During his senior year of high school, Ludlam directed, produced, and performed plays with a group of friends, students from Huntington, Northport, Greenlawn, and Centerport.

Their "Students Repertory Theatre", housed in the loft studio beneath the Posey School of Dance on Main Street in Northport, seated an audience of 25, and was sold out for every performance.

After seeing one of Ludlam's plays, theater critic Brendan Gill famously remarked, "This isn't farce.

[4]Ludlam's Bluebeard was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where Vaccaro's company was in residence, in March 1970.

Rights to perform the play include a stipulation that the actors must be of the same sex, in order to ensure cross-dressing in the production.

[citation needed] In 1991, Irma Vep was the most produced play in the United States;[7] and in 2003, it became the longest-running production ever staged in Brazil.

He attempted to fight the disease with his lifelong interest in healthy eating and a macrobiotic diet, but died a month after his AIDS diagnosis, of PCP pneumonia, at St. Vincent's Hospital.

[12] After his death, Walter Ego, the dummy from Ludlam's 1978 play The Ventriloquist's Wife (designed and built by actor and puppet-maker Alan Semok), was donated to the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, where it remains on exhibit.

In his 1987 obituary of Ludlam in Christopher Street, Andrew Holleran wrote, It would be pointless to subject Ludlam to a dissertation—he was too funny—and yet no one was more grounded in theater's ancient roots than he; like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet, putting on fake noses, mustaches, pulling out toy airplanes, little plastic gladiators, goldfish bowls, Cleopatra wigs, he always gave the impression of having assembled the particular play from a magic storeroom in which he kept, like some obsessed bag lady, every prop and character that two thousand years of Western History had washed up on the shores of a childhood on Long Island.…Drag is a profound joke—the fundamental homosexual joke, no doubt: the Woman at Bay, Wounded but Triumphant, lascivious or frigid, repressed or mad, rings all the notes, high and low.…Charles Ludlam was the greatest drag I've ever seen.