Leandro Katz. Bedlam Days, The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company

Leandro Katz

Bedlam Days The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company

1➻

Leandro Katz (1938), Argentine/American artist, poet, and filmmaker, is known for his films, invented alphabets, and photographic installations.

His works include long-term projects that deal with North American and Latin American subjects, and incorporate historical research, anthropology, and visual arts.

Stefan Brecht (1924-2009) was a poet, actor, and theater scholar. A well-known figure in the New York avant-garde theater scene, in the 1960s and 1970s he performed in plays by Charles Ludlam and Robert Wilson. The critical writings in his Queer Theatre, quoted in the present book, illuminate Berthold Brecht’s methodology for making the mechanisms of the theater a process of simultaneous transparency in the work of playwrights, directors, actors, and designers.

Charles Ludlam (1943-1987), a critically acclaimed and influential playwright, actor, and director, was a prolific artist responsible for founding and developing, together with a troupe of devoted actors, one of the nation’s most unique theater enterprises, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Author of more than twenty-nine plays, as well as puppet and ventriloquist shows, he has been called the most productive and flamboyant artist in the theater of the avant-garde, and an American Molière.

➻2

Leandro Katz

Bedlam Days The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company

Viper's Tongue Books

The apparent rapidity of motion in this phantom may exceed in any ratio that of the spectator – enabling us to see how velocities, apparently of impossible magnitude, may be accounted for by the mere running along of the conditions of visibility among a group of objects no one of which is moving at an extravagant rate.

Stefan Brecht, "Ludlam’s Projection."

3➻

Bedlam Days Leandro Katz

One midnight in 1968, together with the now famous rock singer David Johansen (NY Dolls, Buster Poindexter), then barely an adolescent who had just bought a ukelele to start his musical career, I attended a performance of Turds In Hell, the brilliant work by Bill Vehr and Charles Ludlam.

Turds In Hell was being performed in a theatre at the west end of 42nd Street, near the Hudson and in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, one of the most dangerous areas in Manhattan during those days. The place was, in reality, a porn cinema at the time, and Charles Ludlam had managed to rent it for very little money to stage his show at the end of the x-rated screenings. The midnight performances of Turds In Hell had already gathered a clandestine fame and the shows seemed more like pagan masses than theatrical events. That night the small theatre was filled with the most extravagant characters (ourselves included: it was the end of the sixties), and we ended up sitting in the first row.

In Act One, Carla, the Gypsy Woman (interpreted by the Warhol star Mario Montez) finds an abandoned baby at the top of a mountain and, while in an impeccable Puerto Rican accent she admires his large pinga, mysterious hands appear above the set with boxes of Ivory Flakes soap which, sprinkled throughout the scene, simulate the falling of snow. Later on in the play, after having already met the Baron Bubbles in the Bathtub, Saint Obnoxious, Saint Frigid, the Angel Gaybriel, the Devil, the Pope, the Hunchback Pinhead Sex Maniac (the abandoned baby many years later), the Turtle Woman, the Saints, Monks and Whores, in the middle of a storm at sea, disembodied arms with buckets emerge from the sides throwing water, this time to simulate the waves razing the deck. And after the ship sinks, a curtain made of a large sheet of polyethylene blurrily covers the whole stage to mark the beginning of the underwater ballet in which corpulent male dancers wearing ballet shoes, diadems, and tutus interpret a hallucinatory scene from Swan Lake on a stage that, after all the soap and water, has become very slippery.

5➻

But these anarchic scenographic details are in reality secondary. The play, from its beginning, develops like a spectacular revelation. Composed of phrases from disconcerting literary origins, calculated quotes of Elizabethan theatre, Pirandello, Joyce, classic Hollywood cinema, personal gossip, jokes that only certain members of the audience could possibly understand, structured like an epic work and interpreted with a comic languor that made us forget time and space, Turds In Hell was like a turbulent dream under the influence of a drug invented in secret by Jorge Luis Borges and Raymond Roussel.

At the end of the show we went to the dressing rooms to meet the actors and it was on that night when my friendship with Ludlam and with the central members of his company began. Although these friendships go beyond Charles’s premature death in 1987 at age 44, my opportunities to light, act in, film, and photograph works of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company continued from that occasion only to the end of what Ludlam himself would later call the first of the three periods of his career he considered to be separate, as if they were different professions. The present selection of photographs belongs to the first period, composed of theatrical works produced between 1968 and 1975.

In the posthumous publication of The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam (Harper & Row, 1989, 905 pp.) we can value Ludlam’s prolific production in twenty-nine plays. Steven Samuels writes in the introduction: “Even in an important era of experimental theater, Ludlam’s must have seemed supremely experimental. He was simultaneously devoted to the virtuosic use of language and the sheer physicality of stage presentations, energized by the clash of opposing philosophies and divergent acting styles. Tawdry, flamboyant sets and costumes, nudity, and simulated sex were juxtaposed with the words of Wilde, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire.”

