“Mae West: The First Plays” Might Be Out Today

Mae West passed away on this day in 1980. If she were alive, she would be 143 and couldn’t even pull off Sextette.

Yet on this particular November 22, Westian mourners may have some new/old Mae West product to evaluate. Someone in the Netherlands named either Marquis de Tiarell or Romain Tutak is promising that today is the “Amazon release date” for a book called Mae West: The First Plays.

It wouldn’t be the first such book in existence. Longtime Mae West fans know Lillian Schissel’s 1997 tome Three Plays by Mae West, which contains her controversial Broadway plays Sex, The Drag and The Pleasure Man. My first article for American Theatre was about Sex, which Elyse Singer revived in 1999.

As intimated in this series of videos, this new book will contain more than those three plays, which is exciting news. Whoever owned the rights to these plays has kept a pretty tight reign on them in the past. They may have entered the public domain now. At any rate, you can get the book here. And your pathway to the Mae West section of Travalanche is here.