Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company: Critical Analyses of 29 Plays (review)

In Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Rick Roemer brings increased critical attention to playwright/actor/director Charles Ludlam, hoping to solidify Ludlam’s place in American theatre history and to spark more productions of his twenty-nine plays. With this goal in sight, Roemer begins by interrogating the form of the Ridiculous, looking at influences ranging from comic books to opera to Hollywood B movies to Aristophanes to Dadaism. He coins a new term—“ridiculosity” (7)—to describe the theatrical idiom in which Ludlam worked, considering the Ridiculous as a form of camp. This approach allows Roemer to argue that, by “incorporating discarded elements of culture [and] revamping them in line with [the] sensibility [of] an excluded caste,” Ludlam provided himself and other homosexuals “with a basis for an identity” in a moment when the gay rights movement was coalescing (45).

For Roemer, this aesthetic of reappropriation positioned Ludlam among other 1960s and ’70s downtown artists whose work has been discussed in terms of the avant-garde. Despite Ludlam’s own distaste for the avant-garde label, Roemer notes key similarities: “Like Ludlam, each of these movements and their masters produced a manifesto, or doctrine, which they published as a blueprint for their style. Their theatres were not based on life events or situations, but rather employed distortions, dream-like visuals, and disconnected language in their theatrical visions” (24). Roemer sees Ludlam’s work as both a product of and voice for his own time.

Roemer’s book is organized into seven chapters, the first of which is a condensed biography of Ludlam. His story begins at a fair in Mineola, New York, where, at age 6, Charles became enchanted by a Punch and Judy show. This formative moment was followed by another: Ludlam’s education at Hofstra University, where he was discouraged from appearing onstage because of his over-the-top style of acting. Despite, or perhaps because of, this failure, Ludlam “was truly at the right place at the right time” (15) when he moved to Greenwich Village after college. It was here that he first came into contact with the new wave of theatrical and artistic production that was taking place in the 1960s and that pushed him toward the Ridiculous style that he would later develop.

In chapter 2, “The Roots of Ridiculosity,” Roemer builds an “impressive and influential lineage” (17) for Ludlam’s work, tracing its origins to Aristophanes, who deployed comedy as a means of social criticism, to commedia dell’arte, which emphasized the actor’s personality in performance, and to Moliere, who wrote his works for a specific company of players. Roemer then turns his attention to more recent history, drawing connections between the Theatre of the Ridiculous and forms of popular entertainment like music hall, burlesque, and vaudeville, seeing in Ludlam’s work a similar type of mass appeal. Roemer also offers a detailed consideration of the avant-garde movements that directly preceded Ludlam’s debut, suggesting that, like expressionism and Dadaism, ridiculosity was interested in “extreme artistic exploration” (25). For Ludlam, this exploration concerned gay identity through the use of drag. As Roemer notes, drag queens were important features of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s 1969 production of Big Hotel and of the Stonewall riots of that same year. In his estimation, “the extent of the visibility of the drag queen was responsible, at least in part, for the unleashing of gay power in 1969” (30).

The third chapter, “Ridiculosity in Theory,” attempts to construct a theoretical lens for the book’s critical analysis of ridiculosity. Here, Roemer engages the writings of scholars like Judith Butler and Jill Dolan to emphasize the importance of gender performativity in Ludlam’s theatrical practice. Roemer also discusses theories of camp, tracing the history of the term from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964) through its many iterations and revisions since then. Citing camp’s esteem for otherwise valueless junk, Roemer reads...