Supremely is an important word here. Ludlam was not just a product of the sixties, and to compare him with his contemporaries may be an error. His work reflects an artistic erudition that goes beyond the attitudes of that period.

And –what a thrill it was!– to see him waste no opportunity to throw knives at the vacant avant-garde postures that surrounded him. In his book of essays

➻6

Scourge of Human Folly, he intentionally avoids becoming academic, a label that he would have abhorred. Like the great artist that he was, his philosophy and discourse are mainly manifested through the rich and influential implications of his work as an actor and a playwright.

But most certainly this brief quote by critic Don Nelsen of the New York Daily News, which appears on the back cover of the recently published biography Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam by David Kaufman (Applause Books, 2002, 500 pp.) may reveal the true mystery: “Laurence Olivier? Bah. Gielgud, Scofield, Brando and the rest of the so-called elite bag? Twaddle. The most versatile actor in the Western world is a man named Charles Ludlam!”

All who got to know Charles, to see him act and direct, agree: Charles Ludlam, considered by critics an American Molière, was a genius. Perhaps I have seen brilliant works of art, been near people of enormous talent, but, with the exception of Ludlam, I have never known a genius. To see him act was the arrival of the Magi, the epiphany. With eyes like burning embers, Ludlam could simultaneously make us weep and laugh, think and dream, evoke the most distant fires, manifest the most complex ideas on the strage with his humor, his language, his audacity, his gestures and his strength and physical agility. Furthermore, Ludlam, in his creative generosity, welcomed the more daring and marginalized actors and characters in the art world. Now that his work and his influence is broadly being recognized, we see that the majority of those who have followed him in his liberating campaign have also fallen like warriors. Only we, the chaste, the wary, the cautious, have remained.

The others, headed by Charles, have gone to entertain the gods.

Notes for the exhibition Días de Aquelarre (Bedlam Days), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), curated by Laura Buccellato, 2003.

Notes for Bedlam Days: The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, The Billy Rose Collection, 2005.

7➻

Turds in Hell 1969 Turds in Hell, written in collaboration with Bill Vehr, recounts the adventures of Orgone (the Hunchback, Pinhead, Sex Maniac) in search of his legitimate parents.

Ludlam gave this main role to Arthur Kraft, an extravagant veteran vaudeville actor, despite his inability to memorize lines and a disconcerting tendency to improvise them (“I'm a try-sexual: I'll try anything.”) Ludlam himself played Saint Obnoxious, “the great prophet of Nazareth in Galilee” who will tempt the Devil to have carnal relations with him.

Staged in scenes reminiscent of the Satyricon, quoting lines ranging from Joyce, Proust, or Shakespeare, and simultaneously attacking the values of the Church, the play takes place in mountain tops, convents, brothels, and “a yacht on the River Styx” which by sinking allows the brilliant staging of an underwater ballet and a finale on a desert island shared by survivors (Roussel)… and cannibals.

Charles Ludlam Bill Vehr Mario Montez Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan John Brockmeyer Eleven Ines Bunny Eisenhower Frederick Tepper Jeanne Phillips Ekathrina Sobechanskaya James Morfogen Arthur Kraft Jackie Curtis José Rafael Arango Candy Darling (guest appearance) Songs and lyrics by Minette Sets and lighting: Billy Epius Playhouse: Masque Theater, 42nd Street, NY Photo session: Aldo Tambellini’s The Gate Theatre * Only stage names are used

➻8

9âž»

11 âž»

âž» 12

13 âž»

âž» 14

15 âž»

âž» 16

17 âž»

âž» 18

19 âž»

âž» 20

21 âž»

âž» 22

23 âž»

The Devil seizes Carla CARLA —– (Screaming at The Devil) Take your filthy hands off me, you dirty old man.

(She stamps on his foot.)

DEVIL —– Oooh! Ahhh!

ST. OBNOXIOUS —– Why, Carla, the Gypsy Wildcat, has stepped on his open-toed wedgies with her high-heeled, red vinyl boot trimmed in red marabou.

CARLA —– That just goes to show you that these boots were not just made for walking.

Go ahead, Baron, brand me if you like.

(The Baron is taken aback) Well, why did you not brand me?

BARON —– It's the combination of your intense Latin look mixed with courage.

Oh, Carla, would I like to brown you now!

CARLA —– I don't quite understand it, Baron, first you wanted to brand me, now you want to brown me.

BARON —– Her breath takes my beauty away.

ST. OBNOXIOUS —– (In a British accent) Which do you prefer, my deah, Kipling or Browning?

CARLA —– Oh, Browning, definitely!

ST. OBNOXIOUS —– Why's that?

CARLA —– Well you see, I have never been kippled, so I really cannot say.

BARON —– We could make a deal, Carla. I'll take you to my pavilion so you can tell my fortune.

(The Baron throws Carla over his shoulder and carries her off.)

CARLA —– (Singing) A Gypsy wasn't born to live in slavery … (Etc.)

➻ 24

25 âž»

MME. TRYPHOENA —– Vera, pretend me your mother.

VERA —– What?

