Charles Ludlam

• Born: April 12, 1943
• Birthplace: Long Island, New York
• Died: May 28, 1987
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other Literary Forms

Charles Ludlam wrote several essays on the theater, some of which are collected in Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam (1992), edited by Steven Samuels. In 1976 he was commissioned to write the book for Isle of the Hermaphrodites: Or, The Murdered Minion, but this musical about Catherine de Médicis and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre never made it to Broadway. In 1977 he wrote “Aphrodisiamania,” a scenario for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and in 1980 he wrote a short opera, The Production of Mysteries (with resident composer Peter Golub) for the Santa Fe Opera.

Achievements

Charles Ludlam won critical plaudits and professional awards early, receiving his first Obie Award in 1969 for distinguished achievement in Off-Broadway theater. The next year he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting, and in 1971 second prize at BITEF International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, for Bluebeard. In 1973 Ludlam collected an Obie for acting in both Corn and Camille. A special Obie followed in 1975 for Professor Bedlam’s Educational Punch and Judy Show. In addition to a Playwriting award from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (1976), he won a Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) Fellowship (1977) to coach graduate students in playwriting at Yale University and an Obie the same year for designing Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. Other awards included one for Excellence and Originality in Comedy from the Association of Comedy Artists (1978), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Playwriting (1982 and 1985), and a Drama Desk Special Award for Oustanding Achievement in Theater in 1983. The Mystery of Irma Vep won him a Maharam Foundation Award for Excellence in Design. In 1985 he won the Rosamund Gilder Award for distinguished achievement, and shortly before his death he was given an Obie for Sustained Achievement.

Biography

The middle son of Joseph William Ludlam (a master plasterer) and Marjorie Braun, Charles Ludlam showed his first interest in theater at age six after he was separated from his mother at the Mineola Fair. He wandered into a Punch and Judy show and later into a freak show. At home, he watched puppet shows on television and performed in his basement. He used to go trick or treating dressed as a girl on Halloween, but when he went to a school party in women’s clothing, he caused a scandal. This led to his cross-dressing in secret, using his mother’s clothes.

As a young boy, Ludlam liked the plays of William Shakespeare and the classics. He performed in school productions and had an apprenticeship at the Red Barn Theater (1958), a Long Island summer stock company. Inspired by Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater in Greenwich Village, he founded the Students’ Repertory Theater a thirty-two-seat space in an abandoned meeting hall above a liquor store. He was only seventeen at the time, but he directed and acted in obscure works by Japanese and Russian writers and in works by Eugene O’Neill. In 1961 he entered Hofstra University on an acting scholarship, graduating four years later, after writing (and destroying) his first full-length play, Edna Brown. By the time he graduated in 1965 with an education degree in dramatic literature, he had fully realized that he was gay and took to this lifestyle while feeding off the great cultural fermentation of rock-and-roll, happenings, experimental films, and burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway theater. He dressed in drag to play Mario Montez’s lesbian lover in a brief scene in the 1965 underground film, The Life, Death, and Assumption of Lupe Velez.

Ludlam’s New York stage debut came in 1966, when he played Peeping Tom in Ronald Tavel’s The Life of Lady Godiva, a mixture of camp, drag, pageantry, and grotesquerie, directed by John Vaccaro at the Play-House of the Ridiculous in a loft on Seventeenth Street. He next transformed the role of Norma Desmond in Tavel’s Screen Test into an extravagant star turn and went on to write Big Hotel, staged by Vaccaro. Their collaboration, however, came to an end in 1967 when Vaccaro was fired during rehearsals for Ludlam’s When Queens Collide. Most of the cast walked out in support of him, and Ludlam founded his own troupe and staged the play, the first production of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Ludlam staged a midnight repertory with his first two plays at Tambellini’s Gate on Second Avenue, going on to broaden his techniques and interests and in 1969 to win the first of his numerous awards, despite an almost continual struggle with small budgets and sparse audience support. Before his first big commercial success in 1978 with The Ventriloquist’s Wife, Ludlam supported himself by performing pranks for the television program Candid Camera (1960-1967) and by working in a health-food store or a bookstore.

