"charles busch in vampire lesbians of sodom"

In the latter years of Hirschfeld’s long professional association with The New York Times, his drawings of individual performers would illustrate their mini-interviews in the Friday Broadway column. My opportunity came when my play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom moved from an art gallery/performance space on the Lower East Side to the Off-Broadway Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street and brought me my first New York Times review. It was a rave and launched this raffish pair of one act plays on a five-year run. The week we opened, the show’s publicist, Sam Rudy, gave me the news that I would be profiled in the Broadway column and drawn by Al Hirschfeld!  I love this drawing. It absolutely evokes who I was as a performer at that early dizzying stage of my career and I’m not alone in thinking it’s one of the most striking of this period of Hirschfeld’s work.  Indeed, it was used as the frontispiece of that year’s volume of The Best Plays of 1985-1986. 

Charles Busch