Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
December 21, 2009
A Coda to IRMA VEP
A week ago Court Theatre closed The Mystery of Irma Vep with a bittersweet final performance that also witnessed the victory lap for Ellen, our long-time stage manager, who is retiring from stage management forever (she tells us). This was one show that I never wanted to close. If I was forced to choose one performance to take with me on a desert island for all eternity, it would be Erik and Sully and The Mystery of Irma Vep.
Two days after closing, I was in New York. I had a few hours to kill in the village, so I found my way to Sheridan Square, the location of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. The little square it overlooks now contains a high-end optometrist, a Starbucks, and a pet store selling puppies in the window (underneath an unmarked photograph of Mickey Rourke, smiling, holding a puppy up to the camera). The Ridiculous is gone; in its place is a new theater company. I spent half an hour looking around the front door of Axis like a tourist for any trace of the Ridiculous that I could photograph and put on this blog, but there isn’t a shred of evidence that it was once Ludlam’s theatrical home. In Court’s program I’d written that the little parcel of street outside the building had been renamed Charles Ludlam Lane, but the place itself suggested otherwise: there wasn’t a single sign or marker indicating as much.
So do our most cherished performances meet the fate of the ephemeral. But where are the snows of yester-year?
One Sheridan Square, former site of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
December 9, 2009
One Night Only: IRMA VEP UNPLUGGED
If you haven’t already bought your tickets for The Mystery of Irma Vep, come to the performance this Thursday, December 10th at 7:30 PM, where we’ll present a special one-night-only jam session on guitar and banjo with actors Erik Hellman and Chris Sullivan after the show. These guys have been prepping their repertoire for a few weeks now (hint: it sports a sublime unplugged cover of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), and it’s a unique opportunity to see the cast in a way that no other audience has. Seats are filling up quickly, so buy your tickets now!
December 8, 2009
Why IRMA VEP?
by Erik Hellman, co-star of The Mystery of Irma Vep
A post-show discussion of a drag-farce is an interesting event. And during the multiple talk-backs I attended during previews of “Irma Vep” I found myself unequipped to field many of the questions that Court’s erudite audience were asking; questions about the play’s web of references, its spastic plotting and, most frightening of all, the seeming lack of substance. Of course The Ridiculous Theatre Company, where the play premiered, would not have had post-show discussions, they would have been anathema to the spirit of the company, and of Ludlam himself, whose post-show interactions with members of his audience where anything but scholarly. But this is a different time, Court is a different kind of theater company and a changing culture and multiple remounts have made the play a very different animal. “Irma Vep” in the 80’s could coast on its novelty, its subversiveness, and the charisma of its creator. But Ludlam is gone and the play, as it comes to us now, is a bit creaky, a staple of community theatres and colleges and not particularly shocking in its upheaval of culture and gender. It seems to beg the question: why?
Every talkback someone brings it up. The inquiry can take many forms:
“What is the play saying?”
“Why Now?
“What would you say are the central themes?”
“What am I expected to take from this?”
In talkbacks during previews we would field these questions with gestures of mock horror, which would get a laugh and deflect the notion that the play needs to answer them; such humorous deflections are the play’s defense mechanism as well. But now that the play is open and my days are once again free for reflection, I can’t help but think that this question (which boiled down is essentially “Why do I need to watch this?”) deserves at least a scholarly deflection, if not an answer.
Before starting rehearsal I was visiting Manhattan. Whenever I would talk about “Irma Vep” with theatre people in New York, particularly within the gay community, the play seemed to hold, for them, a reverence and importance that it doesn’t share in the Midwest. Being a heterosexual, I have been a little squeamish in answering questions about the play’s importance to the gay community, but I know it is important, even though I would be hard pressed to point to anything substantive it says about gender or sexuality. A gay director friend of mine in New York was insistent that I really understand the biography of Ludlam and particularly his relationship with Everett Quinton who co-starred with him in “Irma Vep” before I, a dyslexic twenty-something from Denver whose nearest experience to cross dressing was putting my arm in the wrong shirt hole, was allowed to do the play. Quinton and Ludlam met casually on the street in a time of very mutable sexual boundaries, before the serious advent of AIDS, and their one-night-stand translated into a committed and sustained relationship that lasted until Ludlam’s death in 1987. It is one of the great love stories in New York Theatre history and “Irma Vep” is a celebration of it. I think this word “celebration” is particularly important in the understanding of the relevance and substance of this play. At a time when homosexuality was struggling to become a less marginalized part of the American landscape, Ludlam’s Theatre of The Ridiculous took the homosexual viewpoint out of the negative world of politics by choosing to celebrate queerness rather than defend it, indeed, by showing it needed no defense.
That the play makes a similar statement about theatricality is why it remains popular and important twenty-five years later. In a time when the theatre struggles to find its context in a world that offers so many forms of entertainment, I think it is a trap to believe that a play needs to justify its existence with substance. So many recent “plays of substance”, boiled down, seem only to be arguing that theatre has relevance and therefore deserves its continued existence. Irma Vep, which, if nothing else, is most certainly a celebration of theatricality, argues that there should not be such an argument. We don’t ask of every movie or piece of music that it fill our lives with meaning or batter us with substance, and I think it is dangerously narrow to make that a condition of live theatre. “Irma Vep”, with its high theatrical style and quick-change format, would be meaningless in any other medium, and from that distinction it draws its relevance. In a time where the ultimate goal for many plays is to be adapted into screenplays, the few pieces that rely wholly on their theatricality to function are even more important. Irma Vep doesn’t make an argument about why theatre is important; it celebrates the fact that there needn’t be such an argument.
The Mystery of Irma Vep runs Wednesday through Sunday until December 13
December 3, 2009
On Seeing What You’re Not Supposed to See
Stagehands at the Federal Theatre, 193-?
On the Guardian’s impeccable theatre blog, the always-heady performance artist and theorist Tim Etchells writes about his fascination with prompters, stage hands, and the other amanuenses of the theater you’re not supposed to watch.
Part of this may be perversity on my part, attracted as I am by anything on stage that does not ask for my attention. During the longer scenes at school pantos, I’m always scanning the faces of the kids at the back – their restlessness and lapses in concentration make a fine counterpoint to the drama…
Sometimes I think that what grips me in all this is the idea of the figure at the edge of the stage, like something out of a Brueghel painting. Brecht wrote well about Breughel, but there’s another Brechtian thing that really interests me here: the business of work. Watching performers doing tasks like these (the prompter, the reader-of-stage-directions) is akin to watching roadies at a gig. That workmanlike attitude, those functional gestures of replacing a microphone or making sure a keyboard doesn’t fall over play so well, and are such a great foil for the melodramatic performance of your average rock star.
I think this article rises from the same perversely curious spirit that informs the final five minutes of The Mystery of Irma Vep. I won’t give away more than I already have, but suffice it to say that it’s been the most controversial sticking point of our production.
The Mystery of Irma Vep runs Wednesday through Sunday until December 13.