However, with growing critical success, a cult following, and tours, Ludlam and his company were able to earn a down payment for a ten-year lease on what was to become their “permanent” home at One Sheridan Square. He had immense emotional support from his lover, Everett Quinton, who had made his stage debut in 1976 in Ludlam’s Caprice. The two would live and work together for the rest of Ludlam’s life. Ludlam entered the professional mainstream from time to time, winning a commission to write what proved to be an abortive Broadway musical in 1976, coaching students in playwriting at Yale and communications media at New York University, serving three years on New York State Council’s theater panel, playing several nightclubs and the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and even doing a little screen acting in such films as Imposters (1980) and The Big Easy (1987). However, his greatest legacy was as artistic director, playwright, director, designer, and star of his acclaimed company. As an actor with a strong face and bright eyes, he had many facial expressions. As a director, he was kind, fun, wild, erratic, and tough. As a designer, he would recycle any and all discarded items from trash cans and sidewalks. His small, independent movies that he directed (such as the 1981 silent, black-and-white film Museum of Wax or The Sorrows of Dolores, a black-and-white comedy-adventure whose filming lasted several years) were artistic indulgences, rather than commercial or critical successes.

By Thanksgiving, 1986, Ludlam knew he had AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) but believed he could beat it by taking up several hobbies and macrobiotics. He continued with his many projects: revising Der Ring Gott Farblonjet for Broadway, preparing Titus Andronicus for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, editing his film The Sorrows of Dolores for its premiere, and writing and planning the production of Houdini, as well as writing the documentary about the production of the play he was supposed to direct himself. The Houdini play was about the magician who tried to defeat death by daring it. Ludlam rehearsed the magician’s death scene when he himself could not get out of a chair.

Ludlam was hospitalized on April 30, 1987, the same night that The Sorrows of Dolores, starring his lover and artistic partner, Quinton, as the heroine, opened at New York’s Collective for Living Cinema. He died of complications from his disease on May 28. At his behest, Quinton assumed the artistic directorship of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, producing the world premiere of Ludlam’s Medea. In 1988 New York City renamed the street in front of the theater “Charles Ludlam Lane,” and the next year Harper & Row published The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam.

Analysis

Charles Ludlam made an important contribution to stage comedy and gay and lesbian theater. Several of his thirty plays are thought-provoking entertainments that also happen to extend the boundaries of American theater. His comedy expresses its author’s gay sensibility via gay characters and a style that incorporates drag, satiric excess, and parody. His comedy (known as The Ridiculous) is not simply low or merely saturated with foolish antics. Where the absurdists (such as Beckett, Jean Genet, Ionesco, and Alfred Jarry) sabotage seriousness and get bogged down in a cyclical structure, Ludlam revalues things held in low esteem by society and, by changing their context or scale, gives them new worth.

Ludlam studied the classics closely to understand their structures and techniques so that he could then invent his own through parody. For example, out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) came Stage Blood; out of La Dame aux camélias (1848; Camille, 1857) by Alexandre Dumas, fils, came Ludlam’s Camille; out of Richard Wagner’s opera tetraology Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848-1876; known as the Ring Cycle) came Der Ring Gott Farblonjet; out of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (pr. 1670; The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675) came Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde; and out of Euripides’ Mēdeia (431 b.c.e.; Medea, 1781) came Ludlam’s Medea. However, Ludlam insisted that he was not pointing a finger at the classics to ridicule them: In fact, he and his fellow players were the buffoons who, nevertheless, were paradoxically serious about their humor. His games with plots were an attempt to realize his notion of an abstract plot or one that is filled with contradictions. This put him in the company of modernists, for it allowed him to experiment freely in order to draw attention to the antinaturalism of his writing. One of his biggest experiments was Reverse Psychology, which synthesized the epic form with the concentric. Although an epic play about a husband and wife, both of whom are psychiatrists who are having affairs with each other’s patients, who happen to be a married couple, this work has a concentric shape that is intensified by the plot device of an experimental drug that makes the characters fall in love with the person to whom they are least attracted.

Ludlam commented on his own links to classicism and modernism by pointing out how he used old things—plot, parody, and sexuality—to find new expressive possibilities and revalue techniques from various periods. He also pointed out that the tradition of plot and the use of incident in classical comedy was

a little alphabet . . . a matrix of unseemly incident: inappropriate or contrary behavior which the clown exhibits; things falling out contrary to expectation, or propriety; things going wrong. . . . The abstract element in farce makes it the most modern dramatic medium. Its ability to reflect on the human condition is seemingly limitless.

Ludlam, therefore, envisioned The Ridiculous as a mode that freed the artist from having to conform to conventions, especially those of commercial theater.

