‘That Melancholy Fiend’: Charles Ludlam’s Bluebeard and the Horrific City

Abstract

Throughout his twenty-nine plays over two decades, North American auteur Charles Ludlam straddled the contradictions of US entertainment through work that was wild, eccentric, brilliant, and queer. And yet, despite having secured a legacy not only as a downtown New York City innovator, but also a singular theatrical voice, Ludlam has been largely positioned by scholars almost entirely through the queer lens, with a primary focus on his use of camp. This paper aims to consider Ludlam’s legacy differently, through a focus on one of his most important works, Bluebeard, and its use of horror tropes as a means to engage its city’s decadent decline on the cusp of the 1970s fiscal crisis that almost brought the city to bankruptcy. By examining that play’s use of affective body horror as decadent embrace of the erotic, the violent, and the hilarious all at once, I argue that Ludlam’s play might have functioned not merely as camp for his queer community, but also as a reflection of the declining NYC for his more mainstream audiences. Ludlam’s use of grotesque monstrosity, I argue, allowed his audience to both recognize and valorize their city’s decline with an ambivalent, decadent pride. Through an analysis both of the show as it exists in published form and of the contemporary reviews, this article aims to consider new levels of Ludlam’s multiplicitous appeal, and also to suggest how provocative, decadent theatre can so poignantly engage and challenge a cultural zeitgeist.