30 January 2004: Ludlam, The Mystery of Irma Vep
Hartford Stage. Directed by Michael Wilson
In his program note Wilson says this play is, since its first production in 1984, one of the most frequently produced American plays. I think it could be thought of as a quintessentially New York, Off-Broadway play that has unaccountably made it big with a wider audience.
The knowing, winking sophistication of this play is both surface and substance. It is ”serious” mystery, Agatha Christie in drag. Two actors, one the original Charles Ludlam — here, Geoffrey Roberson and James Lecesne — play the various roles, two of them — no, three (the mysterious Irma) — in drag. It is full of in-jokes, including quotations from Shakespeare, Poe, and other well-known writers; and its action forms a constant, affectionate parody of the traditional mystery genre, with all the elaborate accoutrements of the genre: faux-library bookcases; a statue on the mantelpiece which, when turned (“No, not that statue; the other statue!”) reveals a rounded metal cage in which the supposedly dead Irma Vep has been imprisoned these many years; a mummy in a sumptuous case which turns out, despite its 3,000 years of age, to be alive and female and able to dance, half-naked, with seductive charm; French doors, constantly left ajar, whose curtains incessantly below menacingly, and beyond which lie a wolf-infested moor and a fatal footbridge over a foaming mill-race; and — the keynote of Ludlam’s manic conception — a set of characters cloaked in a kind of double disguise, fictional and theatrical. Fictionally, we have a housekeeper, Jane Twisden, who is the sadistic villainess of the piece and who reveals herself as such at the end; and a ne’er-do-well servant with the hilarious name of Nicodemus Underwood, whose alternative guise as a wolf or werewolf captures the parodic, Jekyll-and-Hyde idea and instantiates the general theatrical principle of constant quick-change costuming, accomplished faster than anyone might have thought possible, that is built into the dramatic action itself.
And, of course, the whole idea is unabashedly gay, a triumph of cross-dressing and quick-silver changing not only of clothes but of personality and identity. Roberson and Lacesne are accomplished masters of both arts, and it soon becomes, and remains, a constant pleasure to follow the exit of one character and, after an interval measured in seemingly single-digit seconds, the entrance of the alter ego. Ludlam has carefully crafted the characterization and action of the piece to carry out this basic theatrical concept of incessant change, giving us always no more than two characters on stage, sometimes one but only briefly, but with constant reference to the other characters offstage.
The audience seemed well aware, in advance, of what they were in for. There were, I noticed before the play began and again at intermission, a sizable proportion of gay couples in attendance, and there was also a rather large man i