‘Irma Vep’ serves up British ham

If you’re open to British farce, this one’s for you. The craziness is like the energizer bunny. It just keeps going and going and going.

Also, like the energizer bunny, it doesn’t go any place in particular. Craziness for the sake of craziness is the name of the game.

It’s hard to believe if it’s not your cup of tea. But “Vep” is the biggest success of Brit playwright, Charles Ludlam; a corkscrew mentality that got outside the nine dots and never came back. Formatted after Penny Dreadfuls, it features the monsters, vampires, ladies in distress and terrible secrets that sensationalized fiction in Victorian England. Also, like the Dreadfuls, horror and shock carried to ridiculous extremes are the entertainment values that Ludlam picked up on but with one exception.

Penny Dreadfuls made some semblance of sense. “Vep” doesn’t try.

The idea is to two cast two actors in multiple roles. In this case, the actors are cross-dressing Alan Wilke and Thom Bailey. Cross-dressing because Wilke plays Edgar, Lord of Mandacrest Manor on the Moors, and Jane, his own second wife and a kind of Cleopatra exhumed and restored to life from her tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, where she lay sleeping for centuries. Cross-dressing also because Bailey plays Lady Enid, Edgar’s first wife and a kind of Lizzie Borden gone mad, as well as Nicodemus, a hunchbacked gimp, and Alcazar, a kind of tour guide for hire among the tombs of antiquity.

Mixed in and generously so is a werewolf stiff as a board from rigor mortis, thunderclaps, lightning quick costume-changes; one-liners, physical movements and innuendoes, sometimes off color but never x-rated; pratfalls and an unending chain of outrageous coincidences that lead to nothing but dead ends.

Wilke and Bailey are nothing short of amazing in their displays of characterization, sheer comic timing, spirits of improvisation. Greg Morales’ direction never wanders one iota off Ludlam’s love of absurdity.

However, no matter how you slice it, this is ham, ham and more ham.

I, for one, got infinitely more out of the abstract works by featured artist, Virginia Giles. They are on exhibit in the lobby of the Wade James during “Vep’s” engagement. The praying hands in copper pencil in particular, caught my eye. They are exquisite.