May 29, 2009  |   By: Joey DiGuglielmo  |  COMMENTS   |     |   

She’s been dead 40 years.

Most of her notable work was on stage, so there’s no footage of her in her greatest parts.

She never even won a Tony Award, Broadway’s top prize, despite the indelible mark she left on British and American stages (she was only nominated once).

And yet Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) remains peerless among her contemporaries. While her fellow leading ladies of the stage, such as Uta Hagen and Lynn Fontanne, are not widely known in contemporary pop culture, Bankhead’s fame lives on, disproportionately high among gay men. She’s been the subject of three high-profile plays this decade.

Two from 2000 are largely forgotten — Sandra Ryan Heyward’s one-woman show “Tallulah,” which starred Kathleen Turner, and “Tallulah Hallelujah!,” which Tovah Feldshuh co-wrote and starred in.

A third, though, is showing promise. Matthew Lombardo’s “Looped,” opens tonight at Lincoln Theatre on U Street in Washington, and stars TV legend Valerie Harper as the bisexual party gal Bankhead. Though nothing is set in stone, it looks as if the planets are aligning for the play to move next to Broadway. Arena Stage, which is producing the show at Lincoln, is becoming an increasingly fertile pre-Broadway theatrical incubator as last season’s “Next to Normal” and “33 Variations” graduated to the Great White Way after successful Arena productions.

Harper, who played the “Looped” lead in two previous productions (in Pasadena, Calif., and West Palm Beach, Fla., both last year), says the play has grown stronger each time.

“What we’ve got now is a cohesive play,” Harper says during an hour-long chat with the Blade at the Fairmont Hotel in Georgetown last week. “We had a hilarious first act and the second got really interestingly dark, Now there’s some heft, some content.”

Lombardo, who’s gay and also penned “Tea at Five” (a one-woman show that featured Kate Mulgrew as Katharine Hepburn), says he initially wasn’t interested in writing about Tallulah. A 25-minute tape that had been recorded in the mid-1960s unbeknownst to Tallulah while she was in a studio attempting to loop a line for “Fanatic,” her last movie (released in the U.S. as “Die! Die! My Darling!”), had been given to Lombardo. One of Tallulah’s caddies (the cadre of gay men she always had around her) gave a copy to Lombardo through a mutual friend.

Although Hepburn and Bankhead were polar opposites, Lombardo initially didn’t want to write another play about a legendary actress so soon after “Tea.” Tallulah, who drank heavily and joked about her substance abuse, is under the influence of something on the tape. Lombardo says that resonated with his crystal meth addiction, which he was battling when he discovered the tape and has since kicked.

“She makes no apologies for it,” Lombardo says. “But she has become a bit of a joke by this point. She’s very frustrated, she can’t get the line. I just thought, ‘That’s not where I want to end up at 60 years old.’”

But despite its inspirations, “Looped” isn’t a somber cautionary tale. Harper says the dramedy, which gets increasingly poignant in its second act, is also a celebration of Tallulah’s persona.

“There’s something about her that wasn’t tragic, like Judy,” Harper says. “Even though it was tragic, her alcoholism … she abused herself a long time … she had her vices, but she had them, they didn’t have her. Kind of. Of course they had her but she always would drink after the show and have a party all night and then go to bed and get up for the next performance.”

The journey to finding Tallulah, one of the ultimate drag inspirations, was two-fold, Harper says. She did the usual research.

“I’m gonna grab her hair by its dark roots!,” Harper growls in deep-throated Tallulah mode, mimicking one of Bankhead’s lines from a late ’50s guest appearance on “I Love Lucy.”

But keeping the actress human is especially tricky, Harper says, because Tallulah was parodying herself almost as long as she was famous.

“That’s the main challenge of this role, is to not send her up.”

Harper uses her last stage role, as Golda Meir in “Golda’s Balcony,” to explain.

“You look at Valerie, and you say what in Valerie is like Golda, or like Tallulah and what isn’t,” she says. “I’ll give you an example. Golda. I talk with my hands. Golda does not. So that part of Valerie is off limits on that stage. You have no business waving your hands around if you’re Golda Meir. Because I’ve seen her. I’ve seen her too much in action. Films of her. Press conferences. ...