Queer Decadence: Decline as Radical Refusal in Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre

Guest post: Sean F. Edgecomb

The Graduate Center/College of Staten Island,

The City University of New York   

Fig. 1: Charles Ludlam and other members of the Ridiculous Theatrical company in the mid-1970s. Photo: Unknown. Courtesy of the Laurence Senelick Theatre Collection.

‘Homosexuality is the desire for ones’ own sex. But it is also the desire for something else that is not connoted. This desire is resistance to the norm’. Monique Wittig [1]

From the late 1960s until 1987, playwright, actor and designer, Charles Ludlam, rose to fame as a glittering queer star in New York City’s downtown theatre scene. As a new wave of avant-garde performance firmly took hold below Manhattan’s 14th Street, opportunities for contemporary audiences to attend cutting-edge theatrical productions were abundant: from Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village (founded 1961), to Richard Schechner’s Performing Garage (founded 1968) in SoHo, and Joe Cino’s Café Cino (founded 1958) in the West Village. Ludlam became a key player in this coterie with his repertory troupe, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company (founded 1967). The company appeared in a variety of temporary spaces in lower Manhattan, and established its permanent home at a theatre in Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square in 1978 – just a few strides from the site of the Stonewall Riots, a watershed event that helped to set gay liberation into motion, only nine years before.[2] 

Ludlam’s plays and performances (in which he cast himself as the leading player more often than not) arguably helped to establish queer theatre as a postmodern genre in the United States through a style deemed ‘Theatre of the Ridiculous’. In context, Ludlam defined queerness broadly, using it as an inclusive reference to the LGBT+ community as well as a performed radical rejection of heteronormative culture as monolithic. As a new American form, The Ridiculous unapologetically juxtaposed camp, drag, theatrical traditions such as clowning and commedia dell’arte, a celebration of the erotic and the grotesque (sometimes layered) and the pastiche of high culture (novels, plays and cinema) with low popular culture (B Movies, advertisements and crude jokes). Ludlam’s Ridiculous theatre took delight in ribald histrionics, word play (including puns and double-entendre), excess on a budget (both aesthetically and textually), sexual humor, and a commitment to employing camp to ridicule heteronomativity ‘as motivated by rage’. [3] This is what prompts me to propose that the Ridiculous coalesced in the second half of the twentieth century as a theatre of decadence.  

Fig. 2: Charles Ludlam in the dressing room, wearing a breast plate for his role in Salammbô. Photo: Sylvia Plachy. Courtesy of the Laurence Senelick Theatre Collection.

One might assume that my use of decadence is in reference to Ludlam’s tendency to revel in excess (literary, histrionic, aesthetic or via sexual exploits). My approach, however, is no less pluralistic than my understanding of queer as multitudinous and contextually adaptive, but it does pull from distinct sources. Laurence Senelick makes reference to a habitual definition of decadence as a presupposition of ‘decline and fall, decrepitude and etiolation’. While this approach could be used to unpack Ludlam’s rise during a period of economic decline (namely NYC in the 1970s),[4] his reliance on recycling trash to make art, or even a conservative, public rejection of his queer work as taboo or deviant, I suggest another option: following Ludlam’s obsession with double-entendre, I invoke the transitive verb form of decline as a form resistance, or a ‘refusal to undertake, undergo, engage in or comply with’.[5] On this blog, Adam Alston gestures to decadence as both ‘process’ and ‘a practice’ of performed cultural politics.[6] Scholar Richard Dellamora extends the concept of decadence as queerly embodying a ‘utopian aspiration’, and suggests that in a liberal context it can also infer ‘the possibility of social transformation’.[7] A Ludlamesque pastiche of these innovative approaches to decadence as actively performative rather than simply ontological (decadence understood as being and doing) demonstrates how a queer refusal to engage in a world that oppresses marginalized people does not ensure destruction, but rather reveals creative possibilities for social equity through worldmaking. 

