Charles Ludlam Lives!

Front matter

Charles Ludlam

Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and

the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous

CHAPTER Two: Charles Busch

More Excitement! More Glamour! More Wigs! 47 CHAPTER THREE: Bradford Louryk:

“Not Just Any Woman” 92 CHAPTER FOUR: Taylor Mac:

“The Determined Trickster” 125 EPILOGUE: Paradigms of Queer Legacy, Heritage, and Influence 171 Notes 179 Bibliography 201 Index 211

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Becoming Ridiculous

Instructions for use: This is farce, not Sunday school. Illustrate hedonistic calculus. Test out a dangerous idea, a theme that threatens to destroy one’s whole value system. Treat the material in a mildly farcical manner without losing the seriousness of the theme. Show how paradoxes arrest the mind. Scare yourself a bit along the way. —Charles Ludlam

This is an accidental book, or perhaps, more romantically, an instance of queer kismet. I first discovered playwright Charles Braun Ludlam (1943- 1987) in Laurence Senelick’s class Lesbian and Gay Theatre during my doctoral work at Tufts University. I found Ludlam’s plays, written in a style called the Ridiculous, crass and raucous and esoteric. Plays like Turds in Hell, Bluebeard, Camille, and The Mystery of Irma Vep were confusing and brilliant, like nothing I had ever read or experienced in live performance. As I would come to find out, these characteristics are the very hallmark of the Ridiculous style. My classmates largely disliked and then dismissed his work as incoherent and the humor as base, but I was hooked. Soon after I voraciously devoured Ludlam’s twenty-nine extant plays from a tattered volume I found in the basement of a used bookstore.' Sadly, I was only eight when Ludlam passed away, and growing up on a potato farm in northern Maine, I never had the opportunity to see him perform live, let alone access to any professional theaters (not to pretend that I would have understood the nuances of Ludlam’s plays as a child). Soon after reading the plays as well as David Kaufman's excellent Ludlam biography Ridiculous!, I knew that as a scholar, an artist, and a self-identifying queer,

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xiv PROLOGUE

Figure 1: Charles Ludlam after a performance of Camille with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Lotte Lenya (c. 1976). Photographer unknown. Author's collection.

I longed to become a part of what I realized was a secret, elusive, and exclusive club—the Ridiculous tradition. I was even more surprised to find that so little scholarly work was available on Ludlam and his plays, but also understood how his work could be difficult to access and understand. Thus, my relationship with Ludlam required a certain queer approach to move through time critically, necessitating queer methods to figure out how my present might be linked to Ludlam’s past.

This book is the product of a particular goal that I set out to achieve, inspired by the many incredible performers who have continued to chase Ludlam’s queer dream and expand his unique vision. It is also an exercise in excavating performance(s) from archives, individuals, and the remnants of Ludlam that continue to flow through the ancillary neo-Ridiculous performers that I examine herein: Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac, as well as many of their contemporaries, friends, and even their adversaries.

As an account of a specific gay history inspired by Ludlam and his work, this book introduces the concept of queer legacy as a larger frame-

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Prologue xv work to help understand the connection between nonnormative or queer sexualities, resultant cultural production(s), and their continuance. It applies queerness, or the being and doing of queer, as a mode of ambivalent agency. My approach to queerness is defined by an unwillingness to be singularly labeled, backed into a discursive corner, or pinned down. The sort of queerness to which I refer lies hidden between the normative and antinormative and eschews the notion of these binaries as opposite identities. To paint a simpler picture, think of queerness as a fluid and ever-changing river that wends between the immovable mountains of identity (Tm certain that Ludlam would insert a sexually charged innuendo here). These mountains are formed by the psychoanalytic trifecta of sexuality, gender, and desire, traditionally represented by the gay/straight divide. The river, ever moving, ever changing, slowly and surely will, in time, erode the mighty rocks. My version of queerness refuses to be dismissed or discarded by subjective disagreements among historians and theorists and the seeming disparity between lived experience and reflective critical analysis. As Ludlam might have said with a twinkle in his eye, this is a history, a herstory, a mystory, and now a queerstory.

In order to produce this book, I combined archival research with performance ethnography around Ludlam’s Ridiculous theater to provide an alternative narrative on the phenomenon of legacy through the process of queering and the resultant theoretical discourse. As corroborative evidence of queer legacy in action, this book is intended as both a physical record and as a springboard for new scholarship around theater and the next wave of queer theory—another opportunity to submerge oneself into queerness as a mode of expression through performance.

