Oh! Calcutta!

Taking one's clothes off in public, or having emphatic opinions about people who do, may not ultimately save the American theater, but it has worked wonders for the cocktail party, an even shakier institution that depends for survival on periodic infusions of hip blood to stimulate conversation. Beyond question, topic A for the year thus far is Oh! Calcutta! (reviewed in Playboy last month), the nude revel that was anathema to many New York critics, a few of whom sounded sufficiently exercised to man the off-Broadway barricades and drive the public away with clubs. They may have to yet, from the look of things. While selling out at a top ticket price of $25, unprecedented even on Broadway, Calcutta! is the only show in town that has customers piling into front-row-center seats armed, by God, with opera glasses. They are turning on or off as part of an amusing and perhaps historic sociosexual experiment devised by England's influential critic (and Playboy Contributing Editor) Kenneth Tynan, who at this writing is in Italy licking his wounds--into book form, I suspect--and leaving the show to succeed on its own terms and on terms delightful to the show's backers.

Like it or not, celebrities flock from all over the world to ogle Tynan's sometimes kinky, sometimes beautiful labor of love, then rush away to record their impressions in all media--to gossip columnists and the panting hosts of television talk shows or in the bulging letters columns of the Sunday New York Times. Producer Hillard Elkins, a shrewd entrepreneur who used to be Steve McQueen's agent and was heretofore best known as the producer of Golden Boy, calls the show "a kind of sexual Rorschach test." Nowadays, Elkins' graying sideburns frame the Machiavellian smile of a man who stands to reap substantial profit from the death of a stageful of taboos; and he will leap to his feet to quote a negative review, well aware that anything short of nuclear war or an outbreak of bubonic plague will have no effect whatever on those long, bright-eyed lines at the box office.

"There's no such thing as an objective response to the show, but it's definitely not for uptight people," Elkins tells a visitor, adding without comment that Ed Sullivan and Peter Lind Hayes walked out on his smash hit. So did director Joshua Logan, and Logan also threw away the phone number of one of Calcutta! five nude actresses, Boni Enten, whom he had been considering for a new play. In what must be the ultimate gesture of critical scorn, first-stringer John Chapman of the New York Daily News refused to review the show, which he privately refers to as Jingle Balls. According to Chapman, Tynan is a literary pimp and the contributing writers a pack of whores--illustrious whores at that, the list ranging from Samuel Beckett to Jules Feiffer to John Lennon, none specifically credited in the playbill or program with the sketch he wrote--perhaps because, in some cases, the writing consisted of no more than a few lines, such as any normally horny genius might scribble down about his sexual fantasies.

Collecting reactions to Oh! Calcutta! is part of the game, of course, for--as Elkins suggests in his nod to Rorschach--the comments often reveal more about the observer than about the action onstage. My personal favorite is that of an anonymous lady who referred to the hilarious, quite-innocent (text continued on page 242) Oh! Calcutta! (continued from page 167) parody of a Masters-and-Johnson sex experiment (written by novelist Dan Greenburg, to give credit or discredit where due) as "the scene where a girl comes in for shock therapy and gets raped." There is something to be said, too, for the observation of Pearl Bailey, Broadway's Dolly and a stubbornly loyal wife, who remarked cryptically, "Put all five boys together and they still wouldn't make one Louis Bellson."

More positive responses came from shapely Shirley MacLaine, who caught the show two nights running and vowed to make herself available for the movie version (and after this breakthrough, don't bet there won't be one), Senator Jacob Javits ("very interesting"), Rudolf Nureyev ("Oh, those beautiful, beautiful nude bodies!") and Jerome Robbins ("a celebration"). At one performance, during the nude finale, comedian Buddy Hackett was sufficiently moved to shout from the audience, "This is the best fucking show I've ever seen!" But Shelley Winters may have offered the definitive word about the business of performing in the buff. Quoth Shelley, "1 think it is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22, with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience."