MME. TRYPHOENA —– Mother.

VERA —– Mother??

MME. TRYPHOENA —– No, better sister. Have good talk. Wonderful.

VERA —– What? You mean there’s a language of the senses too?

MME. TRYPHOENA —– Vera, if you had known this perhaps you would have been less bored.

VERA —– No! I would have been more bored …

➻ 26

27 âž»

âž» 28

29 âž»

âž» 30

31 âž»

âž» 32

33 âž»

Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide 1967-69 After Big Hotel, Ludlam wrote his second play, Conquest of the Universe, for John Vaccaro’s group, Playhouse of the Ridiculous Repertory Club; but in the midst of a heated argument during rehearsals, Vaccaro decided to fire him from the company. In an act of solidarity with Ludlam, several of his fellow actors resigned and together resolved to start their own group. Sarcastically, and to avoid litigation, Ludlam decided to subtitled it When Queens Collide.

In this epic work, Tamberlaine, “President of the Earth,” invades every planet in the solar system, raping, pillaging, castrating, decapitating, and turning the monarchs he spares into his sex slaves.

Anticipating the dramatic anarchy that characterized the first period of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the play mixes Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, also incorporating television ads, newspaper headlines, frenetic sexual simulations and jokes in the worst taste.

Ludlam commented in an interview: “We are recycling culture. My problem has been to go beyond the circular cyclical structure of the absurdists which represented a morbid philosophical position they had come to. We represent the positive side of nihilism. Instead of negating anything, we try to find its inherent value.”

For critic Joe E. Jeffreys this work and its successors present a style of subversive comedy so powerful that one can still feel Ludlam’s influence in programs such as South Park and in plays and films by Tony Kushner, Paul Rudnick, Charles Busch, Mel Brooks, Kiki and Herb, and John Waters.

Charles Ludlam Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan Stuart Sherman Janet Castle Ted Castle David Johansen Ines Bunny Eisenhower Ekathrina Sobechanskaya Mario Montez Theater in the round: 13th Street Loft, NY

➻ 34

35 âž»

âž» 36

37 âž»

âž» 38

39 âž»

âž» 40

41 âž»

âž» 42

43 âž»

âž» 44

45 âž»

âž» 46

47 âž»

The Grand Tarot 1969 Ludlam wrote The Grand Tarot inspired by Antonin Artaud’s ideas of a theatre of chance. Based on the Great Arcana figures of the tarot cards, the first presentations began with a ritual in which a gypsy woman (Mario Montez) would read the cards to determine the order of the scenes constructed around the main characters in the Tarot deck. Given the complex scene and costume changes this ambitious experiment entailed, The Grand Tarot, in its second period of performances at The Gotham Art Theater, found a fixed order of scenes.

Charles Ludlam Bill Vehr Sebastian Swann Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan John Brockmeyer Bob Sargent Lohr Wilson Janet Noble Michael Lee Snyder Sets: Edgardo Franceschi Costumes: Edgardo Franceschi, Mary Brecht, Janet Blue, Montez Creations, Lohr Wilson Playhouses: The Millennium, NY, and The Gotham Art Theater, NY

➻ 48

49 âž»

âž» 50

51 âž»

âž» 52

53 âž»

âž» 54

55 âž»

âž» 56

57 âž»

âž» 58

59 âž»

âž» 60

61 âž»

âž» 62

63 âž»

âž» 64

65 âž»

âž» 66

67 âž»

âž» 68

69 âž»

âž» 70

71 âž»

Bluebeard 1970 Bluebeard is a parody of The Island of Lost Souls, a 1933 film starring Charles Laughton based on a novel by H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau.

In this version, the mad scientist in the story, Baron Khanazar von Bluebeard (Ludlam), is obsessed with the creation of a third sex. He lives in seclusion on The Island of Lost Love, assisted by servants on whom he has already performed several failed experiments. But one stormy night his niece, her fiancé, and her governess, arrive seeking refuge from the storm, thereby whetting his appetite to conduct new experiments to create the “new and gentle genital,” neither male nor female.

Critic Mel Gussow wrote: “In a beard that looks like blue Brillo, his eyes blazing with mad menace, [Ludlam] is a monstrous, but oddly ingratiating fiend."

Charles Ludlam Bill Vehr Mario Montez Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan John Brockmeyer Eleven Jack Mallory Lohr Wilson Sets: Christopher Scott, Sam Yahn: La Mama’s Theater Bobjack Callejo: Evergreen Theater Costumes: Mary Brecht et al.

Playhouses: It originally played at La Mama’s Café, then at The Gotham Art Theater, The Performing Garage, The Evergreen Theater, and, for one night, at Sammy’s Follies in the Bowery, NY

➻ 72

73 âž»

âž» 74

75 âž»

âž» 76

77 âž»

âž» 78

79 âž»

âž» 80

81 âž»

âž» 82

83 âž»

SHEEMISH (to Rodney) —– I have been his servant on this island nineteen years and I will say this – just between us – (takes a swig from his flask) that in my master, Baron Khanazar, the Bluebeard, you see the vilest scoundrel that ever cumbered the earth, a madman, a cur, a devil, ➻ 84

a Turk, a heretic, who believes neither Heaven, Hell, nor werewolf: he lives like an animal, like a swinish gourmet, a veritable vermin infesting his environs and shuttering his ears to every Christian remonstrance, and turning to ridicule everything we believe in.