I’ve chosen to organize this book chronologically from past to present, an admittedly traditional and perhaps surprisingly linear structure, but an example of my intervention, a desire not to be cornered by a notion of queerness that lacks history or tradition. In my opinion, queerness has always existed; it is neither the product of 1990s umbrella theory nor a harbinger of a utopic future. To continue the watery metaphor, I believe that queerness has always run rampant beneath the landscape of normative cultural production, sometimes exploding into a geyser that seismically reshapes a changing world. I see the queer radicalism of the American 1960s as one of these geyser moments, an initial eruption set in motion by a fiery passion that eventually transformed into a roaring river, carving away layers of tradition, superstition, and oppression. As this book demonstrates, Ludlam’s theater was a product of such a moment, and his

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

XVi PROLOGUE heirs continue to carve new and unique tributaries, using neo-Ridiculous performance as an agent of queer progress.

The book is divided into two thematic sections. Act I, “Charles Ludlam’s Queer Legacy,’ is a new history and critical analysis of Ludlam’s work and how queer theory in a contemporary, post-millennial context may be used to better understand to the formation of queer legacies. Act II, “The Post-Ludlam/Neo-Ridiculous,’ applies my original theory, as inspired and developed by my research on Ludlam, through new histories of individuals I have marked as Ludlam’s legatees in three case studies. Each of the chapters is preceded by a prologue, which in addition to serving as a précis, explicitly links the queer theories discussed in chapter 1 to the case studies of Busch, Louryk, and Mac. As each prologue demonstrates, the case studies inherently represent the theoretical formula of queer theory in action, thereby better to understand each selected artist. While performances of these artists and many of their contemporaries are critically analyzed, it was important to me to retain the narrative structure of each piece in an effort to preserve distinct and individual voices and as examples of previously unwritten and nuanced queer histories.

Because of its queer nature and my own queer perspective as an author, the order in which the book is read, however, is at your discretion as reader. I would encourage you to approach the book with a sense of sporadic queerness, dipping in and out of the chapters to form new constellations of queer genealogy in order to expose and plumb even more queer gaps and absences. For example, I would encourage historians to approach the case studies in Act II before returning to Act I. If you are particularly interested in a new interpretation of Camp (you'll understand the capitalization soon enough), flip to the index and commence midway through the introduction. If you are curious about how queer legacy connects to the rich web of queer theory, immerse yourself in chapter 1. In other words, choose your own queer adventure.

Ludlam’s career lasted approximately twenty years (1967-1987) from his initial discovery of the Ridiculous theater until his death, so I’ve consciously decided to maintain the same period of time to structure the three case studies dedicated to the legatees herein (1987-2007), though each study is extended with an epilogue that carries the selected neo- Ridiculous artist's career to the present. In part, this is in an effort to avoid the inane though not uncommon “What would Ludlam have done if he had lived?” narrative. Because this book presents queerness as a fluid entity, I've attempted to weave a metaphoric net through my construct of

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Prologue xvii queer legacy to catch what lurks deep below the surface. My decision to include acts, epilogues, and prologues, as opposed to the more common scholarly monograph parts, introductions, and conclusions, was inspired by traditional play structures as well as the essays penned by Ludlam throughout his career that took on not only the theater as its primary topic but also a distinctly theatrical tone and writing style.”

Because ephemeral performance is, in essence, an embodiment of liveness, the tracing of Ludlam’s legacy through performance attempts to make a tangible intervention in the way we think about queer historiography as a living, growing, and ever-developing entity. My methodology is inspired by performance studies scholar Diana Taylor’s work on performance as a form of history, arguing that “performed, embodied practices make the past available as a political resource in the present by simultaneously enabling several complicated and multilayered processes.”? Taylor’s formula for layering not only allows a better understanding of how contemporary performers continue the post-Ludlam Ridiculous tradition, but also invites an alternative reading of Ludlam’s original work, using the present to better understand the past without the limitations of linear temporal frames or biological reproduction. I'm referring to the Abrahamic “begat” formula for understanding reproductive history that has marked Western approaches to historiography for millennia. My approach to layering is constructed around new and previously unwritten histories of Busch, Louryk, and Mac as an extension of the original Ludlamesque. The legacy traced herein is admittedly selective (a primarily gay male history), deeply focused on only one strand of Ludlam’s widespread influence, but I hope that it might act as the catalyst to open up the possibility for more diverse studies from other scholars of queer theater and performance in the near future.

