Episode 109: Going "Beyond Ridiculous" with Dr. Ken Elliott

Introduction to Theatre in Limbo

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Leaguer. The 1980s might not seem like a decade conducive to the emergence of a groundbreaking gay theater. However, amidst

0:30the AIDS pandemic and a homophobic backlash to the gains of the post-Stonewall era, Charles Bush and Kenneth Elliott created something unique in New York City. The company that they founded, Theatre in Limbo, developed some of the biggest underground hits of the 80s,

Theatre in Limbo's Early Hits

0:47with unforgettable titles like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Psycho Beach Party. Now Kenneth Elliott is out with a new book, Beyond Ridiculous, Making Gay Theatre with Charles Bush in 1980s New York, published by University of Iowa Press. It tells the story of theatre in limbo and makes a case for its underappreciated importance. Today, we're fortunate to be joined by Dr. Elliott, who's Chair of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts at Rutgers University. Ken, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks

1:22for having me. So it's in the very title of the book, the mention of ridiculous theatre. Can we maybe pull back for a moment to establish some context and maybe tell listeners what was the

Theatre of the Ridiculous

1:34theatre of the ridiculous and perhaps specifically who was Charles Ludlam? Right. Well, Charles Ludlam is the figure that's most identified nowadays in most histories of ridiculous theatre because he really brought it to the attention of mainstream critics in New York City and had a successful company that operated for some, oh gosh, 20 years in the West Village. But it really started several years before Ludlam broke off and began his own company with some folks who were peripherally involved with the pop art

2:12movement, such as Jack Smith, a filmmaker who's most known nowadays for his film Flaming Creatures.

Jack Smith and the Pop Art Movement

2:21And Ludlam himself said that Smith is the daddy of us all. It was his, it kind of emerged from his aesthetic and his aesthetic was based in rage against the dominant culture of the time. And you must remember in the late 50s and early 1960s when, which were formative years for Smith's aesthetic, there were incredibly intolerant laws that against gay people, bars were raided, people were routinely dismissed from jobs

2:56and blackmailed. It was a difficult time. And then of course, the pretensions, as we all know, now it's easy to laugh at leave it to leave it to beaver and father knows best and shows like that, that depicted a kind of idyllic post-war family unit as the be all and end all. But there were a lot, plenty of people who didn't go along with that scenario. And Jack Smith was certainly one of them. So that the, the impetus behind this was

Exposing Hypocrisy

3:20to expose, I think, the dominant culture for the hypocrisy that was there. And it was that kind of space between reality and, uh, uh, and what was presented as reality that Jack Smith tried to expose in ridiculous theater or the, the beginnings of ridiculous theater, I should say in his film, flaming creatures. And part of that was gender fluidity you in, um, flaming creatures, men played women, but they weren't exactly women as he, as the title implies, they were flaming creatures.

3:55Uh, and in one of the more famous segments of the film, there were men who were wearing wigs and, and makeup, but you could also see their genitalia. The film was very shocking. It was very shocking at the time. Uh, and in fact, it was banned in New York state and many other places and even involved a congressional inquiry. And if you can imagine senators and Congress people in a meeting room at the Capitol viewing this film, which they regarded as, uh, pornography, it's, I, I would love to have been

4:29in the room. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for that, but anyhow, uh, so ridiculous theater.

Ridiculous Theatre on Stage

4:34Then when it finally hit the stage with, uh, John Vaccaro directing and Ron Tevell, who was the scenarist for Andy Warhol's films at the time. So this came out of Andy Warhol's studio, the, uh, films that were initially made and then later turned into stage productions capitalized on the aesthetic that, that, uh, uh, Jack Smith kind of began. And the earmarks of this were outrageous camp, a drag performance parody of popular culture, as well as high culture, mixing it all together in kind of a

5:12postmodern stew and presenting it as just outrageous fun. And it was layer upon layer of outrageousness that really marked a ridiculous theater. Unlike it's often confused with the Jean-Paul Sartre theater of the absurd, uh, Beckett, that kind of thing. And it couldn't be more different from theater of the absurd theater theater of the ridiculous is outrageous and outrageous in almost every way. And it was then Ludlam who took it several steps further. Initially, there was an

5:46anarchic quality to, uh, ridiculous theater. Uh, it, it essentially was plotless, outrageous fun. It could be like a series of skits or what, what Ludlam referred to as epic theater. And as much as it just went on and on and it didn't really matter what the plot was, but, but eventually Ludlam with his company turned to parodying, uh, forms such as the well-made play and that made it more accessible to larger audiences. So Ludlam starting with his, uh, production of Bluebeard and then continuing

6:22with Camille, uh, his adaptation of the classic, uh, well-made play, it started getting as he, the term he used was, uh, gaining converts. He wanted people to become converted to this idea, this aesthetic that was very campy. So anyhow, Ludlam's company, um, became almost critics' darlings for a while of the New York Times. It was, uh, Mel Gusow who originally gave Bluebeard a rave review when it was

