Shaping up for "Oh! Calcutta!"

Having Been Barred unceremoniously from all the under-wraps auditions and something tantalizingly referred to as "nude improvisations," I was ultimately informed that it was a propitious time to visit Oh! Calcutta! in rehearsal. "They're shooting some film tomorrow," said director Michael Thoma, his worry beads almost audible over the phone. "That might be the best time for you to start. Since two other guys will be here, it won't be such a shock to the performers to have another outsider. You might dress as informally as possible."

It seemed like a weighty warning for what was meant to be a casual look-in on a little peep show in Los Angeles that had already been clobbered by critics in New York and San Francisco. [See the pictorial essay in the October 1969 issue of Playboy.] But, as I already knew, Oh! Calcutta! is an imperishable American Happening, a gaudy, unstoppable gallimaufry in the Theater of Zap, an impious, inelegant flicker in the erotic renaissance. And, as I was about to learn, no one involved in the show takes it lightly at all, at all.

Harking to the director's edict, I dressed so casually that, on my first visit to rehearsals, I almost faded into nothingness in the parti-colored presence of producer Hillard Elkins, a symphony of robin's-egg blues, and his beautiful bride, Claire Bloom, in canary-yellow slacks and shiny black-leather jacket with silver studs. Moreover, Hollywood's campy Fairfax Theater, expensively converted from a movie mosque to a theater with terrible sight lines, retained its original decor: Cuban cat house.

Michael Thoma, a tense, bald, mirthless man, asked me to wait in the lobby, behind intimidating Private Rehearsal--No Admittance signs, While he explained to the cast who I was and why I, alone, would be watching their naked frivol from time to febrile time.

"You're not supposed to be there," said the house manager.

"Just reading the signs," I said.

"Sure, sure. That's what they all say."

The lady accompanist arrived in granny glasses and a long, flowing, flowered something. She said she had been borrowed from Hair. The stage manager smiled at her and said: "I love your aba."

"My what?"

"Your aba. It's an African aba."

"It is?"

"Yes, my wife makes them."

"Oh."

Mike Thoma guided me down a dark aisle toward the stage, where four young men and five girls were making funny noises and doing what he called "relaxation exercises." The men were dressed uniformly in soot-black shirts and flared blue jeans, the girls in black tunics, just like Maureen O'Sullivan in the Tarzan movies. "We want them to dress alike to get the feeling of closeness, of a family," said Thoma. "Later, they'll go into identical robes. I wanted them to leave their own things--clothes, jewelry, watches--their identity and personality behind in the dressing room and come free and open to the work. None of them was allowed to read the script beforehand. I didn't want to commit people to parts but to concentrate on the sensitivity training, in which I can get the sense of who is right for what part."

Dancer-choreographer Margo Sappington, the Baytown, Texas, wonder who walked away with the notices in New York for her pas de deux with George Welbes, was putting the players through their exotic paces. "Push. Touch your feet. On your back. Lift your legs over-head and push. Just keep stretching up. Stay in one piece, don't turn into spaghetti. Now down and right leg out and around and extend the joint."

"Which joint?" asked one of the men.

"Your hip joint, baby," said Margo. "It's more of a swastika effect."

One male said that he didn't feel well, and George said, "I think you better go back to show business," but Margo said, "He just needs a good lay." And she drilled them endlessly with snapping fingers and an odd, Morse code-like clucking. "In a performance, you can fake," she told them, "but here you can't fake. Here is where we break things down." The cast groaned. "A little higher on your feet now--so I don't hear the slaps."

"It's like the Latin Quarter," remarked one of the girls. Margo said it was like terrible.

During a break, the cast drank from huge health-juice jars, discussed the organic desserts at The Nucleus Nuance and massaged one another's necks, backs, legs and toes. The accompanist played a harpsichord in the pit while Margo worked privately with one of the players, her lithe body pressed to his scrawny one, working his hips with her hands.

"Poor Tony," said Mike Thoma. "He can't sing, can't dance. Margo said absolutely no, but he read so funny we decided to go along and break our asses with him and see if we can get him to move."

