It’s Showtime Again

You may have noticed that I’ve been missing in action for a few weeks. That’s because the universe has been keeping me plenty busy. In addition to my everyday duties here at HQ, I’ve been doing a lot of acting, most of which has kept me in constant contact with several reviewer colleagues and several past and future Plays and Playwrights alumni.

First off, there’s my current show, which opened almost two weeks ago. It’s good, nasty Halloween-type fun featuring new works by James Comtois (author of The Adventures of Nervous-Boy, published in Plays and Playwrights 2007), Qui Nguyen (co-author of Vampire Cowboy Trilogy, from Plays and Playwrights 2005), and Mac Rogers (whose play, Universal Robots, will appear in the forthcoming Plays and Playwrights 2008), and it has been a lot of fun to work on. The show is full of stage combat and special effects, all of which is cool but a totally new experience for me. The Nosedivers are old pros at this kind of thing, however, and they have made everything very comfortable for the newbie. It’s been a pleasure working with them, and I’m grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to share the stage with two of my favorite indie theater mainstays, Jessi Gotta and Anna Kull. This also marks the third time I’ve worked with my talented nytheatre.com colleague Gyda Arber, and we just have more fun together with each passing show. (Gyda and I aren’t the only nytheatre.com reviewers involved in this show, by the way: co-author James is one of our contributors, as are co-directors Pete Boisvert and Matt Johnston.)

For those of you keeping score at home, this is also the show in which I infamously drop trou. Since I last wrote about that, the concept for that part of the show changed a little bit, and I am now less nude than I thought I would be: the front of me has been sort of covered, but the back of me is still on display, from head to toe, for all to see. (Gyda and I are united in nude rookie solidarity: she goes topless in another part of the show. We’re like war buddies now.)

The surprising thing I’ve learned about the whole nude endeavor is that it’s no big deal. Once the initial shock/impact/whatever-else-you-want-to-call-it wears off, it comes to be regarded as just another part of the show, something as ordinary as a costume change or a scene transition. Backstage, my castmates have adopted a seen-one-naked-bod-seen-‘em-all attitude towards the whole thing: Oh, look, there’s Mike’s butt again – wanna run lines?

However, the current show has been the tip of the iceberg as far as my recent activities go. I’ll have more to report in another blog post later this week. Stay tuned.

More Nude Blogging

Another determinant that played a part in my decision to get unclad onstage (and one that I forgot to mention in my previous post) was the fact that the context would not be sexual: I won’t be parading around up there with a fellow cast member and pretending to get freaky. Instead, I will be flying solo and the circumstances will be a bit more macabre.

That was actually a really important factor for me. I don’t know how comfortable I’d feel feigning intimacy (or animalistic lust), bare-skinned with someone else, in front of a packed house. Talk about vulnerable. Doing what I’m doing already feels vulnerable enough without adding another actor to the mix. I’m baby-stepping my way into this whole nudity thing.

As for the reluctance my friends previously displayed at the possibility of seeing me in the buff: it has vanished. Pretty much every person I’ve told about my new endeavor has greeted it with an exclamation along the lines of, “Dude, I am SO THERE!” What a difference several months makes.

As for my family…well, there’s a little more ambivalence there. My mother and younger sister, two of my staunchest supporters, remain undecided about whether or not they will attend. My father and stepmother, on the other hand, are flying in from out of town to catch this one. WTF?!

The Nudity Returns

I started rehearsals for my new show last week, which means I’m back in training: exercise, watching what I eat, no smoking, the whole nine. It’s nice to be back on this routine - I feel great, for one thing - and I’m trying to remain extra-diligent about it this time because I’m being called upon to do something that I have never done before.

I’m taking my clothes off. Onstage.

That’s right: your friendly neighborhood theatre reviewer is going to don the birthday suit. In front of a paying audience. I can tell you right now that it won’t be the full monty, but it’ll be close enough. My director and I are still working out the details, but let me put it this way: anyone who doesn’t want to get to know me that well probably shouldn’t come.

You may recall that I blogged about this topic earlier in the year. Back in April, I wrote that “until recently, I usually found onstage nudity to be frightfully distracting” and wondered if I had the guts to do it myself. Now here I am, five months later, doing it. I guess I have some explaining to do.

My decision to take this job was actually a no-brainer, for several reasons:

• The actors, writers, and directors involved are all folks whose work I’ve seen and liked, and/or who I’ve gotten to know socially. So I knew what I was potentially getting into when I went to the audition. I like and trust these folks, and that made my decision pretty easy.
• Also, over the past six months I’ve lost a lot of weight - about 20-25 pounds - so I’m feeling pretty good about my body these days. If someone had asked me to do this back in March, there was noooooo way I would’ve said yes. Now, it’s a different story.
• On a non-nudity related note: the theatre where we’ll be performing is within walking distance of my house. I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a consideration.
• Finally, though, I decided to do this because the current trend of onstage nudity now seems a bit like a rite of indie theater passage. As a friend of mine who has taken it all off in front of people twice recently told me: “If you’ve never done it before, then you have to do it.” Exactly. Not to mention that it’s a challenge, and I like challenges. I always know that if there’s something artistically scary about a potential new project, I should probably take it on and defeat the fear.

I imagine I’ll be blogging more about this in the coming weeks: firsthand experience seems like a good way to re-open this discussion. In the meantime, though, feel free to weigh in with your thoughts or comments. I’m sure you’ll all have something to say about this.