This book is not a hagiography of Ludlam (though I personally like his work very much), nor does it attempt to tie up loose ends in order to neaten the history of the Ridiculous, which, like its aesthetic, is inherently messy. Accordingly, it brings memory and nostalgic reminiscence recorded as oral histories into conversation with empirical hard evidence and preexisting narratives, manifesting not only an alternative legacy but also a legacy of alternatives. As part of this, I have taken an unorthodox approach in retaining sizable fragments of both performance texts and original quotes drawn from interviews that I completed over a five-year period—constituting an archive shaped by first-person feelings and then my own critical reflection on those emotional responses. This methodol-

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xviii PROLOGUE ogy also demands tangential exploration into lateral secondary narratives that serve to queerly intersect with, disrupt, and comment on the primary case study on which each chapter is based: I deem this approach lateral historiography, which is further unpacked in chapter 1. My method is also directed by queer scholar Ann Pellegrini’s predictive suggestion that studies of “affective relations are part of the process [of] forging alternative histories, alternative values, queer communities”* and follows artist Martha Fleming’s lyrical notion that queer archives are collectively made from “fragile rumors composed of flicker and smoke.” * I apply this approach to take into consideration suspicious readings of previously recorded histories while also reading through responses rife with gossip, hearsay, and exaggeration. In early gay rights advocate Arthur Evans’s little-read and sometimes-mocked book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978), the author paves the way for my own resurrection of queer historiography:

This book is as true as any other historical work. It is true because all historical works are one-sided, subjective and arbitrary. Every historian works this way. The real falsehood occurs when historians hide their values, emotions, and choices under a veneer of objectivity. A work of history cannot be assessed apart from the values of the person who wrote it.®

While Evans is speaking about his own admittedly amateur and sometimes self-indulgent work, I like that his testament corroborates that affect-driven, gay-themed histories existed long before the advent of queer theory in the 1990s. Furthermore, it was works like this one, published by small independent presses and disseminated through a network of small gay bookstores in the 1970s, that Ludlam and his contemporaries would have read, exchanged, and considered, particularly because the original Ridiculous displaced and reenvisioned history and repurposed historical icons through a queer lens via performance.

Ludlam’s Ridiculous theater provides an ideal model to demonstrate the recuperative analysis of queer legacy in action, because as scholars Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke remind us in The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy, the preservation of such a legacy relies on “the protection of theatrical masking [and] the titillations of communicating in code?” This coded nature of queer legacy is made distinct through its strategic archness fueled by a distinct Camp sensibility. I have intentionally decided to capitalize the term Camp throughout the book to set

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Prologue xix my interpretation (drawn from Ludlam) apart from the many other preexisting definitions of the term.

Although Charles Ludlam Lives! is primarily engaged in tracing an autonomous lineage of gay men, it, in the words of Jennifer Moon, aspires to “provide a compelling model for other queer identities because it makes clearly visible the inconsistencies, contradictions and inadequacies that are central to all identities, especially those marked by sexual deviance and shame?’ The Ridiculous was central to the battle for gay liberation, maintaining close ties if not a direct connection to the feminist movements of roughly the same period. The strategic intervention of the Ridiculous extends beyond the gay community in which it is based and employs Camp humor to transform rather than cover up—a transformation toward a united front composed of distinct disenfranchised communities. This book pursues a reparative and minoritarian tracing of Ludlam’s distinct legacy through the performance of Busch, Louryk, and Mac, three queer individuals who have continued and developed the Camp tradition in Ludlam’s old stomping grounds of New York City. My individual focus and particular curiosity, however, does not intend to foreclose the possibility of others to extend the Ludlamesque in alternative directions across a variety of communities and cultures. This book is just a starting point. So please, read on, or through, or back, or beyond, but always queerly. End scene.

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

ACT I

Charles Ludlam’s Queer Legacy

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Introduction

History “Mystory”: Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater

Camp is a form of historicism viewed histrionically. —Phillip Core

Setting the Stage

Imagine that you have the queer power to travel through and across time. Backward, forward, side to side. You close your eyes and click your ruby slippers, no, your pony-hair cha-cha heels, no, patent leather fuck-me times...

