Silly Spoof

The primary mystery in Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma
Vep is: What, exactly, is happening in this spoof?

The action doesn’t make much sense, but it’s clearly a send-up of
old-style theatrical melodramas and classic horror movies (we get
suggestions of vampires, werewolves, mummies, maybe ghosts and even a
crazed ax murderer), with generous allusions to the films
Rebecca and Gaslight as well.

Ludlam even resorts to outright thievery; the script is crammed with
lines stolen from everything from Macbeth through the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to Young Frankenstein. Sometimes
the lines fit, but often, they’re just gratuitous.

The beginning and end of the play take place in an old English manor
presided over by Lord Edgar Hillcrest, a man haunted by the memory of
his late wife (named Irma Vep, an anagram for “vampire,” not that I’m
giving anything away, because in this play, one thing is almost never
related to another). Now Lord Edgar has a new wife, Lady Enid, who is
the subject of much conversation between two unhappy servants, the maid
Jane Twisden and the peg-legged gamesman Nicodemus Underwood.

For no other reason than to spoof mummy movies, the middle of the
play follows Lord Edgar to Egypt, where a local factotum leads him to
the tomb of an old queen. And I use the term “old queen” in multiple
senses, for all these roles, male and female, are played by only two
men. It’s a quick-change show that offers us the rather antiquated
pastime of tittering at men wearing dresses.

Irma Vep is the light early-summer fare now being served up
by Live Theatre Workshop. It stars the game, energetic and committed
Stephen Frankenfield and Cliff Madison, old favorites at this company,
even if they haven’t appeared much on its little stage recently.

But enough about the production I’m supposed to review. Let’s talk
about me.

When I attended Flowing Wells High School some 35 years ago, I
enrolled in a closed-circuit video-production program. Officially, my
classmates and I were there to tape varsity football games, produce
instructional videos on taxidermy and generate documentaries about
career opportunities in the roofing business.

But we had access to the equipment after school, and worked on
unofficial projects for our own amusement—everything from
parodies of Grape-Nuts commercials to my own magnum opus, a nonmusical
version of the opera Carmen transferred to the American West and
shot, in part, at Old Tucson. It had much in common with the late film
projects of Orson Welles, insofar as it was never finished.

One afternoon, my classmates and I improvised our way through a
double send-up: Sherlock Holmes meets Frankenstein’s monster. From
scene to scene, the same kids would appear in different roles. It
wasn’t live, but for some reason, we didn’t do retakes, and, of course,
something went wrong at the climax. As Holmes, I was supposed to
destroy the monster with a stunt pistol, but the gun failed to fire, so
I wound up using it to deliver a lethal karate chop to the creature’s
neck. This production was never submitted for an Emmy.

I can’t help comparing Irma Vep to the sort of thing my
classmates and I were goofing around with, and Ludlam’s play comes off
worse for the comparison. My point is not that my friends and I could
do better than Ludlam when we were in high school, but that what we did
wasn’t much different from Irma Vep. Why should people pay good
money to see Ludlam’s play, which is the sort of thing a bunch of
precocious, pretentious teenagers could crank out after school?

The only reason is to watch a pair of actors have a good time, and
that seems to be the case at Live Theatre Workshop.

Madison and Frankenfield take quite different but complementary
approaches to their roles. Madison, as Lord Edgar and the maid Jane, is
fairly low-key and relatively serious about his characterizations. This
allows Frankenfield to flip over the top as Nicodemus and especially as
Lady Enid. In effect, Madison is the introvert, and Frankenfield is the
extrovert, and they need each other to keep the proceedings
balanced.

Leslie J. Miller has directed the show in a family-friendly manner;
it’s less campy and queer than Arizona Theatre Company’s treatment
about 10 years ago, and also less self-conscious about straining for
laughs with gags that go beyond the basic script. But not everything
was in its proper place by opening night; in an early scene, when Lady
Enid was seemingly being abducted or assaulted by an intruder, the
action was so chaotic that it was impossible to tell what was going on,
which is probably the point, but the sequence was also too slow, as if
the actors were just vamping noisily offstage until they could get into
the next costume.

The other transitions worked much better, and at the end, the
assistant stage manager and dressers came out for a well-deserved bow.
Charlotte Langford got in a couple of little jokes with her props, too,
including the Egyptian queen’s cosmetics case with its Egyptologized
Hello Kitty theme; I couldn’t read the fine print, but I think it said
“Hello Bastet.”

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2009.