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118 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
specifically of Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company on the west side of
Greenwich Village, using it as a means for clarifying what lesbian performance at
WOW in the East Village is not. Since then, the tortuous experience of the
Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s heterosexist production of Ludlam’s play Irma
Vep has jolted me into a reconsideration of what Ludlam’s theatre is not.
Subtitled “A Penny Dreadful,” Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep is a
pastiche of popular, sensationalistic Victorian plots to which he adds
recognizable touches from Dracula, the Sherlock Holmes tale Hound of the
Baskervilles, and Hollywood films. The action takes place at Mandacrest, a
mansion on the English Moors, where a new wife has come to replace the
enigmatic and recently deceased woman whose portrait dominates the living room
—clearly a reference to Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The play’s four male characters
and four female characters are all played by the same two male actors in a tour
de force of disguise, impersonation, and breathtakingly rapid costume changes
(Plate 11).
The palpable desire of two men for each other that permeated Camille, and
drove the original production of Irma Vep in which Ludlam played Lady Enid to
Everett Quinton’s Lord Edgar, was utterly absent from the Milwaukee Repertory
Theatre’s production. 10 Instead, the actors maintained their status as traditionally
masculine men foregrounding their ability as actors in a kind of competitive duel
of caricature constructions. They never touched at all suggestively and the stage
kiss called for in the script was not executed. The intelligent, lovelorn Lady Enid
came across as a dithering frump. The touch of disdain these manly men
projected at having to play women’s parts (a touch required in order to maintain
enough distance from gay male performance) cast a misogynous pall over the
entire event. In the production’s final gesture, one meant to confirm and
punctuate the heterosexuality that inscribed this homophobic rendering of
Ludlam’s work, the actors took their bows then turned squarely to each other and
shook hands.
Ironically, but accurately, two of the four reviews of the production use the
word “straight” to describe the acting style. The critic for Milwaukee’s major
morning newspaper wrote, “They play their absolutely ridiculous (that is, in the
famed Ridiculous Theatrical Company sense of the word) roles absolutely
straight.” 11
The homoerotic potential of the script—after all, the roles could have been cast
with a woman and a man—was manifest through the performative strategies of
Camp in the performance text of the original production. Wayne R.Dynes writes
in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality that “Camp is not grounded in speech or
writing as much as it is in gesture, performance, and public display. When it is
verbal, it is expressed less through…direct statement than through implication,
innuendo, and intonation” (189). Gay audiences for Ludlam’s production of Irma
Vep laughed delightedly at double-entendres such as the line “How do you take
it?”, delivered pointedly by the maid (Everett Quinton) as “she” served tea to
Lady Enid (Ludlam). Taken aback, Lady Enid replies, “I beg your pardon?” The