Nathan Lane stars in Tony Award-nominated play "The Nance."

Douglas Carter Beane’s acclaimed Tony Award-nominated play The Nance, produced by Lincoln Center Theater, stars stage and screen actor Nathan Lane. The play tells the story of Chauncey Miles (Lane), a headline nance (a parody of a gay man) in the twilight of New York burlesque’s era, who is homosexual. Integrating burlesque sketches into his drama, Beane paints the portrait of a homosexual man, living and working in the secretive and dangerous gay world of 1930s New York, whose outrageous antics on the burlesque stage stand in marked contrast to his offstage life.