The accompanist came up to say that the new man had arrived to audition for understudy: "Shall I give him a voice test?"

"Yeah, check his voice,"said Thoma, inexplicably pulling his pants out at the waist and looking down at himself. "See how he's hung."

"See if he's castrati, anyway," said the stage manager.

"That's how I see if he can sing?" the accompanist asked with innocent wonder.

Later, over borscht, chicken-liver pate and pastrami at Canter's Delicatessen, Thoma remarked that more than 600 people--ten boys to every girl--had turned up the first couple of days of tryouts, an Actors' Equity record. "But it's hard to find people who act, dance, sing and look good with their clothes off, too," he said with a dour solemnity that even the Living Theater's Julian Beck would envy. "A lot of the girls were too hippy and a lot of the men too hippie--they saw our ad in the Free Press. First we conducted interviews to get a sense of communication with the person and his background."

"Do you dance?" Thoma said he had asked one glassy-eyed, hirsute young man.

"Man, I'm dancing now," he said, sitting stolidly in front of a desk. End of interview.

Another gratuitously told the director: "I don't have any underwear on, if you want to see my cock." Thoma didn't.

Yet another insisted on stripping to his Jockey shorts in order to read for Rock Garden, a fully clothed sketch by Sam Shepard. Then he pointedly pushed his pelvis toward the director (or, in Margo's lingo, "He threw a basket"), who cut him off peremptorily with: "That's enough."

Most of the girls promised they would lose ten pounds if they got the job. One said she had no nipples. Another volunteered that she would stop shaving her public hair. Added Thoma: "A couple of guys said, 'If size has anything to do with it, forget about me.' Almost no one came in bragging. Nobody was asked his sexual preference. As things turned out, all our people have been heterosexual, but it hasn't interfered with the work. In order to maintain--and convey--sexual tension built up in the work, we have to keep to our one rule: no fraternization outside. Sensual tension would be diminished if they were having relationships on the side. The audience has this fantasy of everybody fucking and sucking backstage, but nothing could be further from the truth. They are completely asexual with one another."

"The main thing," added Margo Sappington, looking as prim as Ruby Keeler in her prime, "is being able to explore each other's body without having romantic attachments. It's not clinical, either, but affectionate. Society is so funny--when we bump into people on the street, we say, 'I'm sorry,' instead of, 'It's good.' Everybody in the show is glad to touch each other, and it's not being naughty. Of course, it's harder for the men, because there's the outward sign of being aroused. And men haven't been accepted naked onstage as women have, from belly dancers on up. Everyone wants to know how they keep from getting erections. Well, they do get them; yesterday there was a honey of a hard-on. But we don't feel like lovers. It becomes a warm, open, almost brother-sister thing, a family feeling. This isn't the kind of show you can go into halfheartedly. I went in with both feet. I'm Leo."

Sensing a conversational dead end, I took a quick detour: "Do the players use body make-up?"

"No," said Margo, "but sometimes you do have to make up parts of your body--like the time I went sun-bathing in Connecticut, my ass was the color of your bloody mary."

After the initial interviews and readings, said Thoma, "Margo put them through a dance session, to see whether they're open to moving, who's willing to let go and what their bodies look like. She can tell pretty much everything about their bodies in the dance auditions. People who are too careful aren't going to be good for the show. On the other hand, you can tell in an instant if they're there just to take their clothes off. We're pretty certain we want a person before bringing them to the improvisation that takes them into the nude for the first time. Out of the 600-plus, we were down to about 18 by the time we got to that. That's where you really get to see if an actor has the freedom to go with an emotion. Also, you do have to take a look at the body, though I very rarely disqualify them for aesthetic reasons. The actor here, in a sense, has nothing to hide behind--it's a mental and physical stripping. People think we put them through this just to have our jollies." (They couldn't very well have them, anyway: A recent Actors' Equity ruling calls for the presence of an Equity official at all nude auditions. Moreover, Equity prohibits disrobing altogether if that is "the sole prerequisite for a job.")