85 âžť

âž» 86

87 âž»

BLUEBEARD —– Miss Cubbidge, how can you live without love?

MISS CUBBIDGE —– It is my nature to love many persons a little if I've loved few or none passionately, Baron...

BLUEBEARD —– Ah, ah, ah. Khanazar; and may I call you …

MISS CUBBIDGE —– (Coyly) Flora.

BLUEBEARD —– Ah, Flora! It is only possible to be alone with you in nature. All other women destroy the landscape; you alone become part of it.

➻ 88

Scene 3 Seduction scene (audiotape transcription) Bluebeard (B.) and Miss Cubbidge (M. C.) M. C. —– Could any woman resist such desuetude?

Why, Baron …

B. —– (Interrupts) … Khanazar.

M. C. —– (With intensity) Khanazar! (Audience laughter) B. —– Flora!!!

M. C. —– Floooraa!

B. —– Flora, you are part of the trees, the sky; you are the dominating goddess of nature. (Approaching her)

Come to me, Flora, you lovely little fauna, you.

M. C. —– (Severely) Mr. Bluebeard, I shall certainly not come to you!

B. —– (Abruptly) Nah! You see what I am holding in my hand?

M. C. —– (Agitated) A revolver!

B. —– Take it! Press it to my temple and shoot, or say you will be mine.

M. C. —– (Frightened) I can’t shoot you, but I cannot be yours, either.

B. —– It is one or the other. I cannot live another day without you.

M. C. —– Recuperate your gun at once!... It isn’t loaded, is it?

B. —– Pull the trigger! There are worse things awaiting Man than death.

M. C. —– What do you collude? (Audience laughter) B. —– All tortures do not matter ... only not to be dead before one dies. (He gets on his knees) I cannot live without your love. (He pretends to weep) Flora! Flora!

M. C. —– Baron ... Khanazar! 'Tisn’t manly. Try to be more … malevolent.

B. —– Marry me, marry me, Flora, and make me the happiest man on earth.

M. C. —– How can I marry you?

B. —– Easily. (Hypnotizing her) Just repeat after me.

I, Flora Cubbidge ...

M. C. —– (In a trance) I, Flora Cubbidge ...

B. —– Do solemnly swear ...

M. C. —– Do solemnly swear ...

B. —– To take this man, Baron Khanazar von Bluebeard, as my lawful wedded husband ...

M. C. —– (Imitating his accent) To take this man, Baron Khanazar von Bluebeard, as my lawful wedded husband ...

B. —– To love, honor, and obey; for better or for worse; for richer or poorer; in sickness and in health; from this day forward ... (He starts to undress her) M. C. —– To love, honor, and obey; for better or for worse; for richer or for poorer; in sickness and in health; from this day forward …

B. —– Until death us do part.

M. C. —– Until death us do part.

B. —– Are there any hereditary venereal diseases in your family? (Audience laughter) M. C. —– (Screaming) There are none!!

B. —– I may now kiss the bride.

M. C. —– What about your vows?

B. —– (Furious) Can’t you trust me?

M. C. —– (Apologetically) I do. I do. I do!

(What follows is an extended series of chuckles, laughter and applause from the audience, until the silence is broken by heavy breathing, grunts, screams, roars and animal noises) B. —– Was ever woman in this manner wooed?

Was ever woman in this manner won?

(Screams and animal noises continue) M. C. —– Ah! There are things that happen in a day that would take a lifetime to explain.

(Extended silences mixed with audience applause and laughter) B. —– Ah! M. C. —– Hmmm!

B. —– Flora! Flooraa!

M. C. —– (Moaning) Hmmm! Ahmmm!

B. —– Flora. In my right pants pocket … (Audience laughter)

you will find a key. It is the key to my laboratory.

Take it! And swear to me that you will never use it.

M. C. —– I swear!

B. —– Flora!

M. C. —– I must return to Sybil at once. She sometimes wakes up in a phalanx.

B. —– Won’t you spend the night here, with me?

M. C. —– No, I can’t sleep in that couch. It has cold, wet spots in it. (Audience laughter) Good night, Baron ...

B. —– Ah, ah, ah….

M. C. —– Err … husband.

B. —– Good night, Miss Cubbidge.

M. C. —– I … I would appreciate your not mentioning our hymeneals to Sybil. I want to find the right words to immure the news to her.

B. —– Have no fear, I will confess to none of it.

92 ➻

M. C. —– Thank you. I believe that you have transformed me into a part of the dirigible essence.

You have lifted me aloft and I think I am with Beatrice, of whom Dante has sung in his immortal onus…

Good night. (Applause) B. —– It is a lucky thing for me that I did not take the vows or this marriage might be binding on me as it is on her… I cannot sleep tonight! There is work to be done in my laboratory. Good night. Miss Cubbidge, wherever you are. And good night to all the ladies who do be living in this world. Good night, ladies.