6:53being performed on top of a bar in Greenwich Village. It was at a gay bar. Uh, and if you can imagine, once again, uh, the, uh, august critic of the New York Times going to a gay bar on Christopher Street called Christopher's End and seeing this production of Bluebeard and then giving it a rave review in the New York Times. But that really changed things for, for Ludlam. And, uh, he started getting big grants and his theater in Sheridan Square, which he, I guess picked, I guess, I guess he was able to acquire that

7:28theater a few years after Bluebeard became sort of a center of the gay community in the West Village. It was right in Sheridan Square. And it was, uh, certainly I saw a number of his shows there. They were unforgettable and he was absolutely hilarious as a performer. So anyway, that's sort of a rambling take on what ridiculous theater is, but it, it, it, because it's morphed over the years, it's hard to say exactly what it is. You know, it's like, it's different things for different people, but there's a, there's certain common basis for it. And that is camp drag performance,

8:04outrageousness, and parody of popular and high culture.

Camp and Gay Aesthetic

8:08Yeah. You, you're right about this kind of development of, of what you refer to as a gay aesthetic. Um, and, and like you just said, there's sort of all this, the importance of camp, for instance, I guess, would you mind maybe expanding just a little bit more on, on what, what defines that? So what, what makes it so different? So special from maybe what came before or after? Right. Well, so by gay aesthetic, I guess, largely I'm speaking about camp and it's camp is a contested term. As I'm sure you're aware, it means different things to different people.

8:42And I don't pretend to have the, uh, ultimate definition of it. I'll tell you what it was for us was an appreciation of the outrageousness of 1930s and forties films and even fifties films. Uh, just the, the, the wonderful intensity of those stars, like Joan Crawford and Betty Davis, you know, who talks that way, you know, like it was the grandeur of Joan Crawford or of Catherine Hepburn,

9:13you know, that this was outrageous, fun to parody, easy to parody. And as, uh, has been pointed out, it's hard with today's movie stars, you know, like what, there's not so much to parody, but there was a pretension, uh, of those great stars to grandeur that was easy to puncture, you know, it's like, and it was fun to puncture it. So that's where we were coming from. But the term camp, as I'm sure you're probably aware, was first really defined, I guess, by an intellectual, when Susan Sontag wrote

9:45her important essay in 1964 notes on camp, and she defined a camp as a way of looking at things that could be anything from Betty Davis to a Tiffany lamp. But what she, of course, left out of the whole equation was the fact that this is, is an aesthetic, a way of a sense of humor, uh, a way of looking at things that developed in the gay subculture. And it really has all of its roots are, are in the gay

10:17subculture. So even though it's been appropriated, uh, since then, in many ways by straight filmmakers and theater artists, people like Mel Brooks does campy things in his films, right? But, but that really, the beginning of that sense of humor came from the gay community. As far back, uh, if you read the wonderful book, Gay New York, um, as far back as the early part of the 20th century, and it, it also had to do with gender fluidity as well, you know, like calling each other Mary and

10:51that kind of thing. That's a typical, uh, you know, old fashioned way of camping. If you look at a character also like, for example, the character Emery in boys in the band, it's another example of he's, he's a camp, a high camp kind of character because he's always referring to, uh, other men with female pronouns and that kind of thing. This was long before there was any dispute about pronouns or people were concerned about pronouns, you know? Now at the center of the story of theater and limbo is,

Charles Bush and Theatre in Limbo

11:21is this relationship between you and Charles Bush. And I wonder if you could maybe start us off by just, uh, telling us, uh, who is Charles Bush? How did the two of you meet? How did this whole, uh, kind of creative artistic partnership start? Sure. Uh, well, Charles is a, is a playwright and performer. He's, um, become kind of, uh, an iconic figure in New York theater, uh, in, over the years. But so when I've, when we first met, we were both students at Northwestern. We were both in a production of Romeo and Juliet, and we got to know each other because we had such small parts,

11:55uh, in this production in the green room at Khan Auditorium at Northwestern. And, uh, we developed a friendship. I mean, we weren't the closest to friends at Northwestern, but we remained friends throughout our college experience. And then, uh, when I was moving to New York and Charles had just, Charles has lived in New York with his aunt on park and a lovely, uh, apartment on park Avenue. And she was wanting to get him out of there because it was really just a one bedroom apartment. And he'd been staying there for quite a long time. And she was like,

12:28it's time for you to get your own place. So I, when I came to town, I gave Charles a call. I was calling everybody I knew, which is what one does when moving to New York city. And when I went over to visit Charles, his aunt really was sort of persistently suggesting that maybe we could get an apartment together, we could be roommates. And so we ended up doing that. So we were roommates for a number of years, uh, in this tenement apartment that Charles found for us in the village. It was, you know, when I say tenement, people think, oh, it was like a slummy sort of atmosphere. No,

