BEYOND RIDICULOUS
Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York
by Kenneth Elliott
Univ. of Iowa Press. 194 pages, $35.
CHARLES 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 flourishing of the Theater of the Ridiculous movement 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 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 heterosexual culture.
Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas and editor of the academic quarterly ANQ.
