Theater of the Nude

The theater, in case you haven't noticed, has stripped for action. The nude revolution is under way. It comes long after the movies discovered the naked body, long after high fashion gave the see through go-ahead and long after topless restaurants became historical curiosities. And it comes just when the theater seemed to be dead, killed by its own stuffiness. But at least—and at last—it's here. The taboos about bare breasts, bare buttocks and even exposed genitals have been broken. Skin can now be employed as a costume—and that's healthy.

So far, the experiments have been timid and tentative. Nudity on the legitimate stage is still a special issue, too "shocking" to be accepted in the normal course of a play. And its possibilities have been investigated by as many fakers and exploiters as true artists.

When a rather mature schoolgirl strips to the waist in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she keeps her back to the audience. She is posing for her lover, an artist. But for her to turn completely toward the audience, says producer Robert Whitehead, might "detract from the continuity of the play." That sounds reasonable; but the day is coming when Broadway will be able to watch a girl undress without losing complete track of the story.

There's a good joke about audience expectation in Bruce Jay Friedman's black comedy Scuba Duba. Instead of having a pneumatic beauty show her topless charms, there's a droopy matron who flops her pendulous bare breasts about. The sight is disgusting, but it's a brilliant parody of titillation. Here, again, someday no one will be disappointed if it's only the ugly actress who undresses.

Both the beautiful and the ugly hippies take it all off in "The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," Hair. That's a revelation and a joy. The kids do it and they seem to be having fun. But then they just stand there. And somehow, it would be better if they danced or made love, although the revolution may not be ready for that much activity—yet.

While Broadway has stopped at variations on the striptease, the avant-garde has pushed beyond skin-deep realism. Theatrical lovemaking has become incredibly explicit. In Rochelle Owens' Futz!, a tragifarce about a farmer who loves his pig, director Tom O'Horgan has his actors go through extremely raw, though symbolic, burlesques of oral, anal and genital intercourse.

In several other recent productions, there are direct physical confrontations between the actors and the audience itself. In The Concept, a psychodrama presented by former addicts, actors come up to you and ask, "Will you love me?" And you're expected to stand up and return a hug. It's frightening and a strain, but it's real.

In Richard Schechner's total-theater bacchanal, Dionysus in 69, you're invited to dance with the cast in a discotheque inspired revel. Better yet, when the freak-out really gets going, if you're lucky, you're invited out into the playing area, where seminude actors ease you to the floor and fondle, kiss and caress you. Said one critic: "The ... actors' involvement with the spectators has so intensified that one fully expects to get laid during the next evening at the theater."

But don't hold your breath. The legitimate theater will never become that permissive. On the other hand, at some of her recent Happenings, Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese avant-gardist now working in New York, has begged the audience to join in a love-in that means what it says. Nobody has yet, but Kusama keeps hoping. Lately she has been conducting naked guerrilla raids on such landmarks as the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street and Central Park. Acting fast to avoid the cops, Kusama's boys and girls throw off their clothes and paint themselves with polka dots. After the polka-dot painting, everyone dances to the rhythm of African drums. The tourists take pictures and the lookouts keep watch for the police. By the time the cops do come, hopefully, everyone is dressed—and gone.

Obviously, part of Kusama's thrill is her narrow escape from the forces of "decency." One of her Happenings last winter—a naked "crucifixion" with two young men (text continued on page 104) making love beneath the cross—was raided by a black policeman. He was, of course, an actor. But Hair's nude scene is also "raided." The current nude fad still depends on our desire to do—or view—the supposedly forbidden.

Some laws governing exposure, obscenity and permissible public acts are still on the books. But in New York, as of this writing, there hasn't been a bust, you'll pardon the expression, since Charlotte Moorman was arrested for playing a cello topless. For one number, she even attached battery-operated toy propellers to her breasts. That was too much for criminal-court judge Milton Shalleck. In his now-famous decision, he said he doubted that "Pablo Casals would have become as great if he had performed nude from the waist down."

Topless and bottomless is the way the San Francisco rock band The Allmen Joy played recently at the hippie culture palace the Straight Theater. The Joy were part of an all-singing, all-dancing group grope titled Carnival and Resurrection of the Blind God Orpheus Under the Tower in the Place of Lost Souls. Scripted by Monte Pike, Carnival was a tedious evening of slack-jawed social protest, until the very last moment. Then the Joy, urging everyone "to be free," flung off their clothes. The 26-man cast started walloping one another and the audience with pillows. And finally, 50 brave souls from the audience joined the melee.