13:02not really. It was on a great block in, uh, the West village on 12th street between, uh, Greenwich Avenue and West 4th street. And I mean, you couldn't have a nicer block really, but these buildings were tenement buildings in as much as they were railroad flats. That's an art, more of an architectural term than anything, a pejorative term, but it was a floor through apartment. So it was, there was no privacy. You come in through the kitchen, you walk through my bedroom, then Charles's bedroom, and then the living room, the rooms were all lined up like

13:36railroad cars. Anyhow, Charles and I were separately pursuing careers for a couple of years when we lived together. I, I was starting out as a stage manager and Charles was trying to get his solo show on at the time. He realized that he was a difficult type to cast. He was very slender, somewhat effeminate. Uh, it was hard for him to get parts. So he wrote solo shows for himself and where he played all the

14:08parts and these were great shows. Charles was, did a superb job with these, these scripts and he performed them wonderfully. And he got kind of a bit of a cult following performing at places like the duplex on Grove street in the village. And Ludlam, uh, noticed Charles. Charles invited Ludlam to come and see his performance and Ludlam became sort of an enthusiastic supporter. Anyhow, that was fine, but it wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't, it wasn't leading to anything. And something that's often

14:41neglected, uh, in theater histories, uh, is that theater people need to eat and they need to, um, have an apartment. And unless you are on Broadway or, or, or in a long running show off Broadway, uh, or affiliated with some major arts institution, it's kind of hard to piece together a freelance existence. So we were getting a little desperate to be quite honest. And my father was pushing me to go to law school and

15:15Charles was despondent because he had put together this wonderful, uh, one man show that I ended up directing and nothing was happening with it. So as a sort of a last fling before I was going to start to law, go to law school, he said, let's, let's go to the East village and see our friend Bina Sharif, who's putting on a show at the limbo lounge. And we slept over there in a taxi because it was very dangerous neighborhood at the time, but we were really taken with this wonderful atmosphere in

15:47this, this club, a storefront club in the East village. And after the show, we approached the owner of the club and asked if we could do a show there. And he said, sure. And he put us on the calendar and that was all it took to get a show on in the East village in 1984. So Charles had a script in his trunk. It was vampire lesbians of Sodom. And we quickly assembled the cast. And that's how we got started with our company. It was very, very ad hoc. That's for sure. Yeah. I'm, um, particularly, I mean, it's such a striking title and you write about how that

16:19kind of got a lot of attention, uh, for theater and limbo in the early days. I'm curious about the origins and just the nature of, of vampire lesbians of Sodom as a play. Yeah. So, well, Charles was writing plays and taking, he took a playwriting class at Northwestern. And I remember reading an early draft of the play that became vampire lesbians. It was called teeth marks at the time. And I remember vaguely remember giving him some, my thoughts about it. And then I never heard, heard about it again. And he'd kind of pulled it out and, uh, rewrote it

16:55for himself in drag. And this was the things like, you know, at the time, you know, we were wanting to have real careers in the theater and Charles had avoided doing drag because there's a stigma to that. And there, there was much more of a stigma to it in 19, the early 1980s and 1984 than there is now with RuPaul and all that. It's kind of like a whole thing that is accepted, at least in many circles, but it wasn't the case then it was a very marginal, uh, thing to do. So he, that's why he developed the

17:31one man show so that he could play the parts and he could play women and men without putting on a wig or a dress. It was, there was no, he always had a very severe black costume, but with, for vampire lesbians, he wanted to just have fun and to put on a dress and to put on a wig and to do the whole thing and be as outrageous as could be because why we thought that no one would ever see it. It would never go anywhere. And we were just doing it in this hole in the wall club, uh, in the East

18:02village. And, uh, that would be that it would be like a party for our friends, which is what a lot of East village performance was like at the time. It was, it was a party like atmosphere. So, yeah. So we just simply called friends that we knew and said, would you be interested in being in a show for two nights at the limbo lounge and some friends turned us down that they weren't interested, but we were able to assemble a group. Uh, and the title itself that you were asking about, I mean, there's a little bit of, I mean, I don't know who came up with that title.

18:34It was either Charles or his friend, Ed Taussig. I think Ed may have been the person who came up with the exact title. And the whole point of the title was to be as outrageous as possible. And so it was to shock. And so when we had flyers that had the title, Charles created the flyers himself. He was, he's a very talented artist as well. He's a, he worked for a while as a portrait artist. So yeah, when we sent these flyers out and we put them up around the East village, I mean,

19:04it was shocking and that helped to draw a crowd. People wanted something like that. That was very in your face, just obviously anti-establishment. I mean, the title itself, uh, is about as outrageous as the show gets. I mean, because the show itself is not really, I mean, it delivers in as much as it's lots of fun, but, uh, you would think from a title like that, that it would be, um, maybe more outrageous than it, than it was, but it was very, it was, it was just a fun romp for us to perform for

Building a Following

19:38friends more or less. And, uh, yeah. And, and give, gave Charles the opportunity to, to put on a wig and a dress and, and enjoy himself in front of an audience, which he certainly did. Yeah. There's this whole, I thought it was really interesting in your book. You, you describe this kind of dynamic where particularly, uh, Charles Bush is, is playing multiple roles, but kind of in a sense of like, there's this sort of central leading lady character who in turn almost gets cast in the various, uh, early productions that theater and limbo does. I believe your next major production

