CLASSIC MASH-UP BY JAMES STILL, DIRECTOR
What makes a cult classic a classic? One standard might be that it is frequently performed, or that it remains beloved through its hundreds of iterations around the globe, or even that it can be produced in different kinds of theatres with different kinds of audience configurations. The IRT’s decision to produce The Mystery of Irma Vep on our Upperstage with audience wrapped around three sides of the thrust playing area is bold and canny, because it demands that this beloved cult classic be reinvented yet again. While I am always led by story (whether my job is as director or playwright or audience), with this play the theatre itself becomes an important partner in all the choices made to bring Charles Ludlam’s theatrical mash-up to life. This play (and all the work of the great, late Mr. Ludlam) is uniquely one-of-a-kind while being influenced and
inspired by many, many genres, novels, movies, and archetypes. But before I go any further, let me be perfectly clear: the reason to do this play is to showcase two brilliant actors who get to explore their most outrageous, excessive selves while also creating characters and telling story and making art. Can ridiculous, campy, melodramatic excess also be called art? Charles Ludlam and his “ridiculous aesthetic”—he was the founder of the award-winning Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York—makes the case that art can be the product of ridiculous plot and ridiculous story by going beyond the absurd and making its own style that feeds on surprise. Mr. Ludlam wrote a play that celebrates creepy movies and gloomy novels and the 19th century “penny dreadful” by also celebrating theatre itself: two actors play some seven characters who make dozens and dozens of costume changes to play those multiple characters. This is one of those plays that, happily, can only truly be itself in the theatre. Vampires, mummies, werewolves (or maybe a werewolf in wolve’s clothing?) are partnered with fog, thunder, lighting, a wooden leg, an Egyptian tomb, and a certain English manor that has very strange goingson going on, indeed. Watch (and listen) closely and you might be reminded of Dial “M” for Murder and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Gaslight and Rebecca and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Name another play, if you can, that somehow unapologetically references Shakespeare, Poe, the Bronte Sisters, and Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein. Working on The Mystery of Irma Vep has been like being inside the brilliant mind of a mad scientist who inexplicably creates a joyful theatricality, a Frankenstein of styles that ultimately ends up in the hands of two incredible actors and the laps of some very lucky audiences. A new year is the time to put to rest all of the holiday madness and begin again. Why not begin again with vampires, werewolves, and mummies? Marcus Truschinski in the IRT’s 2015 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Photo by Zach Rosing.
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