What did he do for his nude improvisation? I asked Tony later in the theater lobby. "Nude improvisation? What's that?" I explained what little I knew about it and, still looking at me blankly, he said: "Oh, yeeaaahhh. Well, Mike sat on a stool and said, 'Imagine you're a writer and you're a success and one of your novels has just been published and you've decided to move to the country and you come across a stream and you decide to go in. I want you to undress and go into the stream. What you do there is up to you; but at one point, I want you to recite a letter to the person who is closest to you, whom you miss and love the most.' So I took off my clothes and went down on this sheet on my back, sorta, and waved my hands through the 'water' and wrote this letter aloud. It's too personal to recall."

At any rate, that was the initial skin show for each of the performers. Then came the groupie stuff. Margo was a few days late arriving from the East, a delay that created tension in the cast. "My very first day," she recalled, "I could feel that things had been building up and I knew they were anxious to get down to getting naked; and when the moment came, they were pretty rambunctious, looking at each other and laughing hysterically. They were doing a sound-and-movement exercise in their robes and one girl threw hers off and everybody followed suit."

"Then," said Thoma, "I made them close their eyes and come together in a circle. Then, with eyes closed, arms around each other and breathing together, I had them sit down at the same time and speak aloud what they were feeling at the moment. Then I had them all stand in a large circle and, still holding hands, open their eyes, and each person did a little turnaround, so that everyone could get a good look at everyone else. There were no cracks. It was a very quiet moment. After that, they felt totally free with one another."

Sound-and-movement is the concrete slab of a moniker for a kinetic, abstract, fluidly sensual exercise designed by psychologist Jacques Levy to relieve tension and prepare the players for working together in the altogether. "You can scream and yell and allow yourself to look foolish," explained Margo, "so by the time you finish, you'd think nothing of even going to the bathroom with your partner." To an outsider, it looks like some primitive tribal rite. To some of the players, it seemed a bit ridiculous at first blush, but enfin, most felt it was efficacious -- "a way to get out your crazies," as one put it.

Throughout the rehearsal period, sound-and-movement was the one exercise doled out in Cyclopean proportions, almost ritualistically. It began with four people lined up on either side of the stage, all dressed like fighters in white terrycloth robes with OH! CALCUTTA! across the back in hot cerise. At Margo's command, one person would move across to the other side of the stage, releasing free-floating noises while making any kind of move, then transfer both to someone else, who would change the patterns en route the other way.

Though the exercise imparted no subtle messages, perhaps the best way to explain it is through my sketchy notes: (continued overleaf)Oh! Calcutta!(continued from page 76) "Margo says, 'To anybody.' Adrienne begins with 'Oooohhhh, ooooooh,' stretching and groaning loke some unidentifiable wild best. Anna Lee picks up same, but it become 'Annhh-whoop, annhh-whoop,' which Simon in turn changes to 'Whoooha, whooo-ha.' Sounds range from the animal to the human in rage, pain or ecstasy. Movements from nondescript leaps and lunges to slumping on all fours. Mostly awkward, ugly. No Nureyev entrechats, no De Mille vaultings. Margo says, 'No animal sound.' Geroge beats his butt, Simon's whistle mutate to Adienne's Bbrrrruuup-baaaa' to Tony, who goes, 'Vvvvv-rump, vvvv-rump,' like a frog, and Sheldon sidles from side to side like a punch-drunk fither. Simon goes, 'pow, pow, pow,' pubching the air with her fists, then spars with Lisa as Margo moves them back and forth in pairs now. George and Adrienne do a sort of cannibal dance of 'Oommmpahs'--The Nairobi Duo-- Tonny blithers like an idiot child, 'Bli-bli-bli,' and Martin passes with Sheldon, first in a bandylegged walk ("Dustin Hoffman!" says Martin), then as if swinging a baseball bat, then wielding a battle-ax. Lisa and Tony are doubled up, as if in labor, then go onto all fours, crawling and cracking knuckles on the stage, then pummeling it. The Zoo Story. George is sadomasochistic again--'Uummm-pah pah pah!; punching himself and the sky and stomping the stage like a wild man. Margo shouts, 'You're relating to the person beside you but not to the one that's going to pick up what you're doing.' Whispers onstage, and Thoma yells from front-row perch: 'Don't talk, don't talk!'"

