“Do you realize we passed on the young James Franco and Ryan Reynolds?”

Charles Busch was as surprised as anyone when director Robert Lee King recently revealed his casting notions for the small-budget 2000 film Psycho Beach Party. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Busch, who wrote the screenplay but had no involvement in selecting the actors. “At the time, I guess Ryan Reynolds was real skinny and just didn’t seem sexy enough. And James Franco was a little too subdued for the character.”

Even without Reynolds and Franco the movie holds its own in the celebrity department. A few years ago Metro Weekly included this clever send-up of mid-20th century Hollywood genres on its list of 13 Camp Films That Everyone Should See, noting that the film helped launch the career of lead protagonist Lauren Ambrose — a year before she became known as Claire, the prickly daughter on HBO’s Six Feet Under. And the film’s resident mean girl who gets her comeuppance? “Who would have thought that the girl who has a rather small role in the movie turned out to be Amy Adams?” Busch says, referring to the now five-time Oscar-nominated actress.

Of course, before it became a movie with a cult following, Psycho Beach Party was a play with a cult following, a 1987 Off-Broadway production written and starring Busch in the same role that Ambrose portrays in the film. “I used to always say that I didn’t want to be a woman, but I wanted to be an actress,” Busch says. “I just seem to have a talent and an interest in playing female roles.”

In fact, Busch has become best known as a writer of genre-parody plays with female protagonists — and as an actor who plays his characters in drag. The clearest and probably best example is 2003’s hysterical Die Mommie Die!, in which Busch is on screen for nearly every scene.

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“I have a bit of a crackpot theory,” Busch says, when asked what could have triggered this fascination with the feminine. “In the past, when there really was no gay imagery in movies at all — pre-1970s, let’s say — except for killers and villains, I wonder whether it was easier for a certain kind of gay man to identify with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford more than with John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, stories with a strong but vulnerable woman attracted to a man. I don’t know, maybe that’s a little simplistic, but one wonders whether, in some strange alternate universe, if there had been androgynous gay men playing leads in movies with same-sex love stories, would we have needed those female icons?”

Maybe the answer will come with the next gay generation, who are growing up with a pop culture that is far gayer than that of previous generations. Or, Busch volleys back, maybe not: “Are there really that many more roles for androgynous young men out there? How many times can you play Prior in Angels in America?”

Drag artists are certainly far more visible in American culture now than they were four decades ago when Busch started donning wigs. In fact, the 60-year-old doesn’t really think of himself as a drag queen, but as an actor who just happens to perform in drag. Drag is just part of the job, something he had to put on in order to play to his strength, which is playing female characters.

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Still, the culture of drag that has sprung up in recent decades, even just the past few years, fascinates Busch. A couple of weeks ago he was invited to participate in the first International Austin Drag Festival, held in Austin, Tex. “They put me up at this Hampton Inn airport hotel, and they had 45 rooms for all these drag queens from all over the country. It was very amusing calling up the front desk and saying, ‘Could you please connect me to Lady Bunny’s room?'”

But the festival also proved that Busch is different than the typical drag professional. “Every single person who was there in drag, they all take like two hours to get made up. I can’t imagine what they’re doing! Cause I can get made up in 15 minutes. I’m just the lady next door.”

Lately, however, Busch’s focus has been portraying a slightly exaggerated version of himself — through a cabaret — rather than as the lady next door in a play. In fact, roughly a year ago Busch decided to take an indefinite break from playwriting. “Particularly the last five years, every season I had a play,” he says, adding, “Some of them were a little half-baked, I think.” As such, Busch has decided to explore other pursuits. “I wanted to see what joy I could derive from other forms of creativity.” In addition to taking painting more seriously and also “slowly, slowly” working on a memoir, Busch decided to really delve into singing — and performing cabaret. He’ll bring a show he’s developed recounting some of his fascinating personal anecdotes to Washington this Monday, May 18, as part of the annual gala for Theater J.

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“I’m not the world’s greatest singer — if people are looking for big notes, they should go elsewhere,” Busch concedes. Yet the cabaret is “about 70 percent music, 30 percent comedy,” and audiences elsewhere have responded most to the more touching standards that he performs. The show includes “a film noir parody,” giving the audience “a 10-minute feeling of the style of my plays.” He will also play a sketch of a character that inspired the lead in his 2000 play The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife. “Miriam Passman is kind of a raging Jewish lady in New York who is striving to be a cabaret performer late in life.” His first foray on Broadway, Tale of the Allergist’s Wife earned three Tony nominations, including Best Play. Theater J will stage a production of it next month.

And yes, Busch will perform the cabaret in drag. “After all these years in costume, a little bit of masquerade seems to allow me to be even more real. It gives me a confidence and a swagger that I might not have without the drag…. I think of myself as kind of like an old-style television set. When I go on stage, I just dial up the brightness and take down the contrast. But it’s basically all me.”

Busch hasn’t ruled out developing another play. “I have a very fertile imagination [so] it’s not unlikely that I might come up with something,” he says, adding with a laugh: “But if I don’t, I won’t! Nobody says I have to do it.”

It’s quite possible that Washington might once again spur Busch in his future creative pursuits in the same way the city did 30 years ago. At that point, several years out of college, Busch was floundering in his career in New York, and he wasn’t getting any encouragement for his performance art pieces in which he played a bunch of male and female characters, though not in drag.

On a whim, he took a trip to D.C. to visit a friend, who was throwing a party at his apartment. After a small, impromptu performance there, the late Bart Whiteman invited Busch to return for a run at the Source Theatre Company. The rapturous reviews that poured in were just what Busch needed. “It was just the most incredible validation for me at a very young age that I was not deranged, that actually the faith that I had in myself was justified. So Washington, D.C., played a very big part in my career.”

Charles Busch performs Monday, May 18, at 8 p.m., at Washington, D.C.’s Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St. NW. Tickets are $175 for show and dessert reception, or $275 also including a dinner at 6:30 p.m. Call 202-518-9400 or visit washingtondcjcc.org.