Interview: Charles Ludlam

Interview: Charles Ludlam CharlesLudlam was an earlymember of The Play-Houseof theRidiculous, which producedhis Big Hotel andConquest of the Universe. A playwrightactor -director,hefounded (in 1967) The Ridiculous TheatricalCompany, which has performedCaprice, Bluebeard, Camille, Hot Ice, Stage Blood andDer Ring Gott Farblonjet, among others. CharlesLudlam recently has been seen in cabaretperformances of The Ventriloquist's Wife with his dummy Walter Ego. This interview was taped by Gautam Dasguptain March 1978. Gautam Dasgupta: How would you define the term "Theatre of the Ridiculous"? Charles Ludlam: It has to do with humor and unhinging the pretensions of serious art. It comes out of the dichotomy between academic and expressive art, and the idea of a theatre that re-values things. It takes what is considered worthless and transforms it into high art. The Ridiculous theatre was always a concept of high art that came out of an aesthetic which was so advanced it really couldn't be appreciated. It draws its authority from popular art, an art that doesn't need any justification beyond its power to provide pleasure. Sympathetic response is part of its audience. Basically for me, and for twentieth-century art, it's always been a problem of uncovering sources; it proceeds by discoveries. In my case it was based on a rigorous re-evaluation of everything. Like yesterday, I was working on a sculpture, and Bill Vehr [an actor in Ludlam's company] stood over me and corrected me every time I did something that was in good taste. It's really an exercise to try to go beyond limitations and taste, which is a very aural, subjective and not a very profound concept for art. And to admit the world in 69 a way that hasn't been pre-censored. For instance, a handy definition for avant-garde art is that it's in beige-black-white-and-gray. Ridiculous theatre is in color; it's hedonistic. Different artists define it their own way, but basically it's alchemy, it's the transformation of what is in low esteem into the highest form of expression. GD: Your early academic training in the theatre was rather traditional, wasn't it? CL: I was a theatre major at Hofstra, and did the classics, staged and acted in them, and the rest. GD: Was there a disillusionment with the naturalistic (or less-expressive) theatre that led you to the Ridiculous style? CL: Well, naturalistic theatre is a very recent innovation, a corrective device, and it wasn't the end of anything. It was a fashion to do things naturally. You can't really perform an unnatural act, unless you claim to have supernatural powers. So the whole idea of something being natural becomes a very oppressive concept; it's shallow. Gradually, through training with Stanislavski teachers, I realized that they wanted me to behave in a civilized manner in a room, and not do anything extraordinary. But everything I'm interested in is extraordinary. GD: The technique of the Ridiculous is, of course, closer to expressionistic theatre or earlier modes of highly stylized theatre. CL: Yes, and it seems now as if I wrote my way through history. I've written plays that were trying to re-value techniques from various periods. But ultimately, that is an academic approach, and modernism isn't about being academic; it is about being primitive. And becoming primitive isn't easy when you've been over-educated, over-civilized. Another fact is that all modernism was born in the theatre. Every painting technique, everything we associate with modernism-for instance, Jackson Pollock's "scene-painting" techniques; and Salvador Dali's dreamscapes is like looking at a cyclorama, a barren landscape. Everything about naturalism is, in a sense, a distortion, because they (Zola, et al.) were reacting against the theatre of Sarah Bernhardt and others, and it made a mass movement. But finally it became too selective: it set out to prove a point, and proving a point is working from a preconception, and that is academic. Concept and execution is academic; going crazy and committing an atrocity is more modern. In the case of the Ridiculous, it is the only avant-garde movement that...