It became the third longest running show in Broadway history up to that point.īut that all came to a screeching halt on the night of February 9, 1927. For 10 months, West and her troupe of actors took the stage each night to perform the feminist drama in front of an audience that is believed to have numbered as high as 325,000 over the course of more than 370 performances. Several months after its opening night, Sex had undergone a review from the city’s play jury and had been given a clean pass to let the show go on. The people who didn’t initially object to the play? The city authorities. The New York Times explained in 1928 that “It became the fad in not a few quarters to see ‘Sex’ two or three times, and some of our best people were caught entering or leaving Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theatre.” “People thought it vulgar, ridiculous, or funny, or a perfectly terrible play, laughed-and sent their friends to see the show,” Winslow wrote.

“In the play, every woman is reduced down, as though all they offer is sex-that’s why it’s called Sex.”īy all accounts, the show was a sensation, though most reviews seemed scandalized by its content and most proper theatergoers claimed to be returning for repeat viewings out of an outraged curiosity. “The play is about how she can claim power within the confines of being a woman and a sex worker in the 1920s,” Ashley Jacobson, co-founder and artistic director of The Dirty Blondes, told The Guardian in 2016, when her theater group staged a live reading of the show. In the show, West played a sex worker who was trying to choose between two men: a young guy she kept in the dark about her real identity or an older man who accepted her for who and what she was. Sex may have been provocatively titled, but, by today’s standards, the show was quite tame, though the underlying social issues it addressed still have resonance. When she couldn’t find any scripts with parts that she thought were up to snuff, she decided to write her own. Nearly a century ago, when women had even less of a say in the entertainment business than they shamefully still do today, West instinctively knew the wisdom of this career move. There is a common refrain that can be heard in the conversations about representation in Hollywood today: if you want good material or good parts as a woman, as someone from an underrepresented background, as an actress of a certain age, you have to write it yourself. West wanted to be a well-regarded actress. (“She included weight-lifting in her act and she says she can still carry four men on her shoulders,” Thyra Samter Winslow wrote in the New Yorker in 1928.) But she dreamed of more.

West was a born entertainer and demanded her spotlight on the vaudeville stage from an early age. “It became the fad in not a few quarters to see ‘Sex’ two or three times”

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