Good night, sweet ladies.

MISS CUBBIDGE —– Thank you. I believe that you have transformed me into a part of the dirigible essence. You have lifted me aloft and I think I am with Beatrice, of whom Dante has sung in his immortal onus… Good night.

(Applause)

93 ➻

âž» 94

95 âž»

âž» 96

97 âž»

âž» 98

99 âž»

âž» 100

101 âž»

âž» 102

103 âž»

Eunuchs of the Forbidden City 1971 Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, a play in five acts and over three hours long, is based on the history of the corrupt Tsu Hsi Hsi (1834-1908), the last empress of China. With Ludlam as the venal Chief Eunuch, the truculent and convoluted narrative combined a compendium of stage trickery, with a text critic Mel Gussow described as “a heady blend of movie taglines, puns, cartoon balloons, pop-tune lyrics, perverse anachronisms, fabricated Confucianisms … and pure Ludlamisms.”

Charles Ludlam Bill Vehr Mario Montez Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan John Brockmeyer Jack Mallory Bob Sargeant Chris Scott Arturo Esguerra Georg Osterman Lohr Wilson Set design and costumes: Lohr Wilson Playhouse: Theater for The New City at Westbeth, NY

➻ 104

105 âž»

âž» 106

107 âž»

âž» 110

111 âž»

âž» 112

113 âž»

âž» 114

115 âž»

âž» 116

117 âž»

âž» 118

119 âž»

âž» 120

121 âž»

âž» 122

123 âž»

âž» 124

125 âž»

âž» 126

127 âž»

129 âž»

âž» 130

131 âž»

âž» 132

133 âž»

âž» 134

135 âž»

âž» 136

137 âž»

Corn 1972 Corn, the company's only musical comedy, is a Ridiculous backwoods version of Romeo and Juliet. (Corn, a four-letter word, was also Ludlam’s response to the success of Hair, a musical he despised). Corn includes a pastoral romance in an Appalachian town where the Hatfields and the McCoys, two feuding families, try to sabotage the romances of their slightly defective sons and daughters.

An opportunity to incorporate a critique of American society, with traditional bluegrass music composed by Virgil Young, Corn ends happily with the marriage of almost all its characters.

Charles Ludlam Bill Vehr Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan John Brockmeyer Georg Osterman Richard Currie Robert Breers Ma Uroy The Lucky Stars band: John Helak, Roger Acorn, Virgil Young Sets and costumes: Edgardo Franceschi Playhouse: The Thirteenth Street Theater, NY

➻ 138

139 âž»

âž» 140

141 âž»

âž» 142

143 âž»

âž» 144

145 âž»

âž» 146

147 âž»

âž» 148

149 âž»

âž» 150

151 âž»

âž» 152

153 âž»

155 âž»

Camille 1973 The well-known story of The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas generated, besides Verdi's La Traviata, more than a dozen films on the same theme. But for Ludlam it was the image of Greta Garbo in the 1936 film directed by George Cukor that inspired him to write Camille, and to incarnate this classic role in which he articulated the most lucid and complex ideas on sexual difference. In a prize-winning performance, in which he took on this paradigmatic feminine persona without hiding his masculinity to finally convince us that he is the supreme Camille, Ludlam, together with his most loyal actors, masterfully concluded the first period of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Charles Ludlam Bill Vehr Lola Pashalinski Black-Eyed Susan John Brockmeyer Jack Mallory Georg Osterman Richard Currie Robert Reddy Robert Breers Steven Sterne Set design: Bobjack Callejo Costume design: Mary Brecht Lighting: Richard Currie Playhouse: The Thirteenth Street Theater, NY

âžť 156

157 âž»

âž» 158

159 âž»

âž» 160

161 âž»

âž» 162

163 âž»

âž» 164

165 âž»

SAINT GAUDENS (Cupping his hand over her mouth) — I’ll tell it! I’ll tell it! Well, you remember that awful divorce last year of Odile de Lille and that stockbroker of hers. Well, last week I saw her at the Ballet Gala at the Opera. They were doing Zinnia, The Mute Girl of Cincinnati. And who should arrive in the next box but Odile’s ex! And he leaned over and said in a very loud voice, “Odile, my dear, how does your new husband like that worn-out twat of yours?” And she said: OLYMPE (Breaking loose and interrupting) — ‘He likes it fine, once he gets past the worn-out part!’

➻ 166

167 âž»

169 âž»

SAINT GAUDENS — Who hasn’t been deceived? One’s friends and one’s mistresses are always deceiving one.

PRUDENCE — Ah yes, just as in Bérénice by Racine ...

(She takes center stage and begins to emit Gallic gutturals, as the others stare perplexed.)

MARGUERITE — Oh, she’s acting.

PRUDENCE — Oh, mon pauvre Chevrolet. J’aime le Chateaubriand.

