Sex

   One of the most scandalous stage works to reach Broadway in the 1920s, Sex was a vehicle Mae West wrote for herself under the pseudonym Jane Mast. Its initial production on 26 April 1926 at Daly's Theatre resulted in an impressive 375-performance run, due in large part to publicity surrounding West's arrest for indecency and a citywide poster campaign exploiting the play's title after newspapers refused to run advertisements. West played Margie La Mont, whose crooked boyfriend drugs a rich woman who accuses Margie of robbing her, despite Margie's attempt to prevent the theft. Angered, and resenting the inherent snobbery of this upper-class woman, street-smart Margie seduces the woman's son for revenge. Critics unanimously condemned the play, but audiences flocked to see it.

   Although American theatre was prone to romanticized plays prior to 1930, frank discussion or exploitation of sexuality was taboo except in musical comedies, where scantily clad chorines were an accepted fixture. West set out to break long-held taboos through humorous and melodramatic depictions of sexuality, always with herself as the central temptress who is usually good-hearted despite an unconventional lifestyle and questionable morality. West's 1927 play, The Drag, may have been the first American play to depict homosexuality in its drag ball scene, but that play failed to open in New York, in part due to the ensuing scandal, as well as that which Sex had created the previous year. Despite the failure of The Drag, West continued to please audiences with subsequent plays, particularly Diamond Lil (1928), and in a series of popular motion pictures in the 1930s.

   See also censorship.