Ludlam’s theatre welcomed anyone willing to attend and engage in the performances (a sort of invitation to enter the metaphoric closet and play make-believe), as it simultaneously used camp to redirect the audience to view the plays, and thereafter the world, through a queer lens.[8] Through his work, I suggest that Ludlam refused to engage in stories that forwarded heteronormativity by playfully (and sometimes violently) inverting it – whether introducing a ‘third genital’ allegory for homosexuality in Bluebeard: A Melodrama in Three Acts (premiered 1970), burlesquing a straight romance through drag in Camille: A Travesty on La Dame aux Camélias (premiered 1973), or in consistently striving to make contemporary work ‘of [his] time’, conceiving plays that unapologetically drew upon classical and/or canonical inspiration to speak to a particular cultural moment in the community, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Salammbô: An Erotic Tragedy (premiered 1985).[9]

LUDLAM’S QUEER DECLINE

 The twenty-nine scripts that make up Ludlam’s oeuvre were not exclusively ‘gay plays’ (Ludlam only portrayed a gay character once as the fashion designer Caprice in the play of the same name (1976)), but rather queer performances, or, in Ludlam’s own words, ‘those that embrace more variation’, viscerally interpreting queerness as ‘a splash of cold water’.[10] While Ludlam’s often contradictory essays reject the labeling of his theatre as ‘gay’, because he saw it as diluting itself through inconsistent, agenda-driven politics, he admits that his queer intention was to invite audiences to reconsider (or decline) the mid-century, homophobic value systems that they had grown up with – believing that these ideologies (whether religious, nationalistic or class-driven) were morally concrete and beyond reproach or questioning. Moreover, while Ludlam’s humor was often base and brilliantly outré, the intention was completely serious – to use theatrical traditions to make meaningful art that, in turn, made people think. 

Playwright, author and scholar, Leon Katz, remembered Ludlam’s clear intensity of purpose in refusing to comply with the conventional, and alluded to his commitment to queering the normative: 

[Ludlam] would say things that were in conventional terms outrageous. His style of thinking was habitually to invert the commonplace. His mind literally worked that way. He wasn’t just being paradoxical. He inverted the cliché. But it was never with the Oscar Wildean tone of ‘Aren’t I bright?’ or ‘Isn’t this an interesting way of putting words together?’ He simply said what he meant.[11]

 It was this ‘inversion’, to which Katz refers, that became the foundation on which Ludlam could build his distinct approach to the Ridiculous – radically refusing to uphold the status quo in favor of destabilizing then reordering hegemonic expectations of the straight world into something new and undeniably queer.

Fig. 3: Ludlam in the title role of Camille in a gown that revealed his chest hair, embraced by paramour Armand Duval (Bill Vehr). Photo: John Stern. Author’s Collection.

BRIEF CASE STUDIES: THE PLAYS

In Bluebeard, Ludlam pastiched a variety of gothic, literary sources, including Perrault’s fairy-tale (1697), Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), and Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), developing them into a contemporary un-morality play set in a phallic-styled lighthouse in Maine. The play refuted the heterosexual matrix – or the psychoanalytic notion that sex, gender and desire are all biologically linked toward reproduction – to offer an alternative where sexuality could exist simply for pleasure, and promiscuity was an avenue for freedom, self-expression, and a mode of corporeal networking. This was expressed in the plot, where a mad scientist, Khanazar Von Bluebeard (played by Ludlam), obsessed over making a ‘new and gentle genital’ as a metaphor for gay sex and unmitigated pleasure.[12]

The act of queer decline as communicated through physical comedy was particularly evident in an infamous scene between Bluebeard and Miss Cubbidge, a malapropism-spewing woman of size and of a certain age (originally played by actress and RTC troupe member, Lola Pashalinski). In Act II, Bluebeard and Cubbidge engage in ‘a scene of unprecedented eroticism’.[13] The carnality of the scene histrionically ridiculed same-sex seduction, with sweaty mewling, animalistic posing, and concluding with Bluebeard pulling a fez hat out of Cubbidge’s vagina. In addition to presenting heterosexual coitus as an act removed from biological reproduction, it inversely de-eroticized straight pornography, reframing it from an act of sexual pleasure, to one of farce.

In Camille, Ludlam, in the lead role of consumptive courtesan, Marguerite Gautier, rejected concrete gender norms through his use of gender-fuck drag, which violently scrambled gender traits into a singular queer expression. Ludlam achieved this by wearing a low-cut 19th century gown that framed his hirsute chest as a celebration of artificiality and masculine sexuality.  Contemporary accounts reported that even with this gender-muddling approach, Ludlam’s incredible acting made the audience fully embrace the juxtaposition, with critic Misha Berson describing how ‘Ludlam’s Marguerite is both terribly funny and terrifically moving, both ethereally beautiful and grotesque, both real and artificial, both a man in a dress and a woman’.[14] In using camp to help guide the audience’s perspective, Ludlam’s performance refused to acknowledge gender and theatrical genre as concrete structures, introducing the idea that both contradiction and pluralism can be generative modes of critique in a queer context.

