Hot Dame!

Listen up, possums. The Australian icon of snobbery is on the way to skewer your pitiful little lives - and make you roar with laughter.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 1, 2001

[AP Photo] “I’m researching Clearwater and Tampa and St. Petersburg very closely,” says Dame Edna, photographed recently in Palm Beach. “I’ve never been to Florida before, but now I’m thinking of investing in property here. I’m going to have a look at the Clearwater area. Palm Beach is a bit too expensive even for me.”

PALM BEACH -- What makes Dame Edna Everage so funny?

That can be a tough question to answer, because her show does not seem to consist of the most promising material.

An Australian housewife turned self-styled celebrity, wearing a lacquered mauve wig, jewel-encrusted harlequin glasses and sequined frock, makes her entrance in a cloud of stage fog. The pianist lays down a cheesy riff.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you," the Dame, accompanied by a pair of leggy Ednaettes, screeches in a patter song that alternates between drollery and psychobabble.

Slinging one of her trademark gladiolas, she then proceeds, for the most part, to ad lib madly for the next two hours.

Mainly, Dame Edna mocks the audience. "I can see you all read the fine print on your tickets: 'Dress boringly,' " she said on opening night last week at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach.

When a ticketholder, arriving after the show has begun, searches for a seat in the darkness, Edna has the house lights turned up. "Oh, look, a little latecomer creeping in. We've just been filling in until you arrived, dear."

She picks people out of the crowd and interrogates them about things like the interior decoration of their houses, the finer details of which they invariably can't remember.

She orders Italian takeout for a couple in the front row. She calls somebody's babysitter from a phone onstage. She makes inane, patently insincere remarks.

"It's such a mixed crowd tonight -- such a demographically mixed crowd," Edna said of the well-heeled, predominantly 60-plus, virtually all-white turnout in Palm Beach.

Political correctness comes in for a pasting from the Dame, who refers to people in the cheap seats as "paupers," warbles a wickedly funny ditty about her gay son, Kenny, and his friends, and has no compunction about bringing up the indignities of old age.

"I'm so glad to see some of our senior citizens are still here," she said after intermission. "Someone must have topped off their medicine."

She passes out gladiolas at the end of the show.

And that's about it. That's pretty much the extent of Edna's act, but it doesn't begin to explain why she routinely has audiences roaring from start to finish. Now in the middle of an eight-month tour after a Tony Award-winning engagement last season on Broadway, Dame Edna: The Royal Tour plays Ruth Eckerd Hall next week.

The alter ego

Dame Edna revels in the Florida experience, with her clam shell frock and water view. “You look at the audience, and there’s quite a few people who look like me sitting out there,” she said after a performance in Palm Beach.

[AP photos] Barry Humphries created Dame Edna in 1955 and has enjoyed international acclaim in recent years. He is married to Lizzie Spender, daughter of English poet Stephen Spender, and they have four children.

Perhaps Barry Humphries knows best what makes Edna so funny. Humphries is the Australian character actor who is listed in the Playbill as the deviser and writer of the show but declines to acknowledge that he is, in fact, the Dame in drag.

This resolute separation of character and actor -- interviews are given by either Edna or Humphries -- is all part of the elaborate conceit that has gone into the creation of the role, which dates back almost half a century.

"Edna was conceived as a character to remind Australians of their bigotry and all the things I found offensive," Humphries told author John Lahr in his 1992 book, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization. "She was a rebuke. She was a silly, bigoted, ignorant, self-satisfied Melbourne housewife."

What began as a sketch in a revue by an Australian touring troupe in 1955 has evolved into an international phenomenon, feted by every possible tastemaker from Robin Leach (fawning over "the distinguished diva from Down Under" on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous) to the queen of England.

"I think people are rather amused by the familiarity of the character, in spite of her extravagant appearance," said Humphries, who turns 67 this month. "They're just entertained by the mind of this person, sharing a view of the world with this Australian lady who thinks she is a star. It's a joke about celebrity as much as anything else."

Though Dame Edna is a man dressed up as a woman, the show is not a drag act, insists Humphries, who is married to Lizzie Spender, daughter of English poet Stephen Spender, and has four children.

