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Charles Ludlam Lives!: Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
No full textPlaywright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s. Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his influence has changed. Although his Ridiculous Theatrical Company shut its doors, the Ludlamesque Ridiculous has continued to thrive and remain a groundbreaking genre, maintaining its relevance and potency by metamorphosing along with changes in the LGBTQ community.
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/visualandperformingarts-books/1024/thumbnail.jp
Charles Ludlam lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the queer legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
No full textThe Ridiculous Performance of Taylor Mac
No full textTaylor Mac is a contemporary actor and playwright who carries on the tradition of Charles Ludlam’s (1943–87) Ridiculous Theatre for the twenty-first century. One of the first fully realized queer theatre forms in the United States, the Stonewall-era Ridiculous juxtaposed the modernist tradition of the avant-garde with camp, clowning, and drag. By layering Ludlam’s signature clown with the alternative persona of the fool, Mac provocatively reinvents the Ridiculous, employing it as a tool for political satire. This essay traces Mac’s development as a neo-Ridiculous artist in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, analyzing four of his foundational works from this period: The Face of Liberalism (2003), Red Tide Blooming (2006), The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (2006), and The Young Ladies of . . . (2007). In these key performances, Mac seeks both to resurrect and transform predecessors like Ludlam, providing an example of queer legacy in action
Performing Midsommar: Sweden Nationalism, Folkloric Pageantry, and the Political Power of Symbolic Divergence
Full text linkHistory of the Ridiculous, 1960-1987
No full textCharles Ludlam’s raucous parodies launched a gay stage genr
Taylor Mac
No full textTaylor Mac is a queer performance artist and playwright whose politically charged work is inspired by the Ridiculous tradition of Charles Ludlam and Ethyl Eichelberger. Mac employs drag in performance and uses the gender pronoun “judy.” After a series of solo cabaret shows, Mac gained fame with large-scale, queer durational shows including The Lily’s Revenge (2009) and A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (2016). As a playwright, Mac’s original play Gary (2019) premiered on Broadway and received seven Tony nominations. Mac is a MacArthur Genius and the recipient of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, a Guggenheim Award, and two Obie Awards
The Palaces of Ludwig II
No full textIn 1864, at the age of 18, Prince Ludwig Otto Friedrich Wilhelm of the House of Wittelsbach ascended to the throne of the Kingdom of Bavaria. The life of Ludwig II was shaped by a complicated childhood split between militaristic training required by his father and his penchant for Teutonic legends instilled, in part, by his doting mother. As modern Germany began to take shape in the mid-19th century through its unification, Ludwig\u27s title became little more than symbolic. Adolescent Ludwig, who first saw the work performed in Munich, was obsessed. The Bavarian royal family had long associated their dynasty with the symbol of the swan, most evident at their summer palace of Hohenschwangau Schloss, where the avian symbol was ubiquitous in the heraldic décor, from chandeliers and upholstery to Romantic murals
“Not Just Any Woman”: Bradford Louryk, a Legacy of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatre for the Twenty-First Century
No full textQueer Rurality and the Closet Door Ajar on the Contemporary American Stage
No full textWhile LGBTQ+ narratives have become an established part of national storytelling in contemporary theatre in the United States, considerably more often than not such plays and productions focus on urban queer experiences rather than the rural. Many queer theorists, including J. Jack Halberstam, have argued that such a lack of representation is grounded in the false notion of a “metronormativity” suggesting that queers must migrate to the city in order to survive. Through critical readings of two recent revival productions of canonical American works, Christopher Alden’s Peter Pan (2017) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2018), this essay demonstrates how queer rurality was presented conceptually and dramaturgically, reconfiguring ideologies of nationalism that would see the urban/rural as a polarized binary. Drawing on the author’s personal experience, the essay extends Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational theory of the closet (in/out) through its original concept of “closet ajar,” critically unpacking the imagined constructs of these productions where rural queers are alternatively presented as a part of the community at large. The essay argues that these productions open possibilities for future representations of queer intersectional rurality in American performance (and beyond) and scholarship across disciplines
Unformed Beings in Flight: Feminist/Queer Hope in Dramaturgical Re-imaginings of The Salem Witch Trials
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