There was hysteria now, laughter that would frighten all the animals of hell; Lisa seemed to be crying and Martin was yelling, "Heeeeelp"; sensing dangerous exhaustion, perhaps, robes, No robes." As they stipped to the buff, the weird shouts became soft grunts and groans, then sighs and hums and moans, as Mike and Margo gentlym almost imperceptibly guided the others together into a circle, then into what can best at center stage. Massed together now, as they are in the show's finale, they swayed as one, gasped as one, a single colossus of breath, rhythum, soul and simulated sex. Gustav Vigeland's famous nude pile-on statue in Olso. A Bosch painting. A physiospiritual encounter.

"For and four, now," said Thoma in a soft, theatrically modulated voice. "Eyes closed. Make contact. Move together. Once you find a partner, stay together, touch the texture of the skin, hold him, re-establish contact with him, rediscover each other. Now move off to someone else, find another partner. Keep your eyes closed." They touched, fondled, groped, kissed, rubbed and interlocked in lovers' embraces. Anything went--with the notable exception of screwing.

Adrienne and Sheldon were wandering alone in opposite directions when Thoma guided them together. He caught George, groping like the blinded Oedipus, just before he fell into the pit. He paired boy with boy, girl with girl, and they explored each other's body as freely as when they were paired boy-girl. George and Sheldon caressed each other's face, chest, hips, thighs, legs, buttocks, then massaged backs. Anna Lee surveyed the handsome landscape of Adriene's face with the élan of Helen Keller. Mike Thoma, messianic now and scowling, kept them moving by steering one to another, whispering, then spinning them off, grouping and regrouping, in pairs, then in fours, finally melding them into one polymorphous lump. Olso again.

Then Thoma signaled to the stage manger for music and the place was flooded with The Open Window's rendering of their own tender ballad, Much Too Soon. Then, for the first time, the director joined the group, now basking in touch and silent swaying and one bare light overhead. Finally, Thoma very quietly directed them to get into their robes. But the group was slow to atomize. George, Sheldon and Simon were locked in a groin-boggling embrace; Margo and Anna Lee were doing their thing mid stage; Adrienne brushed Martin's gluteus maximus with the tips of her fingers, as Martin's arms encircled George's legs. Then Mike embraced George and, before parting, they exchanged a fleeting kiss.

At length, Thoma signaled to peter, the music director, who banged out something on the piano called Chase Me, Charlie ("I've lost the leg of my drawers!"), a rousing number from a skit that was pulled from the show "long after it became the thing to play when things were getting a little heavy," explained Peter. Things had got very heavy, indeed.

Did the actors find such heady noncopulative exploration helpful to their in-show performance? "Sometimes it does get unnatural," said Anna Lee, a tall, blonde English girl, dressed now in an American flag. "Then you go overboard. You let go too much sexually. That's when it's working against you."

Simon, another British lass whose Manhattan weather show, Simon Says, earned her a Lillian Ross profile in The New Yorker, "The very first day, Margo kissed me right on the mouth--you don't see girls exposing themselves like this, either; Margo thinks nothing of nudity. She exposes herself all the time, because she really does believe the body is beautiful. She's Leo."

"At one point," said Tony, "I felt I could have done it without this [sensitivity] stuff, but you really have no way of knowing; we'd never done it before. Letting go--that's a great thing for freedom. All the crazy noises and movements. There was the initial nervousness about being nude. then I came to love all the exercises-- loosening you up and bringing everyone closer together. People tend to avoid the physical things in life. We're very uptight, especially men with men. But there's no homosexuality here. It's a warm feeling, a very beautiful thing. Like, today we were all crying. I think sound-and-movement and submission exercises helped me more than anything. They brought us closer together, helped make us more of a family."