It was one of Broadway's leading playwrights, Robert (Tea and Sympathy) Anderson, who first satirized the fad of theatrical exposure. Well before critics remarked on "the now-obligatory flash of nudity," Anderson wrote a minispoof of the "pleasurable shock of recognition" as the first sketch in You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running. Way back in early 1967, Anderson portrayed an earnest, middle-aged playwright asking his producer about the chances of showing a 43-year-old husband walking, naked, from his bathroom into his own bedroom. When he got there, he would tell his chattering wife, "You know I can't hear you when. ..."

The big question the playwright had for the producer was: "Why in hell should we in the theater be so far behind the times?" The producer declared that he knew what had been happening in movies and novels. But he also knew what would happen in the theater: They'd all be put in jail; the audience would walk out; no actor who ever hoped to play Hamlet would even audition; ultimately, there would be a demand for onstage sexual intercourse. "No," countered the reality-starved playwright, "the next thing I want to show is the agony of a guy on a hot date running a race with his bladder."

There are some real-life situations. Anderson was saying, that don't make good theater. But what is "good theater"? Anderson takes a conservative view. He feels that the rebels who have been exploiting nudity and audience participation have simply "thrown a pot of red paint over everything. They've used up valuable areas of experience and cheapened them." For Anderson, the theater is a place where the playwright tries to "say something." Essentially, he uses words, and the best way for the audience to tune in is to sit back in a darkened theater and listen.

The radical dramatists and directors who are creating what's now called the New Theater couldn't disagree more. They don't want the audience sitting safely in the dark. They want to knock down the barrier between art and life and make the audience part of the action. Drama will then become a tribal ritual, where everybody is involved and the sound and fury is all around.

Nudity is part of that revolution. It stands for freedom, for shedding old taboos, for throwing off the up-tight conventions of the older generation. Nudity is the way to be open and honest. It means bare facts and true emotions. For actors, trained to hide behind their roles, nudity can be a challenge. Actors have to work free of their own inhibitions in order to peel before an audience. Perhaps this kind of liberation will work for the audience, too. Instead of hiding behind conventional responses, it will come alive, jolted by the confrontation of naked self with naked self.

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Nobody has jolted theatergoers as electrically as has director Tom O'Horgan. A veteran of the off-off-Broadway La Mama Troupe, O'Horgan broke through last season with three award-winning shows: Hair, Futz! and Tom Paine.

The nude scene in Hair became the classic, mainly because it was the first time Broadway had ever seen beautiful young hippies—or any actors, for that matter—stark, raving naked. According to the script, the scene was a be-in at the end of the first act. And according to O'Horgan, be-ins are events where stripping comes naturally. So he had his hippies clamber out of their beads and clothes under a gauzy drape, then pop up through coy little holes to face the audience full front. The lighting is dim, not for modesty's sake but so an overhead projector can bathe the hippies with images of flowers. And because the scene is dark, some onlookers miss the nudity altogether. Others snap away with their cameras.

O'Horgan decorates Tom Paine, Paul Foster's story of the American Revolution's great pamphleteer, with rollicking songs, acrobatics and strange musical instruments. He even has the actors improvise a debate with the audience. Then there is a nude scene, a dream sequence fashioned after a William Blake water color. (Blake was a friend of Paine's.) O'Horgan found that covering the actors with opaque black drapes looked "heavy and weird," so he stripped the cast, then clad them in diaphanous chiffon veils. Thus, the boys and girls swirl around the sleeping Paine, their bodies fully visible beneath their flowing robes. Besides this ferocious sexual nightmare, there's another, seldom-reported nude scene in Tom Paine. To emphasize a moment of "cannibalistic horror," O'Horgan has "freshly killed" soldiers, their pants pulled down, their shirts pulled up, strapped to poles and paraded across stage. Here, exposure is meant to be brutal, not seductive.

In Futz!, O'Horgan uses nudity for quick shock. A mother visits her son in jail, where he awaits hanging as a rapist-murderer. To comfort him, she bares her breasts and—depending on the actress playing the role—suckles him or merely folds his head within her dress. Overtones of Madonna and child. But O'Horgan is after high parody, not pathos. So he quickly shapes the mother and son into a Renaissance Pietà, then exaggerates their sexual intimacy by having the mother stick her leg down her son's shirt. Then he sticks his head up her skirt. And, in a final triumph of impudence, he asks, "Why couldn't I have been my own father?" For an answer, she slaps him.

