Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde
As a struggling New York theater artist in the mid-60s, Charles Ludlam regularly attended low-priced Wednesday-matinee performances of Broadway shows–gathering material for future evisceration. One day a friend offered to buy him a front-row seat if he would show up at the theater in drag. Ludlam arrived at the appointed hour in a tasteful frock and pearls, his beard neatly trimmed, and sauntered gracefully down the aisle, a ludicrous parody of the typical matinee audience member. He sat quietly through the performance, chin poised atop a demurely extended finger, while the cast stole astonished glances at him. The play was called Conduct Unbecoming.
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Ludlam surely took the scowling or surprised faces surrounding him that day as badges of honor. It took enormous courage back then for a longhaired nobody to defy middle-class heterosexist norms. Only a few years before Ludlam’s star appearance at Conduct Unbecoming, the New York State Supreme Court had upheld a ruling that branded as “offensive and indecent” the behavior of gay men who wore tight pants, walked with swaying hips, or gestured with limp wrists (the court was supporting a decision that shut down a gay bar). But unlike many of his contemporaries in the theater, Ludlam openly proclaimed his queerness and rallied to the defense of the offensive and indecent–not to mention the cheap, the tasteless, the melodramatic, and the tawdry. Founding the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, a New York ensemble he kept together for two decades, he undertook what he called the “rigorous revaluing of everything.” In one of many essays on the theater, he wrote that “admiring what people hold in contempt, holding in contempt things other people think are so valuable–it’s a fantastic standard.”
It’s easy to see why Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde was a success. The satire is giddy and playful, a breath of fresh air at a time when the New York performance scene was saturated with humorless artistes intent on claiming every mundane act and bodily function as high art. As in all his plays, Ludlam shows that tradition is something to build upon, not spurn, in an effort to understand the contemporary moment. Combining classical farce, cheap vaudeville, and jokes in exquisite bad taste, he brought ferocious ridicule down upon the heads of anyone within spitting distance of the art world.