Bluebeard

Billed as “A Melodrama in Three Acts,”Bluebeard became Ludlam’s first critical success. In a concentric dramatic form, it uses melodrama, fantastic characters, and exotic locales to comment on sexual mores of its time (1970). Ludlam claimed to have been influenced by Anton Chekhov, explaining that, as in Chayka (pr. 1896, rev. pr. 1898; The Seagull, 1909), “Every character is perversely attracted to someone who doesn’t like him.” Bluebeard is an intellectual who tries to create a third sex out of a radical dissatisfaction with the two existing genders. The third genital represents the synthesis of the sexes. On one level, the play is an attack on the idea of altering people’s bodies to gratify one’s sexual urges.

Camille

Recognizing that the Dumas story strikes an emotional chord with audiences no matter what its form (novel, play, opera, MGM film, or ballet), Ludlam adapted it to his own interests. The Dumas novel begins with a flashback after Marguerite’s death, with the auction of the book that her lover, Armand, had given her. However, Ludlam did not think that a play would work as a flashback, so he reshaped Dumas’s work to suit his own taste and production style. So, strictly speaking, it is an adaptation rather than an original creation. However, its value lies in its dedication to presenting something true from a ridiculous angle, such as a line made flamboyant or an action that is treated outrageously. Yet every gesture and line relates to the original romantic tragedy.

As envisaged by Ludlam, the role of Marguerite is not a drag queen act. The female impersonation makes the play profoundly feminist because it compels an audience to re-evaluate sexual prejudice and the American cultural taboo against cross-gender or transvestite interpretation. The female impersonation plays with the theme of illusion while also drawing attention to itself as a theatrical device.

Der Ring Gott Farblonjet

Another example of Ludlam’s exuberant, inflated theatricality, this play is a parody of opera in general, and of Wagner in particular. The jokes begin with characters’ names: the Rhinemaidens are called Flosshilde, Woglinde, and Welgunde; the gods are known as Dunderhead, Froh, and Loga. Based on various libretti of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (including Wagner’s own libretto), Ludlam’s comedy invents a special language, abandoning literal speech for a language that is often vaudevillian and German Yiddish. The new language reflects the evolution of human beings and thought in the tale. Characters speak different ways, echoing different periods of history, and are given linguistic leitmotifs: The Nihilumpens speak in a pidgin German; the Gibichungen speak an elevated Elizabethan diction; the heroic, chaste, lesbian Valkyries (dressed like motorcyclists) sound like Gertrude Stein; the Forest Bird speaks in plain English; and after he has tasted dragon blood, Siegfried suddenly understands birdsong and English.

The Mystery of Irma Vep

Ludlam’s biggest critical and popular success is a melodrama inspired by Victorian penny dreadfuls, cheap novels that combined lurid horror with inflated language and images. The play shamelessly steals plot devices, themes, and sometimes passages from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the collage novels of Max Ernst, while using quick changes, double casting with gender transformations, and special effects. Servants Jane and Nicodemus welcome visitors to misty Mandacrest Manor where Lady Enid, second wife of Egyptologist Lord Edgar Hillcrest, has to cope with complications stemming from her husband’s lingering attachment to memories of his first wife, Irma Vep. The result is an outrageously funny parody-collage with weird characters (such as a long-dead but strangely seductive Egyptian princess and a kind-hearted werewolf). The Mystery of Irma Vep crystallizes Ludlam’s highly self-conscious style that undermines sexual, psychological, and cultural categories in a structure that parodies classical or popular literary forms.

Bibliography

Brecht, Stefan. Queer Theatre. New York: Methuen Books, 1986. Despite the pedantic jargon and generalized, pontifical tone, this book contains a useful discussion of the positive and negative aspects of Ridiculous Theater. Focusing on Big Hotel and Conquest of the Universe, Brecht argues that the ambiguity of sexual identity is a basic variant of the role-playing theme.

Ludlam, Charles. “Interview: Charles Ludlam.” Interviewed by Gautam Dasgupta. Performing Arts Journal (Spring/Summer, 1978): 69. A discussion of the origin and techniques of Ludlam’s theater. Ludlam distinguishes between Ridiculous and other comic forms such as lampoon, parody, and satire. Touches on the political aspect of the Ridiculous.

Romer, Rick. Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998. Offers a critical analysis of all the plays. Romer introduces Ludlam’s work, mission, and artistic sensibility by starting with a brief biography, then delving into the roots of the Ridiculous and countercultural movements of the 1960’s. Shows Ludlam as cultural scavenger with a penchant for “maximal art.”