20:11was, uh, I believe it was called Theodora, she bitch of Byzantium. Um, so it's, it's kind of like there's, there's a central character that he's playing. And then on top of that, there's whatever specific character is in the plays. I thought that was a really kind of interesting dynamic. Uh, and I wondered if you could maybe talk about that a little bit more. Yeah. Well that developed over time initially, you know, uh, in vampire lesbians. I mean, Charles had a long fascination with Sarah Bernhardt and, and the great movie stars of the thirties and forties, uh, among others. So there

20:42were elements of all of that in his performance, but as we did additional shows, we, he, I should say, cause it really was Charles developed this persona of the star of the show and the star of the show had the qualities of many recognizable stars so that you would see a glimpse of Norma Shearer or a bit of Betty Davis or a bit of Joan Crawford, uh, a little bit of Barbara Stanwyck would come out

21:12from time to time. And you see these, these different stars have very different approaches and a Barbara Stanwyck, uh, you know, was a tough dame and sometimes that was appropriate. So suddenly he'd be Barbara Stanwyck and the next minute he would be elegant Norma Shearer. Uh, but it all kind of, at first it was a little bit rough around the edges, the transition from one quotation to another, but gradually it sort of smoothed out and became this persona of the star of the show. And really the concept of, as we did more shows and we moved to, uh, the larger limbo lounge the next fall

21:49with it because this was the time we'll get to that this in a minute, I think, but, but the East village was really rapidly changing and gentrifying at the time. And we thought we could, you know, capitalize on that. And so as a company, we decided that it would be fun to have sort of, um, the idea of a, of a second or third rate touring troupe with an actor manager, like, you know, then Charles was the actor manager, the star of the show. And there were players who would always play the same type

22:24of role, you know, the leading man, uh, the ingenue, uh, that kind of the character man, the walking gentleman, you know, that sort of thing. Uh, and so each actor in the company had his own persona that we tried to capitalize on each time and always at the center of it was the star who sort of held the whole company together. Yeah. You were just talking about how in a number of ways, the environment

The East Village and Gentrification

22:51around you is changing. The East village is changing, uh, not long after theater and limbo gets started. Um, the limbo lounge itself moves to a new venue. I I'm just kind of curious. I mean, what was, what was it like playing the new venue, but also how were things, uh, changing around you as this theater troupe kind of gets started? I think I mentioned earlier that we were nervous when we first went to the limbo lounge the very first time to see our friend being a Sharif perform because it was in alphabet city, you know,

23:24those avenues, a B and C that are East of first Avenue. And the, that area of town had a reputation at the time of being very dangerous. Uh, it was a marginal neighborhood and we were a little scared. I mean, it was nervous making to go there. Uh, it was, um, block after block of buildings that had been torched by landlords to get insurance money. Uh, some blocks that had hardly any residence in them at all. It was, there was a lot of drug dealing that was going on. Lots of homeless people.

23:57Remember this was in the early 1980s and, uh, there was a real homeless problem in New York at the time that there still is, but I mean, it was first becoming evident at the time. And it was just menacing to, to go into that area. And yet part of the reason that this, the area could start gentrifying and changing was because young people realized, well, it might be scary, but the rents are cheap and we could go over there and, you know, we could rent a storefront for a song and have an art

24:32gallery or a performance space. And that's what started the whole gentrification of that area. And soon there were restaurants like the life cafe, but then many others that opened up nearby and there was, it became a scene. And when it was finally noticed by New York magazine and other mainstream periodicals that, gee, this area of town, this is where the young people are going. This is where the interesting clubs and art galleries. This is where, uh, Keith Herring and

25:03Basquiat are showing their work. It become a desk became a destination. And you would see limousines parked out in front of a bombed out building on a desolate street, but you knew that, you know, things were changing. And so the owners of the limbo, what was called the limbo lounge when it was on 10th street, just opposite Tompkins square park, they sold their lease on that building. And with the money that they got from selling the lease, they were able to lease an old sanitation

25:34garage. That was another block further East. And it was a much larger space. And they took the money that they made from selling their lease and they converted it into a performance space slash gallery. And, uh, it was, it was a fun desk and an illegal bar because, because all the bars were, were unlicensed at the time. So there, you know, but that was part of the fun. People broke the law and it was like, you know, didn't matter because it was the East village. Yeah. So it was, the neighborhood was

26:07rapidly changing. So the folks who ran the limbo lounge, uh, became more upscale with their new space. And, but then time caught up with them eventually, and it became, got out of control, right? I mean, so now you go to the East village in this area, this block of the East village, it was the 600 block of East 9th street is where the new limbo lounge, which they decided to eliminate the word lounge. And they just call it the limbo. And where that building was, you walked down, it's all lovely apartments and really nice at the time. It was graffiti everywhere, uh, you know,