Whether the show consistently provides the "elegant erotica" Tynan promised as a means of bridging the titillation gap seems pretty trivial in retrospect, compared with its effectiveness as an authentic Happening. When Oh! Calcutta! was only a fatherly gleam in his eye, Tynan wrote, "It occurred to me that there was no place for a civilized man to take a civilized woman for an evening of civilized erotic stimulation." It occurs to me that Tynan ("the Joseph Goebbels of the flesh peddlers," said Time critic T.E. Kalem, after hearing him proselytize at lunch) was so bedazzled by his own propaganda that he led critics and the public alike to anticipate a spectacle quite different from the one "conceived and directed" by Jacques Levy, a Ph.D. in psychology who left the Menninger Foundation for the headier success of such productions as Scuba Duba and America Hurrah.

As interpreted by Levy and a dozen free-associating writers, Tynan's vision of an evening dedicated to "the joyful nature of sex ... the pursuit of happiness through sex" came out redolent with sexual hang-ups. The results are probably truer and more relevant than originally intended, but how do you explain that to an audience primed by advance publicity to expect a phallic Magic Flute? Oh! Calcutta! is stunning whenever its ten enlightened exhibitionists flaunt their sex (to tantalizing music by a group called The Open Window), improvising impudent remarks and challenging anyone to deny the pure beauty and innocence of their nakedness. The trouble occurs when they put their clothes on and expose the fact that the writers' words have often failed them.

Gauging the show's ultimate success as an aphrodisiac is difficult, to say the least. Screw, the underground newspaper dedicated to the joys of eroticism, grades all entertainment on a graphic Peter-Meter that reacts in the usual way. Oh! Calcutta! rated a whopping 91 percent, if that helps you. Though I wasn't turned on to any degree worth mentioning, I was decidedly tuned in to the people onstage, as well as grateful that they seemed delighted to do their thing and leave me to mine, without any of that Living Theater I-love-you jazz about melting the barriers between art and life.

Offstage, the performers exhibit traces of missionary zeal as a result of their participation in a sort of psychodrama conducted by Levy during casting and rehearsals. The first step for each actor who had got safely past the acting, singing and dancing auditions was a nude improvisation--it's a day when something wonderful has happened, you're bathing alone in a sylvan pool and composing a letter to a loved one. After that came the rehearsal period, which included sessions of grope therapy similar to those practiced at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, with the actors initially opening one another's robes or sitting in a circle, eyes closed, trying to relate, crying. "It was beautiful. Two of the fellows would walk up and look at each other, then shake cocks instead of hands. We all became very close," says Margo Sappington, the show's 21-year-old choreographer and lead dancer, a freckle-faced Texan whose down-home drawl and bifocals make her seem a life-of-the-party girl in wallflower's disguise.

Once away from the theater during the touchy rehearsal period, members of the cast were strictly forbidden to fraternize, a Levy edict that caused some grumbling. Undertones of discontent can still be detected in conversations with bearded Mark Dempsey, an actor born to play handsome devils, who feels that the company was overpsychologized and underrehearsed, and might have garnered better reviews if it hadn't wasted so much time in therapy. Few of his colleagues would agree. "Personally and professionally, this is the most satisfying thing I have ever done," says Leon Russom, an articulate young blade who has left his wife since he went into Oh! Calcutta!, and adds, "We are all more aware of ourselves as sexual beings. The men were always more reticent than the women about exposing themselves, both physically and emotionally. Even now, the girls are freer and very open about speaking up to a guy they might want to make it with, though there's not so much of that anymore."

Nancy Tribush, described as a happily married lady in a company of swinging singles, is unabashed when her actor husband asserts that before and after marriage, she was "a professional virgin," who has found a fresh outlook on life in the raw. Nancy's closest brush with embarrassment, though the incident seems to amuse her now, came as a result of her bare, bottom-side-up appearance in a sketch called Who: Whom, written by Tynan himself (I swear it but am sworn not to reveal my source), as "a turned-on sadist's view of free choice." As a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Brooklyn College, Nancy was surprised to learn that she had won a dishonorable mention in this year's commencement address for "exposing her buttocks every night on the stage of the Eden Theater." Displaying his, though, has taken years off comic Bill Macy--at 47, the oldest actor in the show--who has dropped pounds and picked up a good deal of speed and style, offstage and on, in amiable competition with men and birds many years his junior.

