http://www.frontierspubli...rticle=177
Drag-a-licious!
Varla Jean Merman’s new one-woman show is of biblical proportions
BY MARC WATREL PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN YOUNG

The “brassy broad” has been a staple of Broadway and American movies since the 1920s; Joan Blondell, Claire Trevor, Janis Paige, and Dolores Gray are just a few of the legendary women who come to mind. Other than Elaine Stritch and Julie Halston, however, the woman today who best fills those big shoes might just be a man.

Jeffery Roberson, whose brassy, sassy alter ego is Varla Jean Merman, returns to Los Angeles January 19 after a two-year hiatus with his show, Varla Jean Merman’s I’m Not Paying for This!, a rollicking exploration of the seven deadly sins.

“I ask the question, ‘How many sins can you commit without going to hell?’” Roberson explains, very matter-of-factly, about his new show. “Varla Jean examines how the world has become morally bankrupt—and how’s she’s contributed to it.”

Though not eager to reveal much about the new piece, which he also wrote (“Why give away the milk, when they can buy the cow?” he reasons), Roberson provides one glimpse into the insanity that usually reigns when Varla Jean is on stage.

“Instead of singing a song about laziness, I use the theremin, this crazy instrument developed in the 1930s that recreates the human voice through radio waves,” Roberson hints. I’m Not Paying for This! marks Roberson’s fifth production at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center’s Renberg Theatre.

Along with Charles Busch and John Epperson (aka Lypsinka), Roberson and his drag peers came of age after Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York’s Greenwich Village redefined the artform. “This wasn’t the traditional drag they were doing in New Orleans, lip-synching to Whitney Houston songs and collecting dollars,” Roberson says. When a friend told Roberson about a monologue he had heard drag diva Coco Peru do in New York about buying Eva Marton’s recording of Wagner’s Liebestod at Tower Records, he understood the potential for a performing career.

“That was a very smart, very intelligent monologue,” Roberson says. “I realized [performing in drag] could be more than an overweight, Southern Baptist boy getting drunk and looking for acceptance.”

Varla Jean Merman, billed as the illegitimate daughter of Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine, began to take shape while Roberson was attending LSU on a full scholarship for voice.
“I met these Ethel Merman freaks in the music department and they had me read her autobiography,” Roberson recounts. “For the chapter about her marriage to Ernest Borgnine, she had left the page blank. I created Varla Jean to explain that blank page.”


The T&A director Russ Meyer was also another early influence: “I love Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, particularly Tura Satana’s character, Varla.”

What started out as a joke in his dorm room, with costumes culled from a drag box, soon took on a life of its own. “I’d go out to the bars in full drag, get drunk, and do silly things,” he says. “One night I showed up at a bar in New Orleans with a plastic baby in a baby carriage and chained the carriage to a post. I had guys watch the carriage all night. Hell, they even started playing with the baby. Then I started doing these videos with Vid Kid Timo, these endless, John Waters–inspired films with me walking around New Orleans sloppily drinking milk or being chased down the street by a plastic rat on a string.” To fund his burgeoning career, Roberson took a minimum-wage job in advertising after college.

The job might not have provided much money, but Roberson used the time to hone his craft while putting together his portfolio, which ended up opening doors at a prestigious ad agency in New York. He moved to Manhattan in 1994, where he was pleasantly surprised to learn that his videos had been playing in the bars to great acclaim.

“My reputation had preceded me: Varla Jean had already taken Manhattan,” he says.
Since then, Roberson has written and performed in five plays, including Enough About Me: An Unauthorized Autobiography and Varla Jean Merman: Girl With a Pearl Necklace, which he recently performed in Australia at the Sydney Opera House as well as in Perth and Melbourne. He also appeared on ABC’s All My Children as lady-of-the-evening Rosemary Chicken. His film credits include Richard Day’s hilarious drag farce Girls Will Be Girls, for which he shared film awards for best actor and actress. In addition, Roberson understudied the role of Mary Sunshine in Chicago on Broadway and toured with the show.

“I never planned any of this. I’m so lucky to be doing more serious things, getting to travel so much, doing a new show every year,” Roberson says. He recently made his stage debut as a man in Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, playing a one-legged hunchback.
“I think I was more in drag with the hump,” he jokes.

Roberson isn’t afraid to speak his mind on what for him is a marked charge for the worse in the drag community, as well as the larger gay community.

“There were so many of us: [Lady] Bunny, Hedda Lettuce, Flotilla De Barge, Kiki and Herb, when I first came up,” says Roberson. “And we’re all still performing, but there’s not as many out there to take our place. The gay community’s gotten so serious; it’s this hypermasculine thing. The sense of fun about being gay seems to be disappearing.”

He adds wryly: “Let’s face it, gay men don’t want to put on dresses any more. They want to dress like plumbers.”

Varla Jean Merman’s I’m Not Paying for This! opens January 19 at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s Lily Tomlin Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 7:00 p.m. through February 5. For tickets, call 323/860-7300.

but she's a she...right?

gorgeous man or woman


why can drag queens do such awesome makeup?

SammiJ said:

Nope Varla's real name is Jeffrey. He's a pretty man too

Varla aka Jeffrey

WOW...
he's gorgeous as a woman

I LOVE HER!!!!!

The movie GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS is genius and hilarious.

"That's when I discovered my spiritualicity."

That line had me on the floor.

Ann Margaret, eat your heart out.

M
[Edited 1/18/06 21:28pm]