In a flash, you are transported to the West Village of Manhattan in April 1970, where Charles Ludlam and his new Ridiculous Theatrical Company are about to perform their play Bluebeard at a gay bar called Christopher’s End. This dive is so named for its location at the far end of Christopher Street, though the double entendre is quickly evident. The bar is filthy, raucous, and exciting. It may seem like an unusual place to see a play, but Ludlam has recently been kicked out of the La MaMa theater, run by its doyenne Ellen Stewart, after a disagreement about royalties and profits earned by the original production. Ludlam refers to Stewart openly as a “bureaucratic bitch” The playing space at Christopher’s End is simply an amalgam of rickety boards laid across the bar with a painted drop of beakers and vessels suggesting a mad scientist's lair. You are packed tightly into a crowd of young, handsome men, some in leather and all in dungarees. The men openly flirt and cling to each other lustfully. The spirit of the Stonewall Riots hangs in the thick spring air and the sparkle of disco is

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor only taking shape on a distant, red bandana-hued horizon. Disregarding any kind of union rules—for this is Off-Off-Off-Broadway, the play begins very, very, very late. The plot quickly descends into a depraved tale that unapologetically hurls gothic horror against B movies, wrapped around the core of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale with Béla Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’ Castle, H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, and a dash of Christopher Marlowe's Faustus thrown in. This production collages sources liberally and sometimes violently into an exciting new work. As the titular character, Baron Khanazar von Bluebeard, Ludlam leads the company, intensely committed to his dream of creating a third, gentler genital (a clear metaphor for homosexuality). He is brash and charismatic, boldly displaying an electric blue beard and eventually a nest of pubic hair dyed cobalt to match. The audience is enchanted, whooping at all the inside queer jokes and unafraid to break the fourth wall with a game of call-and-response, spurred on by a spirit of drunken revelry and Ludlam’s occasional winks to the crowd. Although his troupe has gained a cult following over the past three years, this is just the beginning. Tripping over a bar stool, your heels accidentally click.

Now you are at Vassar College in a darkened auditorium called Avery Hall, surrounded by twenty-something students, many in trendy, thick-framed glasses and fleece hoodies. You have traveled thirty years to the first spring of the new millennium. Some of the same clothes worn at Christopher’s End remain, a fringed vest here, a worn T-shirt there, though they have been purchased on weekend day trips to trendy vintage stores in a now gentrified East Village. A tall, slim actor, Bradford Louryk, stands on stage, dressed as Klytaemnestra, Aeschylus’s matricidal heroine. The play is Klytaemnestra’s Unmentionables, Louryk’s senior project that pastiches text from Charles Ludlam and his contemporaries as channeled through the most iconic heroines of Greek tragedies. Though a program dropped on the floor reveals that Louryk identifies as male, the performative gender of this character is unclear, transforming his masculine body before your eyes with a tightly laced corset and harsh makeup. Louryk circles a raised porcelain claw-foot tub at the center of the stage, once, twice, three times before plunging into the water, sending a torrent onto the stage, metaphoric, in part, for Phaedra’s suicide. As you stretch to get a better look at the puddle slowly pooling across the boards like molasses, Louryk emerges with a gasp, garments made transparent and clinging to his frame. Your heels accidentally click.

It is early summer, 1984, and you have returned to the Big Apple. A

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Figure 2: Charles Ludlam probably in the mid-1970s. Photographer unknown. Author's collection.

heady potpourri of cigarettes, cologne, and earth permeates your nostrils. Settled into a gallery and performance space called the Limbo Lounge that makes Christopher’s End look high rent, you realize that you are in the East Village during its so-called renaissance. You are vaguely familiar with this period through your appreciation of artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a young Madonna, but this is a tad more down-at-heel than you expected. People are congregated, drinking piss beer, focused on a very narrow stage where Charles Busch is performing in his play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. The audience is engaged and excited, but not without an air of sadness. You think you can see an aging Ludlam watching from a corner of the room, but your eyes are probably

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor playing tricks in the veil of New York haze on a hot night. The play is wild and crass, and a very pretty and lithe Busch is nearly naked, costumed provocatively as an adolescent girl, with a headpiece more reminiscent of John R. Neill’s art nouveau illustrations of Oz than the ancient Near East. Two gym-fit boys posing in loincloths pull Busch, portraying a virgin sacrifice for a succubus, across the stage while trading knife-sharp dialogue that drips with gay innuendo. This reminds you of Ludlam’s Bluebeard; it is somehow different, but you can't quite put your finger on it. As you look at the enraptured audience, you cart help but notice several young men looking gaunt, their cheeks dotted with wine-dark lesions. As the tightly packed, standing-room crowd shifts, a glass falls to the floor and shatters. Time stands still, you lose your balance, and your heels click.

