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Charles Braun Ludlam (April 12, 1943May 28, 1987) was an American actor, director, and playwright.
He received a degree in dramatic literature from Hofstra University in 1964. At Hofstra, Ludlam met Black-Eyed Susan, whom he cast in one of his college productions. The two became close friends, and Black-Eyed Susan performed in more of Ludlam's plays over the following decades than any other actor, except Ludlam himself.
I would say that my work falls into the classical tradition of comedy. Over the years there have been certain traditional approaches to comedy. As a modern artist you have to advance the tradition. I want to work within the tradition so that I don't waste my time trying to establish new conventions. You can be very original within the established conventions.
Ludlam's Bluebeard was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where Vaccaro's company was in residence, in March 1970. Ludlam performed in this production as Khanazar von Bluebeard. Black-Eyed-Susan, Lola Pashalinski, and Mario Montez also performed in this production.La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: 'Ridiculous Theater Company Presents: Bluebeard
He taught and/or staged productions at New York University, Connecticut College, Yale University, and Carnegie Mellon University. He won fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and , and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He won six over the course of his career, including a Sustained Excellence Obie Award two weeks before his death in 1987, and won the Rosamund Gilder Award for distinguished achievement in the theater in 1986.
Ludlam often appeared in his plays, and was particularly noted for his female roles. He wrote one of the first plays to address, though indirectly, the AIDS epidemic. His most well-known play is The Mystery of Irma Vep, in which two actors play seven roles in a pastiche of gothic horror novels. The original production featured Ludlam and his partner Everett Quinton. Rights to perform the play include a stipulation that the actors must be of the same sex, to ensure cross-dressing in the production. In 1991, Irma Vep was the most produced play in the United States; and in 2003, it became the longest-running production ever staged in Brazil.Gussow, Mel. "Books of the Times; The Roman-Candle Life of a Downtown Original", The New York Times, January 29, 2003Scheib, Ronnie. "Irma Vep - She's Back!", Variety, August 21, 2006
The block in front of his Sheridan Square theater was renamed "Charles Ludlam Lane" in his honor.
In 2009, Ludlam was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
After his death, Walter Ego, the dummy from Ludlam's 1978 play The Ventriloquist's Wife (designed and built by actor and puppet-maker Alan Semok), was donated to the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, where it remains on exhibit.
In his 1987 obituary of Ludlam in Christopher Street, Andrew Holleran wrote,
It would be pointless to subject Ludlam to a dissertation—he was too funny—and yet no one was more grounded in theater's ancient roots than he; like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet, putting on fake noses, mustaches, pulling out toy airplanes, little plastic gladiators, goldfish bowls, Cleopatra wigs, he always gave the impression of having assembled the particular play from a magic storeroom in which he kept, like some obsessed bag lady, every prop and character that two thousand years of Western History had washed up on the shores of a childhood on Long Island....Drag is a profound joke—the fundamental homosexual joke, no doubt: the Woman at Bay, Wounded but Triumphant, lascivious or frigid, repressed or mad, rings all the notes, high and low....Charles Ludlam was the greatest drag I've ever seen. It ceased to be drag, in fact, or acting: it was art.Holleran, Andrew, "Tragic Drag" in Ground Zero, 1989 (reissued as Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath, 2008); originally published in Christopher Street, no. 113, July 1987.
Garth Greenwell calls Holleran's essay on Ludlam "the most concise and profound discussion of camp aesthetics I know."Greenwell, Garth. " Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited and the Inner Life of Catastrophe", The New Yorker, April 15, 2020.
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