"Secret Lives of the Sexists." "Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide." "Der Ring Gott Farblonjet." "Turds in Hell."

You just need to read a list of play titles decorating the works of the late showman extraordinaire, Charles Ludlam, to get an idea of the man's deliciously irreverent, warped and erudite sensibility. He penned more than 20 comic plays for his perpetually funky and fabulous Off-Broadway troupe the Ridiculous Theatre Company, playing lead femme and/or male roles in most of them.

Intiman Theatre has begun its 2005 season with Ludlam's "The Mystery of Irma Vep." That's hardly a bold measure: by far Ludlam's most traveled work, the play has been seen at numerous local theaters, most recently the Tacoma Actors Guild.

But the prime Intiman slot is an indication that Ludlam's stylishly absurd send-up and valentine to monster movies, Gothic novels, old-time melodrama and Shakespearean hammery may well have the staying power of a comedy classic. And while Jonathan Moscone's staging really needs an adrenaline boost to maximize the mirth in this two-actor, eight-character romp, it's attractively mounted, and full of nuanced shtick executed by two hard-working, cross-dressing farceurs, Mark Anders and Richard Ruiz.

Not unexpectedly, Anders is one adroit zany here, in his multiple duties as the twitty, tweedy English noble Edgar Hillcrest, the lord of the Mandercrest estate, and as Jane Twisden, the sarcastic, severely loopy Germanic housemaid who behaves a lot like the evil housekeeper in Daphne Du Maurier's "Rebecca."

More of a left-field casting choice, the short, stocky Ruiz portrays Lord Edgar's glamorous, extremely put-upon second wife Enid, and (less surprisingly) the alternating part of Nicodemus, a creepy underling with a lolling tongue and a canine alter ego.

All shaggy eyebrows, buggy eyes and sweaty comic fervor, this Nicodemus brings to mind both Peter Lorre and John Belushi. For Enid, though, Ruiz bravely accesses his internal Loretta Young — swishing and swooning around amusingly in Katherine Roth's outlandish frocks, while batting well-mascared eyelashes.

Poor Enid is, more or less, the postmodern embodiment of Du Maurier's Rebecca, forced to live under the grim, glaring portrait of Edgar's previous wife, Irma.

There's a mystery afoot at Mandercrest involving a lurking werewolf. And the story also takes a side trip to Egypt, for a mystical encounter with a mummified princess of the Nile.

But the deliberately silly agitations of the plot are secondary to Ludlam's celebration of old-school acting and quick-change theatrics, and his incorrigible panache for sprinkling puns, pan-sexual double-entendres and quotations from literary classics.

In fact, when things go a bit slack periodically in Intiman's production, one can play the name-that-quote game. Clues: Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe are prime suspects.

The impressive Neil Patel set mixes scarlets, plaids and guns for a mock-hunting lodge look, and then goes Egyptian with a garish sarcophagus and jackal-headed Anubis statuary. Geoff Korf's lighting well punctuates the comic bits, and Stephen LeGrand's sound mix wittily interweaves voices, effects and Hitchockesque music.

It's instructive to note that Ludlam was considered quite the daring maverick in the 1960s, when he began combining drag acting and an openly gay bent with witty, flagrantly over-the-top pastiches of cultural iconography high and low. (By the way: Can we please revive some of those other Ludlam romps, too?)

By the time he died of AIDS-related illness in 1987, at age 44, the writer-actor had finally received his first real blitz of mainstream acclaim, for the terrific 1984 debut of "Irma Vep."

But Ludlam didn't live to see the play infiltrate regional theater. That likely would have surprised and amused the ingenious artist who once proclaimed, "If one is not a living mockery of one's own ideals, one has set one's ideals too low."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com