The Nudity Continues

More nudity here on the blog today. Readers contributed some very nice and thoughtful comments on this topic, the general gist of which was that nudity on stage is cool as long as its justified. However, the criteria theatergoers use to determine what’s justified is as varied as the theatre itself. Check out their comments and you’ll see what I mean.

In the meantime, here are a few words on the subject from someone who has appeared on stage in the buff. Actor Adam Rihacek flaunted his birthday suit in playwright Stan Richardson’s short play, “Patience (Or Taking It),” which was part of Blue Coyote Theater Group’s Standards of Decency Project, and he generously offered these thoughts on the experience:

First we got the text in our body. Then we took the clothes off. [Director] Gary [Shrader] and Stan were very supportive of [actor] Alexis [Suarez's] and my decision of “when it was right”.

As for nerves or uneasiness, I only get nervous if I’m making another actor feel uncomfortable on stage. In a couple of the early nude rehearsals this happened (not by any one’s fault, just by circumstance) and it really broke my spirit. I felt terrible.

On nudity in the theatre: It should be a non-issue. People know what they are getting into. Warnings are put up for everything (smoking, adult content, strobe lights, etc.). It is, after all, just a body. We all have one.

Adam also told me, as a counterpoint to his closing thoughts above, about a student production of Doug Wright’s Quills in which he played the Marquis De Sade during his final year of college at Wright State University. It was the first and only other time he had appeared nude on stage, and apparently it caused quite a controversy on campus. The production was almost shut down because of it. You can read more about this here and here. My thanks to Adam for the links.

nytheatre mike au naturel (almost)

Some more thoughts about nudity on stage with a firsthand story of my own.

Several months ago, a friend of mine asked me to audition for a show she was producing. The role she had in mind for me required the full monty. At first I was surprised, then flattered, then intrigued. I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it, but was fascinated by the potential challenge. I imagine that wearing one’s birthday suit in front of a theatre full of people requires some serious concentration and composure. Not to mention how the audience’s reaction to such an event colors one’s performance from night to night. And then there’s the whole vulnerability factor. In a word: eek.

It turned out to be a moot point, however, because I ended up not auditioning: a scheduling conflict I knew I had during the show’s run prevented me from accepting my friend’s invitation.

Here’s the thing, though: before declining the invite, I told several friends about this opportunity, and they all said the same thing: “Yeah, Mike, that’s great. I hope you get it. But, if you do, I’m not coming to the show.” It seems they were uncomfortable with the thought of seeing their platonic buddy au naturel in person.

To which I thought to myself: what’s the point of doing a show you know no one will come see?

So, here’s my question: how do you feel about the idea of seeing people you know on stage in the buff? With the increase of onstage nudity here in Gotham, I suspect it’s a growing concern for some, while for others I imagine it’s no big deal. Let’s talk about it, shall we?

Showin’ What Their Mamas Gave ‘Em

There seems to be a proliferation of nudity onstage these days. I feel like I have seen more exposed flesh onstage in the last six to seven months than I have in all the rest of my theatergoing life. What is up with this? I think it’s a very interesting development, indicative of relaxing social mores, and people (both artists and audience members) being more open-minded about sexuality, among other things. Frankly, I’m surprised I feel this way because, until recently, I usually found onstage nudity to be frightfully distracting. It would take me right out of whatever show I was watching, and I would sit there wondering “Should I look at that person?”, “Are they cold?”, “Do their parents know they’re doing this?”, etc. Clearly, I wasn’t the only person who felt this way. A few recent examples indicate that theatre practitioners are sensitive to such audience discomfort, and are willing to make oogling the actors more palatable for everyone:

• In Boomerang Theatre Company’s September revival of The Ugly Man by Brad Fraser, the play’s teenage heroine gets massively turned on after a hired hand on her family’s ranch rips her shirt open and wipes the blood of the person he’s just murdered all over her breasts. Yeah, it was a pretty shocking moment, but more so because of the new information it revealed: namely, the up-to-that-point unknown sexual attraction between those two characters, and their kinky little turn-ons. The nudity turned out to be essential to the plot (and a little chilling, as well).
• Blue Coyote Theater Group’s December production of Standards of Decency Project featured a lot of (mostly male) appendages and genitalia flapping in the wind. The point of this project was to explore and challenge conventionally held views of morality and obscenity, and it was interesting to see that no matter how far the nine participating playwrights pushed the envelope, they barely made me (or the rest of the audience) cringe. Which I would say was a good thing. Why? Because, to me, it shows that our collective standards of decency are pretty broad and inclusive. Even the most potentially offensive play of that evening - Matt Freeman’s “What To Do To A Girl,” in which a male teacher at an all-boys school veers dangerously (and unknowingly) close to objectifying a naked young woman he is using as a study aid for his class - struck me more as humorous social commentary than anything else.
• The recent revival of Heather McDonald’s Dream of a Common Language by 3Graces Theatre Co. also featured male and female nudity, but of a much more ”tasteful” variety: art modeling. Again, crucial to the story because it is necessary for the artist’s work (in one instance), and essential in brokering the peace in a brewing gender/equality war (in another instance). In that aesthetic context, the actors’ birthday suits seemed positively harmless.

It seems to me that artists are finding ways to present onstage nudity that go beyond (but might still also include) pure titillation.

What are your thoughts on this? How do you feel about seeing live beefcake at the theatre? Do you like it or hate it? Could you take it or leave it? Do you think there’s more of it around now than there used to be, or am I just imagining things? Give me the scoop.