Finally, in Salammbô, inspired by Flaubert’s sweeping (and undeniably decadent) historical novel, set in ancient Carthage, Ludlam refused to be shamed for presenting overt same-sex desire on stage and subsequently encouraging the same in the attending audience. While debauched humor had always been a hallmark of his work, this was particularly controversial in a period when HIV/AIDS had shuttered many of New York City’s queer spaces out of fear-driven homophobia as the city and national governments refused to acknowledge, let alone face, the growing crisis.

Aside from his trademark reliance on puns and sexual humor (and what Ludlam referred to as reveling in ‘all forbidden theatrical conventions’), in Salammbô  Ludlam filled the stage with scantily clad bodybuilders sourced from local gyms across the city.[15] Beyond eye candy, the hunky amateurs symbolized a celebration of eroticism through the exposed male form. Ludlam noted of the play, ‘[this] is one for the boys, believe me! We decided that we gays have been through enough in the last couple of years. We are going to give them a little something’.[16]  Salammbô reminded audiences that queer desire, kinship and gay liberation continued, even in the midst of so much death, including Ludlam’s own tragic passing from AIDS-related pneumonia only two short years later.

CONTEXT: CAMP AS REFUSAL

The 1970s heralded considerable progress for civil rights in the U.S. – continuing the fight for Black equality, and ushering in Second-wave feminism and the Gay Liberation Movement – and resulted in an urban culture of visibility with renewed opportunities for marginalized Americans. This was reflected in the theatre, and Ludlam’s troupe continued to attract a diverse audience, from the West Village and even uptown, lured in by Ludlam’s brilliant scripts, charisma, and establishment as a cultural icon in vogue with how New York’s City’s cultural elite wanted to view themselves.

While Ludlam’s audience was diverse (a cosmopolitan milieu of mixed sexuality, gender, race and class), his plays remained steadfastly queer in tone and intention, with his contemporary, filmmaker James Bidgood, noting that ‘[Ludlam’s] were very strange plays . . . if you were really straight and watching them you would have trouble following them’.[17] Bidgood’s recollection suggests a potential exclusion of non-queer audience members, but Ludlam stressed that his theatre was always intended for varied spectators, allowing people to join the fold not only through avenues of desire and queer kinship, but also allyship. In this sense, Ludlam’s Ridiculous simultaneously rejected moralistic conservatism more traditionally associated with heteronormative boundaries, while also didactically allowing anyone to change their perspective about queerness through entertainment and shared intimacy rather than proselytizing or rhetoric. While Ludlam’s invitation was open, such an opportunity for experiencing communitas must have been particularly invigorating for the LGBT+ community, forging a public visibility and solidarity that had not yet existed in the United States.

Ludlam’s approach to this queer theatre-for-change, which took shape as a rejection of normativity in the form of community-building rather than grass-roots politics, was achieved through his particular understanding and application of camp. Camp has long been associated with decadence in the 20th century, particularly illuminated in Susan Sontag’s now notorious essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’(1964), which conspicuously names ‘decadence’ as a key tenet in her methodological framework to define the term.[18] While Sontag’s essay had often been misread as assigning camp as a subjective aesthetic (as opposed to an ‘aestheticism’),  in truth, it argues that camp is ‘a sensibility […] a private code, a badge of identity’.[19] Sontag’s idea aligns with Ludlam’s, who articulately set out his own ideas on camp in an essay of the same name:

Camp is all about something in the action or the dialogue or the dress – even in the sets – which in itself is not necessarily unbelonging, but in which relationship to everything is out of line, on its own. Camp is a way of looking at things, never what’s looked at.[20]

It was through this application of camp – a guiding perspective – that Ludlam ridiculed what he explicitly named ‘the straight world’, where he saw ‘no vision’ for queer radical possibility. In pointedly declaring that ‘camp is motivated by rage’, Ludlam expressed his frustration with the limitations that he felt were imposed on him by the radiating hegemony of mid-century American culture.[21] Thus, as demonstrated in the brief case studies of the plays above, camp in itself became a form of decadence; a refusal to fall under the influence of heteronormative social constructs.

In his essay ‘Afterword: Decadent Taste’, David Weir dismisses camp as an adjunct of decadence, forwarding Sontag’s misinterpretation of objects that may be considered ‘part of  the canon of Camp’.[22] Weir further argues that it is a ‘deliberate antagonism’ at the core of camp that distances it from decadence (which is admittedly reflected in Ludlam’s radical queer refusal of heteronormativity), but I suggest that Weir’s interpretation narrowly restrains camp as pessimistic.[23] This view disregards Ludlam’s aspirational use of camp as didactic, hopeful and even utopic. Moreover, I suggest that camp and decadence are just as shape-shifting and malleable as any queer theoretical constructs, and variably dependent on both their queer origin and dissemination. Thus, limiting the definition of such terms by declaring what they do not do, rather than exploring the potential for what they might do, lies in stark opposition to the intersectional queer potential of camp and decadence introduced herein.

