The Ridiculous Sound of One Hand Clapping: Placing Ludlam's "Gay" Theatre in Space and Time

The Ridiculous Sound of One Hand Clapping: Placing Ludlam's "Gay" Theatre in Space and Time GREGORY W. BREDBECK I: LOCALIZING LUDLAM Let's have something gay, dahling. Marguerite in Ludlam's Camille' In 1967 Charles Ludlam mounted the first production of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Conquest a/the Universe; or, When Queens Collide; in 1969 he mounted the company's first award-winning effort, The Grand Tarot, A Masque, which prompted the Village Voice to present Ludlam and the Ridiculous with an Obie for distinguished achievement in the Off-Broadway Theatre. In 1970, The Ridiculous produced its major critical success to date, Bluebeard; A Melodrama in Three Acts, at Christopher's End, "a sleazy gay bar'" (with an active back room) on the waterfront of the West Village. In 1974 Ludlam signed the lease for a theatre off Sheridan Square, which ended the transient movements of the troupe through the bars and movie houses of the lower East Side and Wesi Village and settled it directly opposite the Stonewall Inn, which only five years earlier had become the already mythic origin of gay liberation in America, the site of the "hairpin drop heard 'round the world.'" Geographically and temporally Ludlam's development of The Ridiculous coincides perfectly with the germination of contemporary gay and lesbian politics in America, and I would like to treat this coincidence as more than simply a coincidence. For Ludlam's plays everywhere ask that they be read as specific engagements of the styles, languages, and politics of the New York gay community in the late 60S and early 70S. In Ludlam's first major production, Big Hotel (1966), the Mandarin is imprisoned, as Martok tells him, "Because you bathed in the Sacred Pool of the St. Mark's Baths" (CP, 21) - the St. Mark's being the most famous of the Manhattan gay bath houses, the same one which, along with its counterpart the Continental Baths, was only superfiModem Drama, 39 (1996) 64 Ludlam's "Gay" Theatre cially disguised as the setting for Terrence McNally's The Ritz. In Ludlam's second play, a vertiginous refraction of Marlowe's Tamburlaine through the images of Sci-Fi B flicks called Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide: A Tragedy (1967), Zabina, Queen of Mars, is poisoned by a "cake ... flavored with Pyrinate A-200" (CP, 40), a common over-the-counter remedy for the crab-lice associated with the free-wheeling sexual mores of the gay . male community in the 60s and 70S. In what many consider along with Galas and Irma Yep to compose Ludlam's grand triple crown, Camille: A Travesty on La Dame aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas Fils (1973), the heroine and her love share this moment: MAROUERITE Dh, come on Saint Gaudens, come and get your MDA. SAINTOAUDENS What's MDA? MAROUERITE Monsieur, don't ask. (CP 228) The humor derives here from the fact that while MDA can theoretically mean "Monsieur, Don't Ask," a more common connection in the mind of the New York gay male of the time would probably have been to the popular party drug MDA, a substance valued for its supposed ability to intensify male orgasm and to bolster spirits for long nights at discos. What is most striking about these moments is not that they assume the existence of a gay audience - what could one expect other than that for plays debuting, some of them, in gay bars? - but the limited range of "gayness" which makes up this audience. These jokes are ones which play solely to the urban gay men populating the some thirty blocks that make up Ludlam's world, the West Village of Manhattan. This specificity is highlighted by one of the more famous moments of gay double-entendre in Ludlam's canon, again from Camille: MARGUERITE I'm cold. Nanine, throw another faggot in the fire! NANINE (Waking) There are no more faggots in the hc;>use. (Falls asleep) MARGUERITE (Plaintively looking out at the audience) No faggots in the house? Open the window, Nanine. See if there are any in the street. (CP, 246) The faggotless country house in France, the hovel with no sticks, blends seamlessly...