Central Square Theater resuscitates queer playwright Charles Ludlam’s most produced play, his 1984 “The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful,” bringing it back to life in a hilarious production directed by David R. Gammons. Like the many “undead” characters that haunt it, the play refuses to stay buried.
Set in an English manor house and in an Egyptian tomb sometime between World War I and World War II, “Irma” involves a former wife who may or may not be dead and a housekeeper bent on revenge. Numerous dead and undead characters like mummies, werewolves, and vampires (anagram of the name Irma Vep) pop out of constantly opening and closing doors. Fans of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and of films such as “Rebecca” and “Gaslight” will enjoy discovering the Easter eggs hidden in the fast-moving script. They include lines such as “Each man kills the thing he loves” and housekeeper Jane’s suggestion that Lady Enid wear a dress that belonged to her husband’s dead wife.
The play has only two actors: the ever-hilarious Paul Melendy and Gabriel Graetz, who rapidly exit and re-enter as all eight characters — sometimes male, sometimes female, but always elaborately garbed, and often disconcertingly hairy. Is it still drag if xx dressed as Jane, the housekeeper, sports a heavy beard beneath her mob cap? Or if Lady Enid, attempting to seduce her distracted Egyptologist of a husband, displays a fetchingly furred leg from beneath the folds of her apricot-colored silk? Either way, it’s funny.
The plot of “Irma” is at times hard to follow — at one point, a character announces that it doesn’t make any sense — but who cares? The silly puns and double entendres, both verbal and visual, animate the story.
Melendy and Graetz do a lot to keep the laughs coming, their eye rolls and shoulder shrugs camping up every aspect of their delivery of the delightfully ridiculous script. (Ludlam’s company, founded in 1967, was called the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.) But two actors alone cannot keep the complexities of the production alive. Elaborate costumes (Seth Bodie), sound design (Nate Tucker), lighting (Jeff Adelberg), props (Lauren Corcuera), and stage management (Fanni Horvath) provide the muscle and bones (sometimes literally with severed limbs flung about the stage) that Melendy and Graetz need to pull off their many roles.
“Irma”was written by Ludlam, who died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 44, as a response to the disease that took the lives of so many of those in his Greenwich Village community in the 1980s, Gammons said. All those farcical “undead” characters were his effort to defeat death by mocking it.
Does it go on a bit too long? Perhaps. Do some of the gags become predictable with repetition? Possibly. But in the end, Ludlam’s creation of a script that could keep an audience laughing and engaged nearly 40 years after his death suggests that he did, after all, emerge the victor in his own struggle against mortality.
“The Mystery of Irma Vep” plays at Central Square Theater through June 21.
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