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career when she married, Tulin “was brilliant, very gifted, very ar-ti-cu-late,” recalls Madeline’s classmate, Susan Carlson, an actress who took the professional name Black-Eyed Susan. According to legend, Tulin inspired one of Madeline’s most memorable characters, the actor–director Mavis Danton, featured in a sketch on
The Carol Burnett Show
in 1976. Mavis’s trademark exhortation to concentrate is, “In our circles, in our circles!” and Tulin, who died in 2008, “
really
wanted us to concentrate,” Black-Eyed Susan says.
    In
The Adding Machine
, Tulin cast Madeline as Judy O’Grady, a prostitute, and thereafter she was typecast, playing saucy wenches and servants in one department production after another. Offstage, however,Madeline led a very different life. David Hoffman recalls, “I never saw her with a guy.” He remembers her being “totally non-sexual,” unlike other young women on campus at the time. “There was a certain way of flirting, and she didn’t flirt.” Student productions often were musicals, and Madeline sometimes got lead roles in these. Hoffman directed her a few times, and while he found her attractive, he observed, “She never played her looks into anything. Her talent was the issue. She had a ridiculously funny voice and a ridiculously good singing voice.”
    Leading roles in student productions didn’t translate to leading roles in theater department productions. Those went to classmates like Susan Sullivan, who went on have to a long career in television. “Madeline Kahn was a different kind of person,” Black-Eyed Susan says. When their mutual friend, the budding playwright–director Charles Ludlam, introduced them, “I think he was kind of in awe of her, actually. I looked at her, and she was very sophisticated-looking, and I wasn’t. Her hair was in an updo, a sweep, but it was all
big
. It was sort of like, ‘Wow, she’ll probably be a star. She’ll get major roles.’”
    Madeline probably met Ludlam in Beckerman’s production of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. They fascinated each other, but it was Black-Eyed Susan who became Ludlam’s ally, and she remained so for the rest of his life. While Madeline and other actors tried out for more conventional shows, Ludlam delved into obscure and avant-garde playwrights, meeting with substantial resistance from the faculty. And he took Black-Eyed Susan with him—all the way to New York. Madeline, for her part, continued to struggle in the pigeonhole where the faculty had put her.
    Near the end of her second year, she was ready for change. Tulin was directing Giraudoux’s
The Madwoman of Chaillot
, and Madeline wanted to audition for one of the madwomen. Tulin wanted her to play the Flower Girl instead, but when Madeline allowed that she’d rather concentrate on her studies and wait for the next play, hoping for a more challenging role, “They told me that if I
didn’t
do the Flower Girl, my scholarship would be revoked. That was my first big blow, and it was very difficult, very deflating, scary and discouraging. . . .” Madeline felt she’d already missed any opportunity to negotiate with the theater department. Her options now, she believed, were either to submit to typecasting or give up her scholarship, which would mean transferring—probably to City College—with no assurance that she could keep her credits.
    She turned to Albert Tepper, the music faculty’s advisor for student theater and director of the madrigal group with which Madeline had been singing on Saturday afternoons. When Tepper told her the musicdepartment would offer her a scholarship to cover the remaining two years of her Hofstra education, Madeline promptly cut her ties to the theater department. To satisfy the requirements of the music scholarship, her principal performing experience now came from one-act operas, oratorios, and concerts. 12 With the madrigal group, she also played Isabella in Orazio Vecchi’s opera
L’Amfiparnaso
.