26:43desolate kind of crummy apartment houses. It really was not pretty. Let me put it that way, but that was part of what it was the atmosphere of the whole thing. So you felt like you were going somewhere that it was in some articles, they talked about it kind of like the Weimar Republic going to these, um, like the Kit Kat club, you know, that kind of thing. But I think if you really were trying to find an analogy for that period, it would really be more like Dresden after the allied bombing. And

27:17in fact, there was one street, it's eight streets between B and C where the club eight BC was, which was a famous performance space that they was referred to sometimes as little Dresden. So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was, uh, you, you really wouldn't have thought walking over there that anything could ever happen to that neighborhood to transform it, but it has, you see. So the whole, all of Manhattan now is forbidden in terms of rents because no young person could move to Manhattan, uh, today, unless you

27:49had a trust fund. So, but it wasn't the case back then. As for the people involved in theater and limbo, um, as you're talking about, you're, you're building a company here as well. And I'm just curious about who are some of the early members of the theater company beyond you and, uh, Charles Bush. Right. So Charles wrote, uh, an excellent part for a co-star in Vampire Lesbians. Uh, and, uh, our very first co-star, uh, was Obie award winning, uh, actress from, uh, the Charles Ludlam's company,

28:26but she didn't want to stay with the show because it was Lola Paschalinski. Uh, and she, uh, did two performances our first weekend and then announced that she was, she'd had enough. And Charles and I both sort of speculated that she played on the bar top at Christopher's end on Christopher street with Ludlam. And she'd had enough of that kind of, uh, performance and she was doing it as a lark for one weekend. So then we were kind of up a tree, like who are we going to get to play this part? And, uh,

28:59we found a friend of ours, Julie Halston, who was at the time, um, a wall street librarian, but she had been a theater major at Hofstra and we brought her in. I was a little dubious at first of whether that would work out because she didn't have that much acting experience, but, uh, she really developed a unique kind of style and it, it ultimately clicked. It took a while. It took a while for her to get kind of adjusted to the rhythms of our company, but, but she finally really took off.

29:29And then Charles ended up writing multiple parts for her that where she really, and I would say this only between us because Charles would be very irritated, but she stole the show a number of times. She was just, she was superb. And, uh, Charles didn't care for that, but, but he, he did very generously write great parts for her. And we had other, uh, you know, uh, a friend of Charles's Arnie Kladner, someone he, a magician that he knew from the Renaissance fair, was a handsome young guy. Uh, he, he became our leading man. Someone that I met at a gay bar on Christopher street,

30:03uh, Bobby Carey, uh, who had no acting experience whatsoever became our beefcake more or less. I mean, he was always taking his clothes off and show after show because he had a spectacular body. We, oh, and Charles's best friend, Andy Halliday, I should mention him. Charles always wrote a wonderful parts for Andy, who was a wiry eccentric, uh, guy who could play all kinds of wonderful character parts. So, yeah, so it was all friends who got together. I, we had other friends from Northwestern like Tom Alino, who, um, uh, was part of the original company and he was a character actor

30:37and wonderfully funny. He just had a great comic sense. So yeah, it was just, but it was all by happenstance. We, they were just friends that we, we pulled together more or less for the party. You know, we wanted to have fun. And I think when you have, when you're having fun on stage, you know, that's communicated to the audience and they, they can have fun too. Yeah. I was wondering about the audience. Cause it really seems like you build up a following, um, a pretty impressive one, uh, who's coming to see these shows and many of whom seem to be repeat, repeat customers, if you will. Initially it was our friends who came, but,

31:12but I think word of mouth spread. And as we continue to, um, uh, schedule performances of vampire lesbians and then Theodora, She Bitch of Byzantium, it was really word of mouth, but we, we did collect names and addresses of audience members. We had a book at the back of the house and people signed in so that we developed a pretty extensive mailing list. So the, every time we opened a show, we went to our mailing list and it was pretty reliable way to generate an audience.

31:42And yeah, you're right. I mean, we had a lot of people who came over and over again. It was just a, it was a unique experience going to the East village at that time. As I said, the atmosphere was a little dicey, but, but there was a real sense of community in the room when, uh, you were in one of, at one of our shows and there was a give and take with the audience that was just, you know, an extraordinary experience. That's unlike anything that I've experienced since. So vampire lesbians of Sodom turns into a pretty fair sized hit and eventually becomes big enough

32:16that you move it to the Provincetown playhouse. What, what happens when you kind of take that next step? You know, that's always a tricky thing because, and a lot of people said you'd be crazy to move this. It, I mean, it belongs in the limbo lounge. It belongs in the East village. Uh, you know, we did it for a shoestring. The costumes were thrown together. Charles just had a bunch of garments in his closet that, you know, we managed to turn into extravagant costumes one way or another. So moving it was a, was a tricky exercise. I think it most definitely at the time, um, was

32:54almost dangerous to do so because we risked losing our special audience. I mean, our audience was primarily gay. So when you move to a commercial production, you have to expand your audience. And we were able to do that, but it didn't always work out. We had experiences at the Provincetown Playhouse. And I should say, just for those who may not be familiar with the Provincetown Playhouse, it was an historic theater on McDougal Street. Uh, it had been started by the Provincetown player players back in the teens, uh, the 1918 in that range, um, by, um, Eugene O'Neill and his

33:32friends that had worked together up in Provincetown. And that's why they called it the Provincetown Playhouse. They needed a winter home in Manhattan. And it was a small commercial house at the time we took our show there. There were 175 seats. So it was, it was difficult to, to book because it was really too small for producers to make an enormous amount of money there. But, but nevertheless, it had a storied history and was very well regarded theater.

