Drag! -- Ridiculous Theatrical Company

"A boldly played drag character can have the audience roaring with laughter one instant, and wiping tears away the next."

ABOUT

MEMBERS

PLAYS

ABOUT

Founded by Charles Ludlam after his split from John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous, The Ridiculous Theatrical company transcended transvetite, drag, and gay theatre. It is legend for its mix of theatrical tradition and the avant-garde... and is the brainchild of the genius of Charles Ludlam. Until his death at age 44 of pneumonia as a complication of AIDS, Charles Ludlum maintained utter complete creative control of the company acting as writer and director for nearly every production.

He received six Obies before his death, and even some mainstream success in sitcoms and a movie. But mainstream was never his cup of tea, as is evident by the fact that he refused opportunities to turn his musical Corn into a Broadway production and, later, to move The Mystery of Irma Vep uptown.

At the time he arrived in New York in 1964, the underground theater scene' mostly homosexual nature liberated his mind on every level. In Bluebeard, his first play, the mad scientist Ludlam played was searching for a “third genital.” In the biography Ridiculous!, David Kaufman suggests that Ludlam was doing the same thing in his own life. He had, for instance, a rule that every play he wrote contain at least one crossdressing/transgender role.

The story of Ludlam's genius and folly is elequently told in Ridiculous! Creating theater in an environment of competing artists and battling cultural upheaval of the 1960s was not easy to do without failure. It is also the story of a gay man who moved to the Village and participated in all the debauchery that involved: smoking dope, visiting the baths, working on plays while waiting for tricks to come into his room.

Ludlam did not want to be pinned down or labeled as a gay writer or his theater to be labeled as a gay theater. He saw such labels as limiting. He even saw "camp", the style of comedy he most used to criticize society, as a derogetory term used to describe gay theater when the same style would be termed "biting social satire" in a straight theater.

Everett Quinton, his lover, tried to no avail to keep the company going after Ludlam died in 1987. "It was a question of money, not the work," he says. "I loved the work. I wish there was a way to get back to do it again. But it was just driving me crazy. It was just a constant drain on my soul. The work stopped being fun. It stopped being about work and started being about drawing crowds. But even if we drew crowds, we still couldn't afford to pay for it. I called it 'running like hell to stay behind.' "

The Ridiculous had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, as much as $85,000 one year, although that was a high ebb. When it dropped below $30,000 the company was forced to move from its theater where the rent was $5,000 monthly. After a two-year struggle, Quinton decided to throw in the towel. "I just thought, 'I can't do this anymore. I have to make some changes, or I'm going to jump out the window.' It was inevitable that we would fold."

MEMBERS
Charles Ludlam Everett Quinton Black-Eyed Susan Larry Rèe Richard Goldberger Lohr Wilson Lola Pashalinski Dude/Superdude Badomi DeCesare Ryan Landry	1973 - Obie Award for Distinguished Performances in Corn and Camille 1985 - Drama Desk Award for The Mystery of Irma Vep 1985 - Obie Award for Ensemble Performances in The Mystery of Irma Vep 1987 - Obie Award for Sustained Achievement for Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company

	Everett Quinton	Charles Ludlam

Conquest of the Universe was Charles Ludlam’s second play for the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, the avant-garde theatre troupe founded by Ron Tavel and John Vaccaro in 1966. During rehearsals, Ludlam clashed so severely with director Vaccaro that he was fired from his own play and left with seven other key members of the group. While Vaccaro hired a new cast from the Warhol Factory’s stable of superstars and resumed rehearsals, Ludlam formed a new company from his cast of defectors and christened it the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. In the fall of 1967 Conquest of the Universe opened as a Theatre [no longer Playhouse] of the Ridiculous production under Vaccaro and ran successfully for most of the next year. Meanwhile, Ludlam opened a competing production of Conquest, retitled curiously enough When Queens Collide, and thereby launched his own successful career as a one of the most significant pioneers of New York's emerging Off-Off Broadway scene. Drawn from Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as well as scores of snippets from other classical dramas, old movies and popular culture as a whole, Conquest of the Universe revolves around an intergalactic battle for power, using sexual intercourse on the planet Mars as a metaphor for "affairs of state".

PLAYS
By Ludlam: Big Hotel - 1967 Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide - 1968 Turds in Hell - 1969 The Grand Tarot - 1969 Bluebeard - 1970 Eunuchs of the Forbidden City - 1979 Corn - 1972 Camille - 1973 Hot Ice - 1974 Stage Blood - 1975 Tabu Tableaux - 1975 Caprice - 1976 Jack and the Beanstalk Der Ring Gott Farblonjet The Ventriloquist's Wife Utopia, Incorporated The Enchanted Pig Elephant Woman A Christmas Carol Reverse Psychology - 1980 Love's Tangled Web - 1981 Secret Lives of the Sexists Exquisite Torture Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde The Mystery of Irma Vep - 1984 Salammbo - 1985 Galas - 1983 The Artificial Jungle - 1986 How to Write a Play "Whores Of Babylon"