Oh, le coq au vin, le coq au vin, sur la table avec les pommes frites.

(Standing before the table, she leans into it, champagne glass in hand, in a kind of reverie. All burst into laughter.)

➻ 170

171 âž»

âž» 172

173 âž»

âž» 174

175 âž»

âž» 176

177 âž»

âž» 178

179 âž»

âž» 180

181 âž»

Programs, posters, and quotations from Queer Theatre by Stefan Brecht

183 âž»

âž» 184

The pubescent Ludlam, actor, deciding in his mid-twenties to direct as anyone might, irrupted spitefully midnights into the funky play of Big Hotel and When Queens Collide: transvestite frolic, horrible fun, street-corner rebellion, all guilty innocence. Big Hotel (Nov. 67-June 68) is pulled from the movie of almost the same name and is about stars, – the transcendental seediness of glamour and vice versa. Jack Smith was Mr. X, so slow he was out of this world, Mario Montez the Cobra Woman, Charles, Norma Desmond etc.: the performers seemed to be having a good time, but there was perhaps a marginal feeling they were watching you, – one was waiting for some somber motivations to come out in the open. Instead (Queens, New Year's Eve 67-June 68), the play-acting turned into a high-spirited extravaganza: those doing it seemed to be stepping out, and, as they placed themselves, to be standing severally alone (though not separated from...) in a high place, in danger of death, and visible. The subject was kings, – the grotesquery of power: Christopher Marlowe in interplanetary space. These plays were endless and had the structure of a firewall collapsing à la Cocteau. They were irresponsible and irresistible.

Charles Ludlam and Mario Montez

Jack Smith and Mario Montez. Photo by Rafik

185 ➻

âž» 186

Whores was a gloriously cut-up collage of comic-strip cartoons, –Superboy, Mano, the Emerald Empress (Charles)... Everybody's coming in at odd angles and being located out of place created the effect of a volume of 4 ½ dimensions: all the little scenes enactments at the same time and in the same space, each one a naive lustre-image like those that candy-tobacco stores formerly sold to children for a penny each. It never seemed to work in rehearsal, and at first turned out a little draggy in places (the queens carrying on out front as the 3 Delilahs), but the stage had become one of the little glass paperweights with a Christmas or so scene inside that if you turn upside down and back snow falls inside; the inside of the paper tube of a small kaleidoscope resolving the furnishings into diamantine and elegant rearrangements; and a lit-up revolving gigantic ferris-wheel high-turning above the fair, the individual wagons, from each of which you know the rotating scene is different, coming near and shooting away and up. When Charles took it up again late in the following season as a shadow play, it didn't seem much of anything either when rehearsed, Charles just decided to open and for the opening night Leandro Katz rigged up the lights jellied, and the play, on some screens Ken Jacobs had given, turned out incredibly beautiful poetry, the colored shadows, – 5 colors as fine as in Rashomon, Red Desert, Julieta of the Spirits, – superimposed but not at all quite (the lights coming from different sources), purple and violet, green and yellow (Leandro playing the lights), jumping sometimes, so that the gestures had the most elegantly discreet finesse and poignancy. We all, when not on, stood in the back of the audience watching the Chinese shadows moving, silent music, coming into and going out of existence in the very flatness of image: someone else's dream that, imagine! you have been privileged to see: and when a few of the performers from time to time broke through the self-contained surface, stepped out front and did a scene, it was a gathering of small boys out on the street at night after supper, unsupervised, enchantedly playing something partaking of the nature of ceremony, perhaps standing around a little fire they are entertaining, their faces lit up to the view of a pedestrian pausing in a cross street. The universal unity of the planetary worlds had been rendered visible.

Note: Alas! This passage may be the only record of the shadow play. All color negatives were lost. (LK)

187 ➻

âž» 188

Turds in a dazzle of naive gigantic illuminations tumbled out the vast panopticon of our earth and hell, a casino run by mother, the stakes of which are shit, her pandering cathouse. The foundering of Charon's ferry (Cleopatra's barge) in a storm on Lethe during a yachting party given by the Duchess de Guermantes, – Proust is Charles' psychologist, – dissolved into an endless, hypnotic underwater ballet out of The Tempest, and this into a burlesque of naufrage, the gourmet cannibalism of the shipwrecked.

Orgone-baby, "pinhead, sex-maniac," an infant boy who is a dirty old man (played by Arthur Kraft, – casting that Charles has recently compared to that of Divine's mother, Babs, in Pink Flamingos), stumbles through in search of the mother that abandoned him (Jeannie Phillips). He catches up with her on the cannibal isle, and as he is cooking her, stirring the soup, she in the long tirades of Phaedra, act III, sc. 4 admits her guilty love of him, so much like Theseus his father, when Theseus came, young, to Crete. In Turds, the globular cosmos had become unrolled, it stretches, an undulating expanse, ingrained time, on which events of figuration transpire at diverse locations, little flickering flames on a plain, but each a real person living out a whole life (in the forever repeated gestures of his obsession) little wooden mechanical dolls under a vast sky-atmosphere of soundless laughter.

