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performance is one in which things come together, or where new seeds are sown. Like an intersection of streets, exemplary performances clearly come from somewhere and go to somewhere. Marked against the utter irrelevancy of most theatre, this sense of coming and going is nothing short of an achievement. (We are wrong, of couse, to reject tradition. The problem is to select from over-rich antecedents, and to know our theatre history well.) 'Bluebeard' and 'Stomp' are the theatrical equivalents to confirmatory experiments in the physical sciences. They do not merk out new ground, but show clearly how well what was recently undoable is now done superbly. From their vantage we can see more clearly where to go next. Each of these performances deserves precise discussion and evaluation. Some performers have the gift of redeeming the most corrupted images. Ludlam is a genius of redemption, whose total commitment to his face, his body, the shape od his words makes us understand again what a star is. In the sense that Alcindor is a star, or the great acrobats. A master of doing, showing, and enjoying showing. (The Open Theatre has no stars, for their very bones are set against it; and correctly. But the Ridiculous is a theatre of redemption and exhibition.) Ludlam is able to gather and mobilize his face and throw it across a room; or to bend his body as a bow is bent and then suddenly—preposterously and absolutely—aim and release al that energy. His company is also gifted, but they are infected too. And, I think, Charles Ludlam is their plague. (Hats off to Artaud.) 'Bluebeard' shows how the tradition is viable —not within the murderous economics of Broadway or Off-Broadway: but through a style that redeems the need for acting and for a text. 'Bluebeard' is a brilliant collage made basically from a movie of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moro.' The movie from the '3os is called (I think) 'lsland of Lost Souls' with Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi. It touches on the deepest aspirations and fears of modern, urbanized man: the regeneration of the soul through the reconstruction of the body; and the desperate, ugly, vengeful, and horrible failure of that most utopian of dreams. Dr. Moro, exiled to a distant island, performs surgery on animals, making them proto-humans. He wants to accelerate evolution. He works with the knife, not genetic selection. His servant is (or was) a dog and so is slavishly attentive —as all the 'new humans’ embody in their personalities and gestures vestiges of their origins. A beautiful leopard-woman stalks the garden, and when she kises she scratches for blood. Beyond Dr, Moro’s fenced-in compound is the island populated by 'mistakes,' those not humanified by Dr. Moro's methods. Half or quarter men, or animals with human ears, or beasts that have been partially grafted this way or that, the island's outback is a seething mass of pre-revolutionary agitation. Dr. Moro maintains his authority by means of two strategies. First there is the 'House of Pain, obviously the operating room (the good doctor uses no anesthetic). Whenever