34:02So when we moved there, gosh, I mean, I, I feel like I heard so many naysayers that you just can't do it. Uh, but there was one man who encouraged me and his name was Arthur Cantor. He was a Broadway producer at the time. And he was the general manager of the Provincetown Playhouse. And he felt the show had promise and he wanted a booking for his theater that he thought would run. And he, he pushed me to produce it myself. I, I, I was hoping he'd produce it because I didn't want to deal with Ray. I'd never

34:37raised the kind of money that you needed to do an off Broadway show, but somehow or other by hook or by crook, we managed to raise the capitalization was only 55,000. And that sounds like nothing nowadays, but at the time it might've been 500,000 or a million dollars. It's as far as we were concerned, raising 55,000 seemed insurmountable, but somehow we managed to do it. Uh, and it took a while. We had to go back to the limbo lounge repeatedly to do the show again and bring potential

35:09investors down. And we were able to move and we, and we just got lucky. I mean, we really, um, cause luck plays such an important part in theater. It really is extraordinary. You know, that when we moved to the Provincetown Playhouse, we had really great audiences. We had $15 preview performances and great audiences. And we were thrilled with the way it was going. And then one Sunday afternoon, we did the show. You have to do eight a week, right? It's not like doing just weekend performances

35:40for a party anymore. It's like, you have to grind out eight performances a week. And this Sunday matinee, we were suddenly stunned at the silence, like things that had always gotten a laugh, didn't get it anymore. And like, what, what's the problem here? And we were a little mortified. We thought we're, we're done for, you know, but then that evening, the Sunday evening performance, the audience was great again. So it really was mysterious. And luckily the critic for the New York times, uh, was a gay man,

36:12DJ R. Bruckner, who loved it and gave it a rave review, but we got some terrible reviews too. And that afternoon, uh, that was the quietest audience ever that afternoon, John Simon, the critic from the New York magazine was in attendance. He left at the intermission and he loathed it with a passion. So if he had been the critic for the New York times, we never would have gone anywhere. Right. But because the, uh, critic from the times was predisposed to like it and raved about it,

36:46we became a hit. And then the trick of it really was for sustaining this production. It was being able to play to a range of audiences because, you know, our, our initial gay audience kind of dissipated after a time. And then we were having tourists, uh, largely for years. Uh, I, I kind of said it was, it was the show that people come to New York and see something kind of naughty and go so that they can go back to Oshkosh or wherever they're from and say, well, we saw vampire lesbians

37:18of Sodom. I mean, it was kind of that sort of thing in a sense. And I, uh, but it worked for whatever, whatever reason. And part of it was that I was able to keep, I was the producer and ultimately the general manager of the show, as well as the director and the, and being in it for 10 months, but I was able to keep the costs down and that that's how it was able to run because sometimes we had very small audiences, but then boom on Saturday night, we'd fill the place and that would sustain us for a week. Well, I have to say, I'm not from Oshkosh specifically, but I am

37:52from Wisconsin. So I guess I understand that, that dynamic. And there's nothing against Oshkosh. I've never been, it's like, it's, I'm sure it's wonderful, but I, but I've, that's the way I always thought of it as like people from the Midwest or, and I'm from the Midwest too. I'm from Indiana. So it's, you know, it's nothing against the Midwest, but you felt like tourists coming to see something a little naughty, you know, and that's with the title and the drag performance, you know, that filled the bill. And also it was, it was silly fun and, uh, yeah. And audiences love that.

38:26Yeah. And it sounds like from, from your book, it sounds like that's kind of part of what sustained the show's success. Um, and you sought to build off of that. I know, uh, theater and limbo goes on to develop a number of other works. Uh, probably the title that listeners might be most familiar with is a psycho beach party, but I understand there were a number of other works that you develop after vampire lesbians. Well, yeah. Psycho beach party is maybe somewhat well known because it became a movie, uh, as well. And, and I really did the thing that I point out in the book is just the irony that, that, that Jack

39:03Smith's flaming creatures was banned by in New York and many other States. And, you know, was a cause celeb of intellectuals. I mean, the aforementioned Susan Sontag wrote an essay about, uh, flaming creatures as well, but then psycho beach party opened in multiplexes across the country and there were no incidents at all. So that's, that's how times change. Right. So our next, well, we got a little bored. I have to say, you know, anybody gets anybody who's done eight a week,