As you open your eyes, you find yourself initially blinded by the sting of bright theatrical lights. You are sitting, cross-legged, among a sea of other audience members on a stage. As your focus settles, you see Taylor Mac in your midst, dressed in a gown of paper coins and a powder-white face awash in messy glitter. His head is shaved and unadorned and his dimples are charming. The humidity makes his dress stick to his lissome frame. You have landed gently on the other side of the globe at the Powerhouse in Brisbane, Australia, during the balmy winter of 2013. Mac is closing a performance of his abridged 20th Century Concert, a cabaret show that mixes hit songs from all ten decades of the last century. Embodying a self-professed stage-worthy representation of himself, Mac discards his male gender to become judy (always lowercase and borrowed from the Judy Garland), a chanteuse who performs in the genre of pastiche, a notion drawn directly from the plays of Ludlam.’ Mac begins to sing Irving Berlin’s 1924 song “All Alone,’ which judy delivers as a comment on Berlins childhood in New York City’s Jewish tenements. Through this lens, the song becomes an ironic statement on the crowded conditions of this neighborhood in the first decade of the twentieth century. You and the other audience members have been called to the stage and then separated by judy into various community groups that populated the tenements: babies, kids, parents, grandparents, teenagers, and neighbors. The audience is admittedly small, as the show was bizarrely billed as a drag act, but those in attendance are enchanted. Each group is assigned a sound to perform, and you have been deemed a wailing baby. As Mac points to your group, you follow the cue and begin to mimic an infant yowl. This is fun. judy continues to croon Berlin’s “Just for a moment you were mine, and then / You seemed to vanish like a dream.” Your heels click once, twice, three

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor times and you disappear, returning to a room of your own. Now, slip off those Ridiculous heels.

Aside from a penchant for queer performance, you might ask, what do these four diverse performers, Ludlam, Busch, Louryk, and Mac, have in common? This brief “historical” narrative, written in an attempt to evoke the Ridiculous theater style, is structured to give you a taste of the four artists who are profiled in this book. Ludlam, the very root of this study, begins a distinct approach to the Ridiculous in the late 1960s setting off a tradition and subsequent legacy that is extended through the performance work of Busch, Louryk, and Mac until the present day. All three of these legatees of Ludlam rely on Ridiculous tenets, including Camp, drag, pastiche, and traditional theater skills—which were all at the core of Ludlam’s original plays—to reinvent the Ridiculous genre as a reflection of their own time(s) and place(s). In the decades since Ludlam’s 1987 death, gay life, culture, and politics in America have changed rapidly. From AIDS, to hate crime, to “Don't ask, don't tell? to the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, as a “gay theater,’ the Ridiculous has kept pace with the times by juxtaposing contemporary social issues with pop culture and extant literature. While the tradition of the Ludlamesque Ridiculous is kept alive, it is transformed and manipulated to fit the missions and talents of individual performers. Examining Ludlam’s life and work help us to see what it was like to synonymously be a gay person and a gay artist from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as how such work and identity-making built a foundation for those who followed in his footsteps as a queer legacy. But how did Ludlam’s Ridiculous differ from his predecessors and peers; and how, where, and why did this particular queer legacy take shape? Let’s start at the beginning; I hear it’s a very good place to start.

Just Plain Ridiculous

The seeds of the Ridiculous theater movement are apparent in the underground films that were a staple of the mid-twentieth-century American subversive art movement. The Ridiculous did not evolve in a vacuum. The West Village of the period was a hotbed of counterculture, producing experimental theater and film. Iconic theaters of the period such as theater giant Richard Schechner’s Performing Garage, Joe Papp’s Public Theater, and Joe Cino’s Caffe Cino produced and sponsored innovative, irreverent, and often queer works that are deeply woven into the distinct

Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor antiauthoritarian culture of the period. In 1964 Cino opened his stage for the premieres of Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright and Robert Patrick’s The Haunted Host, both plays with gay themes. Although Ludlam would eventually become aware of Cino, it had little to do with his own legacy and pursuits, and as a senior at Hofstra University, he was not present for, and was unlikely to be aware of, these productions. So while the Ridiculous was, admittedly, only one facet of queer cultural production of this time and place, it is a crucial one with a distinct genealogy. Whereas Ludlam’s contemporaries like Cino and their legatees have received due critical attention in books like theater historians James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal’s Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies; the Ridiculous and its heirs still remain largely absent.’ So where and why did the Ridiculous develop in this cradle of queer creativity?