189 ➻

âž» 190

The skill, intelligence and control of the actors polished the first of Charles' formalist or decadent works, inspired by the Laughton film of the Wells novel, Bluebeard (March-Dec. 1970), to such high precision it appeared a splendidly comic exhibition of brilliant stunts, as for instance, the good doctor's i.e.

Mad Scientist's – Albert Einstein, Wilhelm Reich, John Neumann, Wernher von Braun, Henry Kissinger, – (Ludlam), – businesslike, studiedly passionate seduction of his intended victim's matronly high-minded but cooperative chaperone (Lola) and cohabitation with her on a relatively small couch and all over the floor. Horror and pity being so thoroughly muted, being powerfully insinuated, surfaced only as aftereffects. The Faustian hero pursues the creation of a third gender (concretely: the destruction of the female sex) by surgical means: the cosmic principle of duality in fact precluding success, he botches every job. The successful achievement by the intrepid energy of genius of an unachievable purpose is solidly articulated by three (3) acts, viz.: exposition of how things are on the secluded isle, and inception, yet once more, of evil purpose; setting into motion of the necessary means: monstrous result. The lovely hysterical victim of this Victorian tale (BlackEyed Susan) ends up nude with a chicken-claw-and-sponge sex that she agitates faintly by a visible string. Sexuality is our fate, but we can't get no satisfaction. The spectacle has changed to pure laughter, – the content has become torture itself, the central fact. A satin cocoon of excellent ribaldry so smoothly encloses a black widow spider you can hardly see the insect move, it does not seem real. The images, frank and strongly colored, to a closed eye reveal little grey shadow workmen, moving in the structure of bi-polar procreativity with delicate impotence, pale fingers of a feeble hand, vainly trying to fuck up the works, tugging, adjusting. It's all under cover.

191 ➻

âž» 192

Inspired by the fact that it worked on the screen, (Greta Garbo’s Camille, 1936) Charles Ludlam adapted the play to himself as its star and ran it in the spring of 1973 at Mrs. O'Hare's 13th Street Theatre between 5th and 6th Avenues. The way he did Marguerite, – out of sympathy, – cleaned the story of its moralisms, but, with only a slight shift of emphasis, kept it a paean to pure love: though in the form of low comedy. His magnificent acting achieved this implausible result by alternating rapidly between drag-queen impersonation and a milking of the part's sentimental potentials. He did the former when Marguerite quipped, showed her common sense, or acted the haughty cocotte with her butter-and-eggs man, de Varville, the latter when she related to Duval père ou fils.

The shift is from the transcendental absolutivity of pure love, its mystique, to its tenderness and sacrificial nobility, its psychology. The naturally loving but much misused creature responds to a man's true love, but after a brief moment of happiness, she, – motivated by her boundless love for him, – gives him up, and resumes a frivolous and unhappy life of degradation, and one that is bound to give t.b. the upper hand over her: for the sake of his family's respectability, of his career, and of the happy marriage of his pure young sister. She goes to her death within the year. Ludlam's sentiment conveyed the tragedy, nobility (moral beauty), and above all, the grandeur of her love. His irony absolved us (and him) of some of the shame of sentimentality, allowed us to be moved. His intelligence focussed our tenderness on nobility of sentiment.

193 ➻

âž» 194

Remarkably, the sentimental appeal of Ludlam's clean and pure sentimental poses, – not camped up, neither exaggerated nor twisted, nor played in quotational style, – was not destroyed either by their being recognisable derivatives from films shown at night on TV, and from old films at that, that is, in a style of expression gone out of style in art and in life, given up together with the ideal of woman as fulfilled by her sacrifice of herself to man and procreation, nor by their isolation in an ornate setting of stridently ambiguous poses of enviously competitive, ridiculing adoration of woman as powerful sex-object. This artificiality and this setting of his sentimental style did not destroy its power to move us by making it itself ironic, but affected us as an irony directed at the conventionality and hypocrisy associated with sentimentality, i.e., purified it. They left the play a tribute to tender love and loving generosity, by their ridicule distancing it from the passé sacrificial ideal of woman, twin of the pornographic version of the image of her as sex-object, conventional and hypocritical ideal to which an unalloyedly sentimental treatment of the corny story would have been a tribute. Instead we saw a person victimised by bourgeois hypocritical convention. The frosted window of sentimentality was opened onto a landscape of noble sentiment. Ludlam's achievement as person and actor seemed so remarkable to me that I have neglected everything else. He wrote the play for himself, so he didn't give anybody else much of a part: which made the others' strong vignettes the more remarkable. Brockmeyer beautifully sketched de Varville as the baron Charles. Lola Pashalinski and Black-Eyed Susan, casting vanity to the winds, made up for and played ugly bitches, – Susan in the unsettling hysterical style she first developed in Corn. Bill Vehr out of almost nothing gave to Armand Duval an appealing and quiet presence invisibly holding the play together. Callejo's pretty sets in foreshortened perspective gave to the tiny stage a claustrophobic spaciousness. My wife, Mary Brecht’s costumes, beautiful and ridiculous, with exquisite sensitivity supported the individual characters.

