Actor, director, designer, puppeteer, and playwright--Charles Ludlam was as versatile a theater artist as could be found in twentieth-century America. As a gay man, he was one of the most influential and celebrated theater artists to emerge from the liberating energies of the Stonewall era and the first wave of gay liberation. Current queer theater and performance remains strongly indebted to his work. As a theater experimenter, he preceded much of the poststructuralist theatrical theorizing with his own parodic, densely intertextual, and self-consciously ironic theater pieces. His appetite for literature and performance is reflected on each page of his plays--from Christopher Marlowe to Antonin Artaud, from Aristophanes to George Abbott. A self-proclaimed traditionalist in theatrical matters, he brought a rich knowledge and understanding of the theater to his own inventive work.

Ludlam was born on 12 April 1943 in Floral Park, Long Island, the second of the three sons of...