39:36uh, for an extended period of time may find that it gets a little tedious repeating the same thing over and over again. So we ended up going back to the limbo lounge several times to do, uh, late shows after our curtain came down at the Provincetown Playhouse, I would rent a van and we'd all go over to the limbo and do a new show. And psycho beach party really started out as a, as a play called Gidget goes psychotic. And that once again, one of those titles that just sells, uh, and we,

40:09limbo lounge was packed once again, the audience is laughing and I thought, gee, maybe I should try this again. So we, we moved that one to another theater. It was also on McDougal street, the player's theater. Uh, and it ran for over a year, but was not, maybe it wasn't quite a year. Maybe it was more like 10 months. I'm forgetting the length of the run. Exactly. It ran for a while, but it was, didn't have the success that, um, vampire lesbians had. And partly that, that was due to the, I mean, once again, the critics, I mean, the times critic, Stephen Holden, who reviewed that

40:42liked it, but it wasn't a rave. So, I mean, things like that made a big difference. I think, I think also the fact that Charles was playing a girl who has a boyfriend by the end of the show that she's going off with might've been unsettling to some of the straight people in the audience. Whereas in vampire lesbians of Sodom, it's all a joke, you know, it's, uh, but there was a slightly maybe unsettling romantic relationship between Charles and Arnie in Psycho Beach Party, at least

41:15to some people. That's one theory as to why it didn't pan out, uh, as strongly as, uh, vampire lesbians, even though it had a respectable run. Yep. So then there were others. We did a show called, we developed a relationship with Kyle Rennick at the WPA theater, and we did the lady in question there, uh, which was a parody of 1940s anti-Nazi melodramas. Uh, and then we did a parody of 1950s

41:47anti-communist films called Red Scare and Sunset that was also rather disturbing to a lot of people because a lot of people from that era were still alive and did not find the parody amusing. You know, it was, um, just more troubling to them because they, that period was so hideous, the 1950s, uh, for anyone who had been blacklisted or accused of being a communist. So it's like, we, we certainly

42:18had a little bit of backlash even to that, even though once again, it had a respectable run and did reasonably well. You know, as you're talking about the works that theater and limbo develop, when you write the book, you really, you know, you're mostly stepping out of the way. You're kind of putting on your historian hat. Uh, but, but you're also developing at this time as a director, uh, in addition to sometimes appearing on stage in theater and limbo productions, you're, you're sort of, um, developing your own career. I, I'm wondering if you would be just be willing to share a little bit about the role that you specifically played in theater and limbo, how that maybe connects to

42:53what you find yourself doing as, as the company gains prominence and success. You know, once again, it developed in a very ad hoc way. I mean, it started out, I wanted to be a director. I mean, that was starting out as a stage manager, uh, when I came out of Northwestern was, was I thought considered a stepping stone to being a director. It's not always, it's really not that simple, but that's, that was sort of the idea. And so by directing Charles's one man show at first, and then directing these shows at the limbo lounge, I thought, Oh, this is my pathway into being a

43:26director. I got saddled with producing the show because no one else wanted to produce it. And so that's, that's how I became a producer. And then I became the general manager of the production because our, the general manager that I had hired made a terrible error in the payment scale of actors equity and overpaid our actors that he almost bankrupted the production and we had to let him go. So I ended up becoming the general manager of the show as well. So I was playing kind of wearing

44:00an awful lot of hats and I still occasionally appeared in shows as well. So the directing, producing, general managing, but it all happened sort of by, by accident, but you learn along the way how things work. Right. So, uh, yeah, it was great experience. I mean, I, because there's nothing like really exploring all the areas of theater and wearing all those hats that gives you an idea of what it takes to put on a show, you know, so, uh, it was, it was a great experience. I, I wouldn't

44:33have changed it for anything, even though at the time I wanted someone else to be the producer. Like I just wanted to be paid. Right. Now you're, you're producing these works, these delightfully campy, ridiculous plays at the same time that the AIDS crisis continues to grow. If you're willing to talk about it, what was it like to be making art at that time? How, how did it relate perhaps to what you and your, your friends, your, your colleagues were doing? Uh, and how, how did you maybe help

45:04you get through that, that time, that moment? Well, it was horrible. I mean, what, there's really no other way of describing the horrific, uh, this, you know, the plague of AIDS at the time was, I mean, and it was everywhere. And we knew an awful lot of people who developed AIDS and died, including several in our company along the way. So that was a backdrop to what we were doing at the time.

