Playwright Ken Ludwig has almost single-handedly revived the genre of comedy in theater
Ludwig ascribes his success to luck.
From Left: Kate Loprest, Adelin Phelps & The Cast of Lady Molly of Scotland Yard at Asolo Rep
“My father put it this way: ‘If you wake up in the morning and you don’t look forward to going to work, you did something wrong and you got to go fix it. I get to do just what I love every day. I hit the jackpot by luck and I’m so happy.”
Ludwig is being modest, of course. He’s almost single-handedly revived the genre of comedy in theater.
“If there’s any way I’d like to be remembered is as someone who really kept the art of comedies in the theater alive during a period it was starting to fade away,” Ludwig said.
His success resides in the accessibility of his characters and plots.
“Comedy for me doesn’t mean just getting laughs,” Ludwig noted. “It’s a type of theater that touches our hearts, and makes us think, but in a different way than tragedies do.”
While his approach to playwriting is deliberate and disciplined, Ludwig has a more descriptive way of visualizing the end product.
“Comedies are like taking a jigsaw puzzle and throwing it up in the air and all those pieces falling down and somehow linking together in the end so that picture comes together and gives us a sense of reassurance that we’ll be alright, and the world will be alright,” Ludwig said. “And that’s what I think comedy does, and the kind of comedy that I admire most.”
Of late, Ludwig is pioneering a new subgenre in comedy. He calls it the comedic thriller. It’s influenced by his recent work with Agatha Christie Limited in adapting “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” for the stage.
But he promises not to stray too far from his comedic roots.
“That’s what moves me. That’s what touches me, and nobody else is writing it.”
Regarding the subgenre of comedy thriller, Ludwig pointed out that humor works in combination with intrigue and tension to advance plot and character development.
“It’s all part and parcel,” Ludwig acknowledged. “We’re used to seeing comedy thrillers, like ‘North by Northwest’ and [the 1963 film] ‘Charade’ [starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn]. It’s not laugh out loud, but it is, in a sense, comedy of manners. But nowadays there’s lots of it on video. It’s a very specific genre, the comedy thriller. There are real hardcore thrillers and noir murder mysteries. That’s not what this is. This is a combination of lots of laughs, but lots of tension and excitement.”
Ludwig’s newest play, “Lady Molly of Scotland Yard,” is an example of Ludwig’s slant on comedy thrillers for the stage.
“’Lady Molly of Scotland Yard’ is set in England during World War II,” Ludwig said. “It’s about two women who work for Scotland Yard, an inspector and her sidekick. The inspector is Lady Molly and the sidekick is Peg. A murder occurs in London at a tea shop, and that murder leads them on a trail that takes them to what was called Bletchley Park, which was the center of the code-breaking operations in World War II. So they get involved in the spy business and are unearthing a spy, and really saving the world by uncovering a spy at Bletchley Park.”
Underpinning any good comedy thriller, especially one conceived and written by Ken Ludwig, is an intriguing historical artifact like Bletchley Park. During World War II, Germany believed that its secret codes for radio messages were indecipherable to the Allies. However, the meticulous work of code breakers based at Britain's Bletchley Park cracked the secrets of German wartime communication, and played a crucial role in the final defeat of Germany.
In Ludwig’s estimation, a historical reference such as this enhances the play’s interest and appeal. It doesn’t give the story context. It gives the story meaning for him, as the playwright, and the audiences who eventually see the show.
“I love reading about World War II,” said Ludwig, whose father fought in the war. “So it’s always been a literary interest of mine, and then I became enamored with reading about Winston Churchill. That whole era seems to me to be such an example in America of our patriotism and our heroism and our courage that it just inspires me. I’d like to write about it all the time.”
The choice of London during World War II presented Asolo Theatre with a number of opportunities to create a visually and aurally appealing period piece on stage. For example, Asolo performed the play with appropriate British and German accents.
“It’s written for a relatively small cast, but there’s dozens of characters so it’s a highly theatrical event in which the actors are often switching from a Castilian accent to a Cockney accent to posh British RP [Received Pronunciation],” Ludwig noted. “So it takes facile actors who can quickly access different accents.”
The actors who play Molly and Peg just play those roles. But six of the other actors play 15 different roles. In addition, there are several historical characters in the play, including Winston Churchill and Louis Armstrong.