"There are very skilled drag performers, but the character being impersonated is usually a well-known diva, very often a homosexual icon like Marlene Dietrich or Judy Garland," he said. "The fact that it is a man playing the character is the joke."

Edna is something else again -- "extraordinarily actual," in Lahr's description -- and you quickly forget that a man is playing a woman.

"It's meant to be a sort of seamless performance," Humphries said. "It's an acted part. The audience is meant to accept the personality of this woman on the stage and not be distracted that an actor is somehow involved. That's what happens with ordinary theater. When you see a very good Hamlet, you're not thinking, 'Oh, he really lives in the East Village.' "

In a strange sort of way, the Dame's interaction with the audience suggests the dynamic of a family. Humphries likens her to certain women in the novels of Henry James or Jane Austen.

"Edna is meant to remind people of a rather stern parent," he said. "She is quite strict with the audience. She insists this is tough love that she's employing, that this is some kind of chastening experience for them. But of course the audiences are half sort of awed by the character and half enjoying the joke of accepting this person on the stage at her own estimation of herself."

The rolling-in-the-aisles reaction to Dame Edna is reminiscent of the effect of the humor of Christopher Guest or Lily Tomlin. Humphries is not familiar with Guest, director and star of Best in Show and other ersatz documentaries, but he did see Tomlin's one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.

"The characters Lily does are funny because they're treated with respect," he said. "They are invested with the dignity and authority of real people, and they're all the funnier for that."

An audience with the Dame

Going to meet Dame Edna after the show, you weave your way through dozens of water-filled tubs of gladiolas that give the backstage area the feel of a florist's warehouse.

"I don't think there's anyplace for me sit here," Edna said, grandly sweeping into a dusty dressing room not much bigger than a broom closet. She summoned a stagehand to clear off a chair in the corner, then settled down for a chat.

Her eyes glinted demonically through the oversized glasses she calls "face furniture." She still had on her "Florida frock," with silver clam shell shapes embroidered on the bodice.

"This was, in a way, the most inhibited audience I've ever played to, because they're rather grand people, very Palm Beach, I suppose," she said. "You look at the audience, and there's quite a few people who look like me sitting out there."

Edna likes to learn a thing or two about the communities she performs in, so she can localize some of the jokes. She was curious about the Tampa Bay area.

"I'm researching Clearwater and Tampa and St. Petersburg very closely," she said. "I've never been to Florida before, but now I'm thinking of investing in property here. I'm going to have a look at the Clearwater area. Palm Beach is a bit too expensive even for me."

She went on to describe her dream. "I'm building this wonderful memorial to my late husband. It's going to be called Prostate World, and it'll be this huge structure, based on the form of the prostate. It'll contain all sorts of things that people in Florida like There'll be pizzerias, bowling alleys, whitewater rafting."

Naturally, the presidential election recount in Florida was on Dame Edna's mind. She was especially interested in the future of Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

"I have heard that she's going to Australia as the U.S. ambassador. . . . It's in the Outback, unfortunately, a crocodile-infested area, but then she should be used to that in Florida, don't you think? She's spent enough time in the political equivalent of Alligator Alley."

One of the most amusing segments of her show involves Edna's quizzing an audience member about her house.

"To get them to describe their environment is funny because many people don't actually remember what their houses look like," she said.

"I'll say, 'Have you got a nice bathroom?' Yes. 'Well, what color tiles?' They can't remember. 'Do the tiles go all the way up the wall?' They can't remember."

The silliness has a serious point. "What it does is remind people -- even rather grand people like you get in Palm Beach -- that there is a kind of a commonwealth of humor."

With a party to go to, Edna rose to leave, but not without a parting thought on her upcoming engagement.

"I do want to see this place called Clearwater. I haven't got a picture of it all in my mind. But I'm starting to research it. And Prostate World will be my gift to the people of Clearwater. And what an appropriately aqueous name Clearwater has for a prostate memorial."

Theater preview

Dame Edna: The Royal Tour is at Ruth Eckerd Hall for eight shows Tuesday through Feb. 11. Tickets: $35-$50. (727) 791-7400.

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