one of the proto-humans acts threateningly, Dr. Moro says, 'Remember the House of Pain.' The humanoid groans (like Gogo when Didi tells him they are waiting for Godot) and is peaceful, But terror is not Dr. Moro’s most powerful weapon. His authority rests on 'the Law.’ When is the Law?' And the masses answer, This is the Law! We shall not eat meat! We shal not kill!’ Vistors come to the island. One falls in love with the leopard-woman. Another questions Dr. Moro’s experiments. There is fighting. Dr. Moro kills someone. The humanoids, seeing that Dr. Moro has himself violated the Law, rise against him and tear him to pieces. The movie ends idyllically with everyone sailing back to England, and the island with its miserable mases (now turned revolutionaries) killed by a volcanie eruption or something. The story is a deep one, an allegory with reference to the master clases and the exploited; utopian dreams and real outcomes; the double weapon of terror and law. And more, Ludlam takes this rich tale and makes it his own. He builds an extraordinary collage that cannibalizes sources from the Bible to Shakespeare to Wells to contemporary tv programs. But his text is not a hodge-podge, or an exercise in secondquoting. It is an authentic theatre text, made in the theatre the way Moliere made his plays and, I think, as fine a whole experience as Moliere. Ludlam's hero is Khanzar von Bluebeard —a titanic and masterful hybrid of Dr. Moro, Bluebeard Faustus, Don Juan, and Ludlam. The company is straight, gay, drag—a perfectly traditional theatre company that feasts on acting and impersonation delights in costuming and masking. Bluebeard, near the start, asks the question of the play: 'ls to end desire, desire’s chiefest end? Have all my pervensions and monstrosities, fucking and suckings, led me to this? This little death at the climax followed by slumber? Does sex afford no greater miracles? Yet chastity ravishes me! And yet the cunt gapes like the jaws of hell, an unfathomable abyss; or the boy-ass used to buggery spread wide to swallow me up its bung; or the mouth sucking out my life! Aaagh! if only there were some new and gentle genital that would combine with me! ... They said I was mad at medical school, They said no third genital was possible. Yang and yin, male and female, and that's that. (Laughs maniacally) Love must be re-invented, that's obvious?' It is not parody, through there is much parody in it; nor is it farce, though its greatest moments are farcial. 'Bluebeard' is contemporary high comedy. That is, Ludlam's company is showing the only way that traditional theatre—the theatre of texts, costumes, stages, impersonations, stagey lights—can flourish in our society. If 'Tartuffe' held up the religious pretensions of Sun King France to ridicule, 'Bluebeard' does the same to our utopian pretensions. And like Tartuffe, Bluebeard is a tragic character. This is not the place for a detailed examination of the rich themes in Ludlam’s text —made richer by a profoundly agitated and choreographed production. I want only to say that 'Bluebeard' is exemplary of the

continuation of the Grand Tradition in the theatre. In Philadelphia this past January, after showing some scenes from his theatre's work (including one from 'B'uebeard') before —of all things-a convention of the American Educational Theatre Asociation, Ludlam was asked about his 'Ridiculous' comnapy. 'lt’s ridiculous because we love the theatre,' he said. T am continuing the work of the Elizabethans.' He is right. He does this by bringing to the surface all that the last 75 years of naturalistic evening out and expressionistic intelectualization suppressed—the glitter of the theatrical experience. Several years ago I called the work of the Ridiculous (before in split into Ludlam's and Vaccaro’s factions) the only thing we had in America that could be compared to Grotowski’s work. I said that both had the stength and severity of autonomous events. I would only add now that ’Bluebeard,' like 'The Constant Prince' or 'Akropolis,' is fundamentally a theatrical experience. That is it asks for no other knowledge tojustify itself expect the lore and concrete knowledge of the theatre. When it 'refers to life’ it does so by analogy—the way a great cathedral like Chartes refers to God.

laughs pepper ghoulish ’bluebeard’ (mel gussow)

Charles Ludlam has apparently seen, adored laughed at, been scared to death by and memorized every mad-doctor movie ever made. 'Bluebeard,' which he wrote, directed and starred in, is a distillation of that ghoulish genre, and serves successfully as both a loving paean and a lunatic parody. The root of this 'Bluebeard' is that old 1935 Charles Laughton movie, .Island of Lost Souls’ with infinite revisions and elaborations by the devious Ludlam. There are intimations, for example, of 'Faust,' and Bartok's 'Bluebeard’s Castle’ is playing as the entertainment begins. Ludlam's hero-villain is the Baron Khanazar von Bluebeard, and that K in Khanazar is as hard as a pile-driver. In one of Ludlam's consistently amusing linguistic conceits, characters occasionally rasp K's where there are no K's, just as, occasionally, they intentionally drop their Transylvanian accents for New Yorkesse. Ludlam khids himself as well as Khanazar. Bluebeard is trying to manufacture a new sex, specifically, a third genital. Any innocent female, such as the mad doctor's nubile niece Sybil, who visits Bluebeard’s island, then wedded to a laboratory table for experimentation. The plot is complicated and digressionary, and great fun to follow-from boudoir (a blatantly lewd, hilarious seduction of Sybil’s billowy guardian by the irrepressibly lascivious Bluebeard) to laboratory. No corny burbling decanters there, just a tinny chair

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