“For them, you need people who are very facile, very charismatic and quick on their feet.”
Asolo was also a great choice for the play’s world premiere because of its interest in workshopping the production and making the changes necessary to create a polished product that other theaters would happily produce.
When a new play premieres, the first time the playwright typically hears the play out loud is at its first reading. Then the real work begins. In the case of “Lady Molly,” Ludwig found Asolo Repertory Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director Peter Rothstein’s comments immensely helpful.
“It’s a very collaborative effort,” Rothstein explained. “It’s also thrilling for an actor to be part of a world premiere and to be in the room with a writing of Ken’s reputation and the incredible canon of work he’s given to the theater. But it can also be stressful as they can be given pages of new dialogue in the final days leading to the opening. And since this is a comedy thriller, the rehearsal process is where you not only find the humor, but balance the humor against moments of tension that really make the audience sit on the edge of their seats.”
And that’s where the previews become so important. The final collaborator is the audience.
Asolo did six previews. Each helped Ludwig and Rothstein determine what laughs were landing, which laughs weren’t, and whether they were getting laughs where they didn’t want any.
“To get a laugh in some situations, you want a nice little beat,” Ludwig explained. “Somebody says something. Beat. They say the next line, and that gets the laugh in that situation. In other instances, it’s the opposite. You don’t want the audience to get ahead of you. So it’s a matter of picking up the cue, getting it right, answering it immediately and surprising the audience with that answer, and that triggers the laugh. The science of comedy is so complicated, and it might just be not how an actor is even delivering the punchline of a joke, but it might be something that’s happening on the other side of the stage, or the actor who just finished a line isn’t drawing the focus to the person delivering the punchline. There are so many ways to destroy a joke, and very few ways to actually win that joke.”
According to Ludwig and Rothstein, comedy thrillers fell out of favor in theater for a several decades because, by design, they include elements of melodrama.
“There was a period in American theater, certainly during the first half of the 20th century, where that was really the lifeblood of American and world theater,” Ludwig observed. “But that sort of waned and was replaced, especially in New York, by small intellectual pieces that explore individual tragedies – great masterpieces like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff.’ But what got lost a little bit in the history of American theater over that period was the joy we get of going into a theater and telling a big story that is what they used to call melodramas; that has a lot of action, moves around, is a thriller on a stage as opposed to in a movie. [‘Lady Molly’] is, in part, an effort to revive that tradition of drama in America.”
A play like “Lady Molly” also reflects Ludwig’s recent work adapting Agatha Christie classics for the stage. Ludwig explained how that came about.
“Agatha Christie Limited contacted me about eight years ago and said they had not had one of her novels adapted to the stage for 30 years. Would you do one for us? And they said you can choose any of her novels that you like. Tell us which one you want to do and we’ll give you the rights to do it.”
Ludwig chose “Murder on the Orient Express.”
“I thought it had such a good title and it’s kind of a comic play in a way,” Ludwig commented. “It isn’t like murder after murder. It’s an old murder that they’re trying to solve in a group of people on a train who Hercules Poirot is going to question and figure out who’s the culprit.”
The adaptation proved wildly popular. So Agatha Christie Limited asked Ludwig to choose another title.
“Again, they said choose any one you want. I chose ‘Death on the Nile’ and I just finished a little version of that, and it’s about to go out in the fall in a tour of the U.K., Ireland, China and Australia. I’ve taken it apart and rewritten it and that will be the definitive version.”
During the process of adapting “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” for the stage, Ludwig says it occurred to him that cozy mysteries and comedies have more in common than he thought. Both provide a sense of finality.
“Not the kind of mystery that’s noir and leaves us hanging in many ways to try to make social points, but the kind that was written from the 1920s right up to the 1960s and ‘70s by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer and Josephine Tey – all those great mysteries, that’s what they are, and they do the same things as comedies in that sense.”
Ludwig said that “Lady Molly” is probably a play he would not have written if the Christie people hadn’t called him to do two in a row.
“I was able to lean into it [because of the work I did on the Agatha Christie adaptations]. It’s not the kind of play I’ve written before, but thanks to Peter I was able to get it up into this amazing production and really see what it was.”