane said. “Understanding what love is about, as a gay person, took me a long time.” “Chauncey has his own struggles with love in the play, and it’s not all that dissimilar from my own,” added Mr. Lane, a two-time Tony Award winner for best actor in the musicals “The Producers” (2001) and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1996). “There were no rules guiding me or Chauncey — no rules about relationships or monogamy or emotional intimacy. And that can make life difficult.” Compounding that difficulty for Chauncey is the burlesque routine that has made him a star: he is the nance, a flamboyantly effeminate stock character that is all swish, wrist flicks, and double entendres. Nances were usually played by heterosexual actors in the ensemble. In Mr. Beane’s play, which is set amid Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s crackdown on burlesque before the 1939 World’s Fair, Chauncey’s nance is a star playing a caricature of his true identity — a source of both pride and self-disgust for the character. “These conflicted feelings were so common with older gay men I met when I moved to New York in the late ’70s — they could be incredibly funny but then turn into a rage easily, after being belittled for so long,” said Mr. Beane, whose previous plays have mostly been contemporary satires like “The Little Dog Laughed,” his last one on Broadway, which received a Tony nomination for best play in 2007. “It was a pent-up anger, I think,” he added. “Gay characters like nances used to be the brightest ones in the burlesque sketch, usually the victor of the sketch — getting the upper hand on everyone else. But in the 1940s the nance character started becoming an object of ridicule, and by the 1960s it was just awful — the nance was usually subjected to offensive jokes and sexually derogatory put-downs that were really ugly.” Growing up in Pennsylvania (Mr. Beane) and New Jersey (Mr. Lane), both were aware that they were attracted to other boys. But they also knew that being tagged as a “nancy boy” (a close cousin of a “nance”) would be humiliating and turn them into permanent targets for bullying, so they largely kept their sexuality to themselves until they began working in the theater. “By the time I was in my 20s — well, I was in my 20s for god’s sakes, but I wasn’t doing anything with these feelings,” said Mr. Lane, now 57. “It was my partner, Devlin, who finally taught me what love is about,” he said, referring to his companion of the last decade, the theatrical producer Devlin Elliott. There was more than a touch of melancholy in Mr. Lane’s voice and a hangdog expression on his face as he talked about his love life before Mr. Elliott. He was in his dressing room, which has been handsomely refurbished to suit his tastes and needs — two purple and white orchids and photos of his French bulldog, Mabel, in addition to a foam roller and plenty of bottled water. “I didn’t try to pick up drunk straight men like Chauncey and his friends often did — more’s the pity, perhaps,” Mr. Lane added, leaning forward on a corner sofa. “But what young gay people today don’t realize is, there were centuries of total confusion about how to express your sexuality.” Mr. Beane, who sat with Mr. Lane for the interview, said: “The nances were heroes, in a way, because they were so hilariously out. And at first many people accepted this performance style — Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion was pretty much a nance in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” released in 1939. Mr. Beane, 53, had been interested in burlesque long before writing “The Nance,” at one point holding a reading of old sketches as a benefit for his theater company, the Drama Department. He had also become smitten with the old Irving Place Theater, a burlesque house that once stood near his Union Square home, where he lives with his fiancé, the composer Lewis Flinn, and their two children. (The theater, demolished in 1984, is where Chauncey works in “The Nance.”) Preparing to fly to Wyoming for a writers’ retreat eight years ago, Mr. Beane looked for a book for the long flight and grabbed “Gay New York” (1994), a deeply researched account of early-20th-century life and culture by George Chauncey, now the chairman of the history department at Yale University. (Mr. Lane’s character is named for him.)
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