195 ➻

Ludlam's genius as an actor is in the totally energetic facetry, each facet, cracked or murky, radiant, of his portrayal of social conduct as a face of single asocial purpose: the many human masks of the monkey. The insincerities succeed one another with incredible rapidity, each totally true to ludicrous nature. That the rapidity of succession of complete gestures of hypocritic concern is incredible means (1) growth, transition, continuity of the character are intercepted, and (2) no putting on of any mask of covenance is observable. Thus on the one hand we are prevented from assuming a sane natural man in his various outward turns, on the other, we cannot discount these grimaces as mere artifice. Hypocrisy thus is presented as the nature of social expression itself, intercourse as insincerity. It is the ability of the actor scared into his wits that provides this frightful comment: less ability would not. We see him mastering his insanity, for instance (in Bluebeard): so rapidly that the sanity required for doing so is clearly insane.

Quotations from Queer Theatre by Stefan Brecht, Methuen Drama, London, 1986

âžť 196

197 âž»

âž» 198

199 âž»

âž» 200

201 âž»

Bedlam Days .... 5

by Leandro Katz Turds in Hell .... 8 Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide .... 34 The Grand Tarot .... 48 Bluebeard .... 72 Eunuchs of the Forbidden City .... 104 Corn .... 138 Camille .... 156 Programs, posters, and quotations from Queer Theatre by Stefan Brecht .... 182

Bedlam Days The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company Photographs by Leandro Katz

The author wishes to thank the following people for their support of this project: Fermin Eloy Acosta, Sarah and Sebastian Brecht, Laura Buccellato, Black-Eye Susan, Edgar Franceschi, Richard Garmise, Joe E. Jeffreys, David Kaufman, Lola Pashalinski, Bérénice Reynaud, Steven Samuels, Berta Sichel, Sigismond de Vajay, and to remember Frederick Ted Castle (In Memoriam).

Viper’s Tongue / La Lengua Viperina, 2019 ISBN 978-987-24581-3-3 All rights reserved Photographs and transcriptions of performances unless noted: © 2019 Leandro Katz http://www.leandrokatz.com Audio recordings transcripts: Midsummer Madness at St. Mark’s Church, and Bluebeard at La Mama performances: Juan Julián Caicedo.

Bluebeard: The famous seduction of Miss Cubbidge, https://vimeo.com/87693838 Excerpts from Queer Theatre, Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. © Stefan Brecht, 1986.

Manifesto Ridiculous Theater, Scourge of Human Folly by Charles Ludlam. Brochure reproduction – © 1989, The Estate of Charles Ludlam

Suggested Bibliography: Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre, Methuen Drama, London, 1986 Charles Ludlam, The Complete Plays, Harper & Row, New York, 1989 David Kaufman, Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam, Applause Books, New York, 2002 Steven Samuels, ed.

Ridiculous Theatre, Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992

Public Collections: Digital scans and photo editorials: Mercedes Figallo, Simon Hall Text editing: David Jacobson Design: El vivero Plates: Eduardo Nave Printing: Palermo Artes Gráficas, Madrid, Spain The book is set in Avenir and Bazooka, printed on Cretor Vol 135 grams in an edition of 500.

A special edition of ten copies was also produced, signed and numbered by the author and accompanied by Reel Six, The Grand Tarot, 1972, in digital video disc.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts - Lincoln Center, Billy Rose Collection. https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/bedlam-days-earlyplays-charles-ludlam-andridiculous-theatrical-company Robert Wilson and The Watermill Center, New York

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Any copyright holders we have been unable to reach or to whom acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact us.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Other books and catalogues The Catherwood Project Incidents of visual reconstructions and other matters. Leandro Katz and Jesse Lerner.

University of New Mexico Press 2018 The Seagull’s Footprint (El rastro de la raviota) Leandro Katz. Exhibition catalogue with texts

by Berta Sichel, Bérénice Reynaud, Jesse Lerner and Cuauhtémoc Medina.

Espacio Tabacalera, Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Madrid 2017 LEAN-DROKA-TZ Ana Longoni, Jesse Lerner, Mariano Mestman.

Colección conceptual. Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires 2013

The Ghosts of Ñancahuazú Leandro Katz. Foreword by Eduardo Grüner; essays by John Berger, Jean Franco, Mariano Mestman and Jeffrey Skoller. Photographs by Freddy Alborta, and with the documentary essay El Dia Que Me Quieras in DVD. Viper’s Tongue, Buenos Aires 2010

3➻

"Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company revealed the hidden face of America’s obsession with realism. It elevated outrageous farce to the rank of a dramatic genre, glorifying parody at a time, unlike today, when it was still possible. Leandro Katz’s exuberant Bedlam Days is a fitting homage to this love-child of Père Ubu and the Marquis de Sade."

Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

Viper's Tongue Books

➻4