“We should auction off backstage passes for this show so people can watch what’s going on behind the scenes,” Kara Midlam joked. She’s the costume designer for Shakespeare & Company’s current production, The Mystery of Irma Vep, a play in which what happens offstage is just as intriguing—and potentially chaotic—as the onstage action. “It’s a whole different show back there.”
Charles Ludlam’s comic horror spoof turns on a gimmick that could be a costumer’s most exciting challenge or worst nightmare. The play’s six characters, half of them women, are performed by two male actors, who regularly vanish offstage to slip into a different costume for a different character. There are 65 costume changes in the course of the play, all of them requiring lightning speed and split-second timing. For Midlam, the show has been a stimulating challenge that was not without its headaches.
Irma Vep is Ludlam’s homage to Gothic horror and B-movie monsters. It takes its cue from Daphne DuMaurier’s spooky romance Rebecca—a new bride oppressed by the lingering memory of the dead wife and the resentment of the faithful housekeeper—then gathers up a full complement of stock Gothic tropes, including ancient curses, spooky omens, hints of murder and the supernatural, implausible turns of plot and cloying sentiment, along with werewolves, vampires and a mummy, topped off with smutty gags and literary in-jokes.
Ludlam’s plays are ridiculous, and I mean that literally. In a 20-year career that ended with his death from AIDS in 1987, he became the outrageous doyenne of the style he helped pioneer, Theater of the Ridiculous. The comedies he wrote, directed and starred in for his Ridiculous Theatrical Company were more than kinky spoofs, though they certainly lampoon every literary and theatrical convention in sight, usually several at once. Ransacking dramatic the past, from Shakespeare to Grand Guignol to burlesque to movies, he gave a curious respectability to the Ridiculous genre. His work taken as a whole is at once a gleeful trashing of theatrical styles and a loving if cockeyed retrospective of the entire history of entertainment.
Ludlam’s own company was made up of friends, freaks, enthusiasts and people who wandered in off the street. The unabashedly tacky productions they mounted underscored the plays’ improvisational spirit and sense of smutty fun. In addition to stylistic parody, they specialized in toying with sexual identity in both themes and casting. Ludlam himself was brilliant in drag, and his plays frequently cast men in women’s roles and vice versa. Cult favorites like The Rocky Horror Picture Show owe their cheeky campiness to the Ridiculous model.
Shakespeare & Company’s production of Irma Vep builds on what is becoming an off-season tradition for the Lenox troupe: comic takes on the mystery genre. The two stars, Josh Aaron McCabe and Ryan Winkles, also appeared in 2009’s Sherlock Holmes send-up, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and McCabe was in last fall’s Agatha Christie parody, The Real Inspector Hound. In all of them, the actors’ and audiences’ awareness of the artificial conventions and cockeyed theatricality are part of the fun.
The Mystery of Irma Vep is subtitled “A Penny Dreadful,” one of those illustrated thrillers of the Victorian era, half novel and half comic book, mysterious, melodramatic and maudlin. The four main characters are all connected to Mandacrest, the ancestral seat of the Hillcrest dynasty. (“The Hillcrests have been descending for centuries,’ says one of the descendants.) Winkles plays Lord Edgar, an upper-class twit in tweeds and spats, and Jane, the housekeeper, a stiff, sour spinster with an snippy demeanor, both of them still mourning the deceased Lady Irma, whose portrait hangs above the fireplace. McCabe is Lord Edgar’s new wife Lady Enid, a simpering flower with the build of a linebacker, and the lecherous, lame, hunchbacked swineherd Nicodemus.
Dancing with the Stars
On the afternoon before the first public preview, I was invited to watch the show from the backstage vantage point Midlam was joking about and get a peek at the instant costume transformations. The wall of the drawing-room set stands a mere three feet out from the back wall of the long, narrow stage in the company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre. (“It was going to be just two feet, too narrow for the costume changes,” Midlam told me. “I had to bargain with Kris Karstedt, the set designer, for three.”) There is no time for the actors to go all the way backstage for their changes, so they simply step offstage into that cramped passage, where two dressers, Mary Readinger and Sophie Tannenbaum, wrestle them out of one costume and into the next.
