LUDLAM: REQUIEM FOR AN OBIE WINNER

AIDS continues to take a terrible toll of American theater people. The latest victim is Charles Ludlam, the founder-director of New York’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Ludlam, 43, died early Thursday in St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York. He had been admitted to the hospital April 30. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia, but he had been suffering from AIDS.

Ludlam had just won an Obie award for sustained excellence in the theater (this is the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s 20th season) and was preparing to stage Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.

“We have lost an extraordinary artist who was just on his way to a tremendous breakthrough in theater and opera,” Papp said.

Ludlam was one of the funniest and brightest people in the Off Off Broadway movement. His company specialized in parody and spoof. He sent up old movies, Gothic novels, the fashion industry, the sacred cows of drama--”Hamlet” and “Camille.”

His work was camp, but not empty-headed camp. In 1978 he brought “Camille” and “Stage Blood” (i.e., “Hamlet”) to Los Angeles. While having a laugh on Shakespeare, the latter really did have something to say about fathers and sons, theatrical and real.

And Ludlam’s hairy-chested “Camille” wasn’t just outrageous. It left the viewer feeling oddly moved. Ludlam so believed in his death scene that the audience believed it, too. Ludlam wasn’t a mere imp. He was an actor, puppeteer, ventriloquist, playwright, designer--a total man of the theater. He cannot be replaced.

The morning-after reviews for “Three Postcards” at Playwrights’ Horizons in New York disappointed those of us who had admired Craig Lucas and Craig Carnelia’s musical mosaic at South Coast Repertory. The late returns look better.

Michael Feingold in the Village Voice saw a lot more going on in this play than three girlfriends dining out in a nouvelle-chic restaurant. He thought it pointed to a whole way of life in the 1980s--filling up the margins of one’s life so as not to deal with the absence in the center of it.

Edith Oliver in the New Yorker said that her first reaction leaving “Three Postcards,” was: “Gertrude Stein would have liked this one.” We take it that that’s a compliment too.

Angela Lansbury, warming up for her emceeing duties at the Tony Awards June 7, told UPI’s Frederick Winship that she wanted to come back to the theater, but not in a Broadway musical. “I’d like to do a rip-snorting Restoration comedy or Lady Bracknell in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ ”

Lansbury added that she’d like to work in a resident theater, “so there would be more time to work on the production, to be sure the costumes and sets are perfect. Plays of this kind must have a careful nurturing of style and diction.”

How about the Old Globe in San Diego?

IN QUOTES. Charles Ludlam, in “Camille”: “How strange a life this first one is.”