This kind of bitter buffoonery could hardly be misread as "commercial exploitation." But the box-office potential of nudity has not been lost on producers. (Hair's producer, Michael Butler, has pegged a dozen of his seats at an awesome, record-breaking $50.) But precisely because nudity is so fashionable, some producers will have none of it. David Merrick has "absolutely, unequivocally" no plans for nude scenes in any of his productions. His complacent reasoning: "If you can sing Stormy Weather, you don't need to take off your clothes."

Off-off-Broadway playwright-producer Ed Wode admits he "took a chance with nudity out of desperation, in order to get publicity for the little theater I started." Wode's farce about liberals and racism, Christmas Turkey, put a totally nude chick on a tabletop platter. She never moved and seldom said anything. But she was pretty and naked. And the play ran a respectable 14 weeks.

With this success behind him, Wode returned to the classics, booking plays by Strindberg, García Lorca and Brecht. Then he came back with another creation, The Fall of Atlantis, which features another total nude. She's a daughter of Aphrodite, and she moves around and suggests intercourse with a parrot man. "I was tempted to present the real thing," says Wode, who claims to have had two willing actors. "But I'm not out to be (concluded on page 197)Theater of the Nude(continued from page 104) immortalized as the first one to try it."

The producers of Her First Roman, the Broadway musical based on Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, worked out a flexible policy toward nudity before their show began its previews. Their script had two scenes that begged to be fleshed out: a boudoir view of young Cleopatra, shielded by a translucent curtain, and a Roman bath scene, with the legionnaires cloaked in sheets and their lovely attendants in loose shifts. "Despite all the pretentious explanations," said producer Joseph Cates, "nudity is a commercial device. We can justify it artistically as well as the next guy. And if we get bad reviews or if business falls off, we'll just snip away at Cleopatra's curtain."

How long will this snipping-away process take for the theater in general? How long will it be before the novelty has worn off and nudity can be used or not used as the occasion demands? The experience of modern dance suggests that the value of shock is quickly exhausted. In 1965, Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer did a classic, though naked, pas de deux, clasping each other tightly, front to front, and moving austerely across a bare stage. Also classic was the nude Joseph Schlichter, who positioned himself inside a huge plastic cube and patriotically splashed about with buckets of red, white and blue paint. Last year, San Francisco's Ann Halprin staged the ultimate striptease at a Hunter College recital in New York. She had her dance troupe go through a marathon of undressing, dressing, undressing. ... The rhythm was that of each dancer's breathing. And the ceremony was majestic and mysterious. But Manhattan's district attorney was not impressed; he warned the troupe never to come back with that particular number. Fortunately or not, Miss Halprin is no longer interested in nudity. "Getting undressed on stage," she declares, "has become excessively popularized."

Popular or not, there are still many things to be done. Director O'Horgan feels he may have found his own "ultimate solution to the nudity problem." Working with the La Mama Troupe at a Brandeis University production of Megan Terry's Massachusetts Trust last summer, O'Horgan experimented with "naked suits," outfits that look like skin and are equipped with full sexual regalia. O'Horgan put them on actors of the opposite gender under their street clothes. At the finale, the boy and girl stripped first to their naked suits and then to their own bodies.

Playwright Anderson suggests another way to mock the theater's sexual hang up. He imagines a skit about a middle-aged actor whose current role requires the performance of sexual intercourse. The curtain rises with the actor at home, in his own bed, with his wife. It is morning, and she asks him to make love. "Honey, you know I can't," he replies meekly. "You know I have a matinee and an evening performance to do."

Or, as a hippie-actress declares in the second act of Hair: "Harry, you've seen the nude scene. Now can we go home?"

A couple of seasons ago, critic Kenneth Tynan, surveying the state of the theater, predicted that acts of sexual intercourse would soon be staged. His prophecy was correct. In London, censorship by the Lord Chamberlain ended in September. Now that the lid is off, the crop of earthy, experimental sexplorations that flourished only in private theater clubs and lunch-hour cafés should begin to surface. For playwrights like John Arden and John Osborne, who have waged a constant battle with the censor, the liberation should be tremendous. The same surge to free expression can be expected in this country. If we saw more of the body last season than ever before, nudity in the theater is still not a part of life. Soon it may be. And nobody should be the worse for wearing less.