“This is a different kind of show, so I’ve approached it differently,” Midlam said. “Before I started thinking about the designs, or even what time period we’re in, I was thinking about costume closures. How are the actors going to get in and out of these garments? Because the reality of the show is how quickly the changes can be made. It’s massively quick.”
To make those quick changes work, the actors are costumed in layers. “The male costumes are the base, and the women’s costumes are piled on top. The majority of them go on like a smock—the bodice and skirt are connected so it’s just one item—and they’re split up the back, so the actor can be putting on a wig while the dresser is behind him fastening the closures.
“It’s a dance, it’s choreography,” Midlam explained. “When we first started working on this, we slowed everything down to a snail’s pace. Mary is very good at this. She said, ‘You come offstage, you drop your arms, I’ll be unhooking this while Sophie gets your hat off.’ They would do it four or five times slow, then pick up the pace, and then finally do it at time. When the choreography is spot-on, that change is spot-on. As soon as anyone panics or drops something, it unravels. At this point, they’re still trying to get their rhythms down, just like the boys are. There’s a lot of nerves back there right now.”
Once Midlam got to the stage of thinking about her designs, she and director Kevin Coleman settled on the turn-of-the-century Gilded Age era rather than the mid-Victorian Gothic implied by the script. But that choice, too, was suggested by the show’s technical demands. “I liked that time period because the high-necked dresses cover the women right up to their chins, which helps me hide what’s underneath,” Midlam said. That look has also spawned a company in-joke: “When Josh McCabe is dressed as Lady Enid, he ends up looking just like Edith Wharton,” the fashionable Gilded Age novelist whose Berkshire estate, The Mount, was Shakespeare & Company’s first home.
As the company prepared for a final runthrough before the evening’s performance, Readinger and Tannenbaum were setting up the quick-change dressing areas, hanging costumes on hooks and checking through the three pages of cues tacked to the wall. Waiting offstage, Winkles told me that the madcap costume changes are fun but can be confusing: “I sometimes have to look down before I go on, to remember who I am.”
Meanwhile, Coleman worked through a tricky piece of business with one of his actors. At the end of Act One, the portrait of Irma Vep comes briefly to life. In the blackout between two lightning flashes, McCabe—now costumed as the title character—has to remove the painting from behind the set and assume her pose in the frame. The timing of this “reveal” is crucial, and many repetitions were needed before McCabe’s hand-off of the portrait to a stagehand, soundman Michael Pfeiffer’s cues for thunderclaps, and lighting designer Stephen Ball’s lightning flashes were perfectly in sync.
The play opens with Winkle in the housekeeper’s black-and-white uniform and McCabe as Nicodemus in a filthy overcoat and cloth cap, with long white hair (sewn into the cap for easy doffing) and limping in a prosthetic boot (attached with Velcro straps—the sine qua non of this production). After some expository dialogue, Nicodemus goes off and we hear Lady Enid’s voice as she descends the unseen staircase to the drawing room.
Positioned at the very edge of the set, I was able to see the costume change as well as the stage. As McCabe shouted his lines in a throaty falsetto, the dressers were converting him from Nicodemus to Lady Enid. While Readinger pulled the overcoat off from behind, Tannenbaum pushed the lacy gown on from the front, then replaced the hat-and-hair piece with a bouffant wig and stooped to pull off the swineherd’s boot while Readinger closed up the back of the dress with hooks and Velcro—just in time for milady to make her grand entrance.
Just a couple of minutes later, it was Winkles’ turn, as the housekeeper morphed into Lord Edgar: off with the Mother Hubbard cap and starchy dress, on with the tweed jacket—he’s already wearing the jodhpurs and riding boots—and back onstage in 10 seconds flat.
As soon as Winkles hit the stage, the two dressers started getting set up for the next quick change. “Sometimes they’ve got 10 minutes between changes,” Midlam whispered, “and sometimes it’s a minute 30 seconds. They’re dancing back there.”
The Mystery of Irma Vep plays at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, through March 27. (413) 637-3353, shakespeare.org.
