GLR September-October 2024

Live from the Limbo Lounge

C HARLES BUSCH’S landmark plays for the Theatre-in-Limbo (1984-1991) were the product of a very particular yet short lived cultural moment, the final flourish ing of the Theater of the Ridiculous move ment that goes back to the mid-1960s and is most closely associated with Charles Ludlam. It was as though, from the mid 1970s through the mid-’80s, the political

tions. The Lady in Question , in which an actress visiting an alpine village becomes a heroic member of the Nazi resistance movement, was conceived in part as the op portunity for Busch to wear an elegant, full skirted green satin dress that he’d fallen in love with and sought to create a heroine worthy of wearing. Busch’s ability to play female parts proved so convincing that he dared to do so before the movie camera, under the harsh glare of production lights, in Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! Unfortunately, Theatre-in-Limbo’s moment in the sun was cut short by two phenomena. The first was the commercializa tion of the East Village as speculators began gobbling up the Village’s relatively cheap real estate, depriving Off-Off-Broad way performance artists of the makeshift spaces in which they thrived. Elliot, the company’s astute business manager (as well as the plays’ director and Busch’s leading man), secured the lease on the his toric Provincetown Playhouse, which allowed the company to move from Off-Off-Broadway to the more legit imate Off-Broadway, generating higher visibility for their productions. (The transferred production of Vam pire Lesbians of Sodom ran for over 2,000 performances.) The downside was a less spontaneous audience of tourists in search of “an authentic Greenwich Village experience” and up-towners exploring the avant-garde chic of theaters south of Union Square. Busch’s plays became more plot-driven and less flamboyantly campy. (In Red Scare on Sunset , for example, Busch played a movie ac tress whose husband has been coopted by a communist cell in Hol lywood.) Inevitably, the company lost the improvisational energy that came from engaging directly with an audience seated only a few feet away and with whom the actors rubbed shoulders in the building’s only bathroom, which sometimes served as the performers’ dressing room as well. Second, even though the “Limbo” was founded during the early AIDS years, the crisis as it escalated caused audiences to reconsider how apolitical their fun could afford to be. (Founding company member Bobby Carey succumbed to the disease. He was a physically alluring young man whom Busch invariably found a way to bring on stage naked.) But this is not to say that the epidemic killed gay theater. Paradoxically

R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN

BEYOND RIDICULOUS Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York by Kenneth Ellio tt Univ. of Iowa Press. 194 pages, $35.

intensity of the Gay Liberation movement could be relaxed as gay people playfully, and in some cases tauntingly, exposed the absurdity of the most oppressive conventions of hetero sexual culture. As Kenneth Elliot reports in Beyond Ridiculous , his his tory of Busch’s company, the name Theatre-in-Limbo (“hy phenated like Stratford-upon-Avon”) was derived from the

makeshift space where they pro duced their first plays. The Limbo Lounge was an art-gallery-cum-per formance-space-cum-unlicensed after-hours-club on East 10th Street in the heart of Alphabet City. (It later moved to a vacant garage on East 9th, which was a larger but more awkwardly configured space.) The very word “limbo” suggests the mar ginal quality of these productions, which invited audiences to delight in well-known cinematic formulas even as the plays undercut their triteness, and which were never more serious than in their determination to have fun. A mad exuberance and raw cre ativity enlivened Busch’s initial pro ductions, notably Vampire Lesbians of Sodom , Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium , Pardon My Inquisition , and G idget Goes Psychotic . Audi ence members were crammed into a cramped space and seated on the floor, a veritable purgatory. Busch starred in a series of female parts. But unlike Charles Pierce’s over-the-top impersonations of Bette

Charles Busch, 2023. Photo by Tom Judson. Private collection.

Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Channing, Katherine Hepburn, and Mae West, which became so popular that Pierce became something of a fixture on 1980s television, and—unlike Charles Ludlam, whose plunging bodice revealed his hairy chest when he played Camille—Busch evolved into a sensitive portrayer of women on stage, especially as he parodied B-movie conven Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas and editor of the academic quarterly ANQ . 34

TheG & LR