Fig. 4: The seduction scene from Bluebeard, featuring the unbridled passion of The Baron and Miss Cubbidge (Charles Ludlam and Lola Pashalinski), 1970. Audio and photos: Leandro Katz. Source: https://vimeo.com/87693838.

CONCLUSION

For nearly twenty years Charles Ludlam perfected his own brand of queer refusal with his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York City, employing camp as a method with which to decline heteronormative cultural aphorisms in order to conceive queer community. Ludlam’s theatre contemporary Charles Busch, who carries forward a legacy of the Ridiculous tradition, notes that Ludlam ‘had this magical aura of decadence’, even though the Ridiculous doyen largely avoided using the term in his own critical reflections, perhaps fearing that decadence could be incorrectly mistaken for a lack of relevance.[24] As the Ridiculous genre has continued to thrive through its subversive commitment to reject heteronormative structures with camp performance (in work by individuals like Busch, Justin Vivian Bond, Erin Markey, Taylor Mac, and theatre troupes Split Britches and Fake Friends), it is essential for scholars to continue critically reflecting upon Ludlam’s texts and performances, perhaps revealing new generative ideas about the possibilities for decadence when interpreted as queer action.

NOTES 

[1] Monique Wittig, ‘Paradigm’, in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts, Critical Texts (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 114-21. 

[2] It’s apocryphal to claim the Stonewall Riots as the genesis of Gay Liberation when several events of radical queer defiance preceded them, including a gay sit-in at bar Julius’ in New York City (1966), the trans-led Compton’s Cafeteria riots in San Francisco (1966), and the police raid of Black Cat Bar in Los Angeles (1967). 

[3] Charles Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly. The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 254. 

[4]  In the 1970s ‘New York City’s economy was rocked by the decline of manufacturing and the flight of the white middle class to the suburbs’.[4] Kim Phillips-Fein, ‘The Legacy of the 1970s Fiscal Crisis’, The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/legacy-1970s-fiscal-crisis/, accessed 21 April 2021. 

[5] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decline?src=search-dict-box, accessed 21 April 2021. 

[6] Adam Alston, ‘Staging Decadence: An invitation’, Staging Decadence Blog, 2 October 2020, https://www.stagingdecadence.com/blog/staging-decadence-an-invitation, accessed 21 April 2021. 

[7] Richard Dellamora, ‘Productive Decadence: “The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought”: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau and Oscar Wilde’, New Literary History, 35 (4) (Autumn 2004), 529-46, 529.

[8] Ludlam contemporary, Stefan Brecht, noted of the Ridiculous participant: ‘His personality is like the make-believe identity a child assumes in play with others or an actor assumes in the theatre and is as real as these – accepted (felt by him and projected outward in activity), real not in the sense of corresponding to any true given nature but as being his free product expressed in action’. Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre (Frankfurt: Suhrkamo, 1978), 30. 

[9] Scourge of Human Folly, 221. 

[10] Ibid, 229. 

[11] David Kaufman, Ridiculous! The Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2002), 276. 

[12] Charles Ludlam, ‘Bluebeard’, The Complete Plays (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 118. 

[13] Ibid., 128. 

[14] Misha Berson, ‘A Moving and Funny Camille’, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 28 February 1990. 

[15] Scourge of Human Folly, 227. 

[16] Ibid., 133. 

[17] Sean F. Edgecomb, ‘Camping out with James Bidgood: the Auteur of Pink Narcissus Tells All’, Bright Lights Film Journal, May (2006). https://brightlightsfilm.com/camping-james-bidgood-auteur-pink-narcissus-tells/#.YJAxCrVKg2w, accessed 21 April 2021. 

[18] Susan Sontag, ‘Notes On “Camp”’ available at: https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf, accessed 22 April 2021. 

[19] Ibid. 

[20] Scourge of Human Folly, 226- 27. 

[21] Ibid., 254. 

[22] David Weir, ‘Afterword: Decadent Taste’, in Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (eds), Decadence and the Senses (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), 222. 

[23] Ibid. 

[24] ‘Charles Busch on Ludlam in “Camille”’, Backstage.com, 22 March 2012, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/charles-busch-charles-ludlam-camille-52512/, accessed 2 May 2021.