45:38And partly, you know, Charles wanted to escape. There was a, there was a sense of, you know, let's get, how do we get out of this horrible world that we live in? We can do it by, through make-believe, by taking us to ancient Byzantium or the 1940s or, uh, the 1950s, uh, and, you know, it's like putting on a show and living in that world. And that, that, so there was a, definitely a sense of like,

46:10this is our escape valve from, uh, the, the horror of everyday life in New York in the 1980s. And I think a lot of our fans, a lot of the people who came to our shows were looking for that too. They wanted to escape the world that they lived in, and they could do so by coming to the Limbo Lounge or coming to one of our shows at the WPA theater, for example. But I think there was also in the audience and in relation to the performers themselves, a sense of community that helped to

46:48ameliorate the awfulness of the AIDS crisis at the time. It was coming together, you know, and I, I think that, and that's also what theater is, right? I mean, it's an audience coming together in the same room with performers and, and that's, but there was a particular audience and it was the gay community so affected by this AIDS crisis. And many of the people, it was just quite evident. I would watch people entering the theater, uh, and know that they had AIDS. I mean, you could see it

47:20in their faces, the drawn faces, sometimes with Kaposi's sarcoma. And you thought, oh my God, terrible. Uh, but they found joy in coming to the theater and it was a, it was at least a temporary escape from that. And I think that's because the shows that we did really had nothing whatsoever to do with AIDS. And when I, when I mentioned in the book that it was a gay aesthetic rather than a, you know, a gay story, I mean, we very, we really didn't have a lot of gay characters in, in the plays. I mean,

47:52but it, so it wasn't about that. It wasn't about AIDS. It wasn't about contemporary issues. It wasn't about that. It was about, you know, outrageous, uh, stories from the past that we were inflecting with a modern sensibility, you know, but it, it, it definitely was the sense of community that, that, um, tied us all together. I think that, that, uh, reflected the period that AIDS was destroying the city. How does theater in limbo ultimately dissolve?

Theatre in Limbo's Demise

48:23It was kind of an organic thing. I mean, so we had several members of our company that our choreographer, Jeff Fisi, uh, our leading lady who replaced Julie Halston for a period of time, Megan Robinson, who was wonderful. And Bobby Carey, whom I mentioned earlier, all died of AIDS while we were still performing. And so there was that loss of those, uh, members of the company, but also, as I mentioned before, Charles and I both needed to earn a living and we needed to find new ways to

48:59get by in the theater. It's, you know, running this little company with shows that ran for, a period of time off Broadway was just not paying for the rent in our New York apartments and to, to live the way we wanted to live. So we all just kind of moved on and that, that's really the way it happened. I, I mentioned in the book that, that, uh, you know, at Bobby Carey's memorial service, which we held at the Provincetown Playhouse, uh, all the company was there, the surviving members.

49:31And yet that was kind of like almost not just a funeral or memorial service for Bobby, but really for the company itself, right? It was, it was clearly kind of over by that time. You write about theater in limbo, often getting, as you put it, quote, left out of overviews of gay avant-garde and off, off Broadway theater of the period. Why is that exactly? And what do you think makes theater in limbo so important? Why, why should it be part of that story?

50:06First off, I think part of it was part of the reason that we maybe were left out of some of these overviews is that we transferred so many shows to commercial off Broadway productions. I mean, and so they kind of get viewed as lightweight commercial comedies rather than serious works in the tradition of Charles Ludlum. I mean, I, I, I think that has a lot to do with it. And in point of fact, uh, the, the plays themselves were intended to be fun and entertaining. Uh, and we gradually as,

50:41as our experience, as we gained experience, um, they became more polished and, and, and they had a kind of commercial quality to them, I guess. So that, I think that's part of it, but the fact that we started out in the East village and that I think our audience was most definitely a gay audience. And we, and the, the aesthetic of our shows, the ridiculous aesthetic, the camp aesthetic was an aesthetic that, that appealed most to gay audiences. I think that's why, you know, we should be a part of that history. And I hope we

51:17are now. Uh, but cause we were, we were there, but I, it's hard to say, you know, it's like, you know, Ludlum has been, was the critics darling. We were often compared to Ludlum's company, to the ridiculous theatrical company. And usually the comparisons were not favorable. Sometimes they were, but yeah, there was a sense that Ludlum was a serious, uh, artist and we were rather frivolous. I don't really think that's true. I think, you know, regardless of, uh, uh, the fact that the shows

51:49were well-structured and entertaining and featured a lot of well-executed comedy, I think there was more to them than simply a frolic. And the fact that our leading lady was a man, uh, at a time when that was not that accepted, it was transgressive in its own way. Uh, so yeah, I, I, I, I think that largely though, it was this, the idea that we were presenting what were viewed as commercial shows.

52:19Yeah. So if, if there were one thing that I would just like to leave us with, it's the, the idea that, I mean, even though this is partly a memoir of mine, but more than that, it is the history of a theater company and how it began and how it developed and ended in a very pivotal time in New York history, the 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis. And when things were changing radically, and it's not just the East village that's changing, although that's, that was part of it, but it was the way the mainstream perceives gay people that was changing radically

52:56at the time as well. So it's an, it was an interesting period. I, I wouldn't want to live through it again, but it was an unforgettable time. We'll post links in our show notes that will let you learn more about theater in limbo and the wider ridiculous theater movement. Ken, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, uh, and, and for talking to us about, uh, your book Beyond Ridiculous. My pleasure. It's been a delight. If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theaterhistorypodcast.net and follow

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