Unless the police interfere with their act--which seems unlikely, since producer Elkins cannily called on the cops and sundry protectors of the public morals to drop by for consultation during 41 previews--the performers can settle down for a long, profitable run, interrupted only by ringing telephones and heavy correspondence. Letters from home are a problem for some of the girls, whose parents tend to view their present employment with apprehension. Pinned to the mirror in her dressing room (if one can still call it that), Katie Drew-Wilkinson, an ebullient English kewpie, displays a crisply worded letter from her father, who suggests that she change her name. And no one escaped the ire of a Mrs. Smith, who wrote a vulgar note to each performer, under a Waldorf Towers letterhead, wishing them everything from incurable cancer to perpetual banishment from the centers of Western civilization. "I wanted to answer her and say thanks," says Margo, "keep those letters and postcards rolling in, folks."

Whatever they were like before, today the cast members appear unencumbered by either inhibitions or euphemisms, and their air of rich communal mystery might well intimidate an outsider who customarily goes around fully dressed. Invited backstage during a performance one balmy evening, I made my way to the Eden Theater, an appropriately rechristened burlesque house on Second Avenue in the East Village, somewhere between the Reno Chophouse and the Sock It To Me! boutique. With absolutely nothing hanging out save my Playboy credentials and a new blue tie, I stood in the shabby wings, while actors effected exits and entrances. Except for the fact that Bob Hope, Gina Lollobrigida and Johnny Carson were supposed to be out front that night, it was just another performance. And I noticed things:

Two elderly stagehands doze on a flowered sofa that is used for a wife-swapping orgy in the middle of the first act. A nude actress steps up to the water cooler beside them, but they appear oblivious to her.

Onstage, playing an irascible fetishist in a sketch by Jules Feiffer, Alan Rachins shouts, "You only fuck for companionship!" Stage manager Greg Taylor laughs.

Stark-naked on her way to a costume change, Katie stops to confide that she is thinking about her fantasy for the masturbation sketch. Seems the actors improvise their own words, changing from show to show. "We just say whatever comes into our heads. If I have a friend in the audience, as I do tonight, I say something sort of related." Later, I hear Katie getting a solid laugh with, "We were fucking in the flickering light of the Johnny Carson show."

Because Bob Hope is, indeed, out front, Leon expresses concern about the timing of his monolog.

Bodies, bodies everywhere, and no one the least bit self-conscious. Me neither; I am used to it now. Walter Kerr was wrong, I learn, about the dearth of erections ("Impotence is what is finally celebrated in all of these ventures"). The guys admit it happens all the time and the girls help them cover up, because the New York district attorney's office disapproves of onstage tumescence.

Someone invites me, facetiously, of course, to join the "fuck line," the cast's code phrase for the finale, a chain of nude bodies in a rousing simulated orgy.

Very few visitors backstage afterward. Gina left at the intermission. Carson never showed at all. Hope relays an equivocal message: He, too, wants to do the movie version.

Leon is scarcely out of the shower when a tall dark girl appears at the crack of his dressing-room door. She is a friend of someone he knows on The Paris Review. Fast hello and good night. Leon shrugs. "You never know whether to cover yourself with the towel or what. Not too many people come back. I think they're uneasy in this little subculture of ours."

Nude actors sound quite vulnerable when they begin to wonder about the value of what they are doing. "The houses are full," Katie observes, "but are we in a success or a peep show?" Mark, who is a friend of Nureyev's, insists that the Russian dancer's enthusiasm for Oh! Calcutta! will prompt him to perform a nude ballet of his own within a year or two (and even the show's coolest critics have agreed that it frames a compelling case for nudity in dance). English actor Nicol Williamson has hinted that he may consent to do a nude version of Prometheus Bound.

If there were nothing else to commend it, and there is, Tynan's futtering brain child might claim distinction as a breakthrough in equal rights for women, who have waited centuries to ogle males for the sheer pleasure of the sport, while their menfolk told themselves that the ladies didn't crave that sort of stimulus. Which explains in part why women (very few functioning as drama critics, worse luck) respond as enthusiastically as most of them do to the purely physical excitement of Oh! Calcutta! More importantly, the show may prove a milestone in the galloping sexual revolution and does provide--with body English--a ringing answer to those indefatigable puritans who still complain in writing to the Times that any further sexual freedom marks a surrender to "our lower nature." It's that sort of thinking that makes one want to adopt "Oh! Calcutta!" as a battle cry.

Curtain up. G strings and jocks away.