When we did a short run of Charles Ludlum’s camp classic The Mystery of Irma Vep last fall, everyone kept encouraging us to remount the show for a longer run. Well, we’ve been running for a few weeks now at SPACE916 in Hollywood (formerly the WeHoChurch Space) and are proud to announce we are extending through the end of September. I directed the piece and am in it with the amazing Kevin Remington. But that’s not what I’m writing about here… I want to talk about camp.
Michael Lorre and Kevin Remington
The Mystery of Irma Vep is homage to Old Hollywood movies: horror films, English period dramas and “women’s pictures” from the 1930s and ’40s. These were films where a fish-out-of-water heroine navigates the dangerous new world in which she finds herself — women like Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca and Ingrid Bergman being driven mad in Gaslight. In Irma Vep two actors play eight roles — half of them women. What could be more camp than that, right?
The word “camp” has gotten a bad name. I think, like so many other things, it has acquired its bad name because people have been exposed to lousy examples of it. What exactly is camp? Is it a man in a dress? Is it mocking women? Is it bitchy humor only certain gay people appreciate? All those things qualify but good camp is so much more.
Camp can be either cheap or sublime. And when it is at its best it can teach us things about ourselves. But it is a dying, more often than not, misused art form.
I think true camp is a way of getting to larger truths and pointing out absurdity. It’s much more satire than mock. When I was in college, back in Texas, I worked as a gallery guard at a modern art museum. All day long I saw people walk up to a Jackson Pollack or a Rothko and say, “Hell, I could do that.” Somehow camp has the same reputation… as cheap and silly, anyone can do it. Good luck with that.
It is a difficult acting style that deserves respect and involves hard work just like any other style. Have you seen Moliere or Shakespeare played in a post-method way where actors “feel” their way through the piece? You can’t fight the style or ignore it. Camp has no iambic pentameter but its style has strong roots in film acting from the 1930s.
Style acting, in general, seems to be a foreign language these days. It’s not trained like it used to be which is a shame because film and TV acting history is something most actors should know and understand. Sitcom acting has more in common with 1950s theatre than modern acting. The West Wing plays like a Frank Capra film from the 1930s with all that talk-as-you-walk three-minute takes and breakneck pace. Watch an old episode of NYPD Blue and tell me they are not doing Damon Runyon-speak right out of Guys and Dolls. Each year new examples come around. Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives are examples of high camp just like Dynasty was in the ’80s which can be traced all the way back to films like The Women (1939).
Camp is hard. The purer form of camp happens when you touch on the truth of a subject. Of course, a man in a dress is absurd but so is Hollywood’s idea of glamour. And I believe this is what Charles Ludlam was going for. He is well known for his production of Camille in the early 1970s in which he played the title role. Now, Ludlam was not pretty as a woman. He looked like the type of character guy who could play the plumber in an episode of All in the Family. I’ve read Ludlam’s Camille had a huge nose and a hint of chest hair but by the end of the play there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Yes, he’s a man in a dress but he’s trying to show you something more.
And were the performances by the great actresses in the ’30s any less mannered or overly dramatic? Yet Garbo, Bergman and even Crawford tried to find truth within the high style. And that truth is where true camp lives. In Irma Vep, a delicate actress has become the new Lady of the House at the turn of the 19th century. Her character is played by the same actor who plays the rough stable hand Nicodemus. Her nemesis is Jane, the lower class maid, eaten up with jealousy and she’s played by the same actor who plays the tortured Victorian gentleman Lord Edgar.
Our goal with this production was to play the truth within the style which is where I think camp lives. The truth of the scene is about a girl in her nightgown trying to survive a harrowing night. Never mind that the reality is the actor is too old, too tall, too male. If the actor believes it then the audience will and that’s a much better absurd situation than drawing attention to the reality of the actor and mocking it.
In the show program, I talk about how Joan Crawford, in her 50s, truly believed people would buy her as the young housewife in the early scenes of films like The Damned Don’t Cry where she’s the good girl forced to go bad. She truly believes she is pulling it off (though in many ways, by this point, tough as nails Crawford was “a man in a dress”) and it works in the same way Ludlam had the whole house in tears at the end of Camille. Play the truth and let the absurdity take care of itself. That’s what we are trying to do with The Mystery of Irma Vep. Come and see us now that we’ve extended.
Production photos by Cece Tio
The Mystery of Irma Vep, presented by Deconstructed Productions, continues playing Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through Sept. 26. Tickets: $20. SPACE916, 916 N. Formosa Ave., West Hollywood; 323.667.1304 or http://tinyurl.com/irmavep2010page