Submission was the most complex and least performed of the psychological exercises. The first time she tired it out on the L.A. players, Margo was no more than half done in two and a half hours. She had explained it to the cast before-hand: "All right, robes off and line up. One of you comes out and faces the group. Then one by one, left to right, each one of you comes out and faces the group. Then one by one, left to right, each one of you comes out to greet this person and do whatever you feel like doing. The person out here alone can go along with the movement but must not initiate a new movement. The only warning is do not challenge the other person; never do anything that would turn him off to you. If you do, we call it throtwing down the gauntlet, meaning not looking into the other person's eyes. You can read eyes; you can feel it instinctively when someone's throwing down the gauntlet. It's a way for each person to meet everyone on a deep level. It starts tense and gets more and more intimate. This exercise is not stopped for anything, even if somebody cries. The only rule--there's no fucking. I known it's tough--we let you get into each other, then tell you you can't. It's a frustrating experience, because we're always pressing you to yours limits."

After the first such exercise, everyone dressed and sat around in a circle and held hands in a sort of languid, Pre-Raphaelite ring-around-a-rosy. "Everybody felt they wanted to share it with everybody else outside the group," said Margo later. "This looking at somebody and not being afraid to touch. Adrienne was crying ans saying, 'I feel so wanted and loved.' [She was fired from the show just before opening night.] One girl said she felt left out, like a litttle kid in the neighborhood, that nobody wanted to play with her. We all reached out for her. One guy couldn't (continued on page 196)Oh! Calcutta!(continued from page 78) break through and we couldn't break through to him and he looked as if he was crazy. We took off his clothes and bounced him around, made a circle around, made a circle around him and made him sing our names out to get him and made back into the group."

This remarkable 22-year-old lady, who was clearly born to dance naked, and teach others the same, pulls neither physical nor verbal punches in her work. Mango both strips and bandies four-letter words as insouciantlu as the rest of us might dispose of a plum pit. Rehearsing the opening number, which is called, with exfoliated accuracy, Taking Off the Robe, she calmly instructed the cast: "Every ten bars, a white light picks up a different person, who does his thing, and in the end everybody is doing the same thing. You're welcoming your guests to this evening. Every ten bars, a white light picks up a different person, who does his thing, and in the end everybody is doing the same thing. You're welcoming your guests to this evening. Everybody is introducing humself, so think of the name you want projected behind you and the correct spelling. Now, Martin's first; he doesn't expose anything--he teases. Anna Lee shows a little ass. George shows his legs and a little cock. Simon, you're the first tit. Sheldon, the first real flash of cock. Tony is a lot of ass. Adrienne is the first time you see the whole body naked and mine is taking the robe off completely and putting it back on again. I'm totally nude at the end. That's the progression of the thing--more and more is shown. It's a little bit tough. You known: Take it or leave it." Then, turning to be the elaborately indifferent accompansit, who was reading a book on child psychology, she asked demurely: "Can you play Oh! Calcutta!, lady?"

Simon said, "I'm not jiggling them right," and George conceded that "It's hard to dance and jiggle, too." Martin said, "Don't worry. we'll get it jiggling, bady," and Margo said, "It's terrible."

"It's not that good," Thoma added. "It's got to get better to be terrible."

Several days of technical rehearsals--setting lights, props, positions, slides, 35mm color film--interrupted the sensitivity exercises and, finally, Martin said to the director: "We seem to be drifting, losing contact. We can use some close-contact exericses again. Now there's too much invovement with self, with energy levels and what each of us is responsible for, which doesn't allow the socializing thing we had. We're really spent at the end of the day. Before, we felt good. I've become more interested in certain people than others. Others I'm losing. There's an undercurrent of jealousy. This isn't good."

Mike Thoma agreed; it was the very thing he had in mind himself. First he consigned your horny, astigmatic notetaker from his usual front-row seat to some dim limbo "beyond the tenth row," to avoid disturbing his sensitive passel of players. Then he assembled them on-stage: "What we wanna do, gang.... Quiet! Now, listen, gang, because of the technical activity of the past week we've been losing the warm, wonderful family thing we've had. I want to get into exercises where we can find each other again. We've gotta be together. I feel it myself; I've let it happen. I don't want to lose what we had. I feel you're not as full or as free or as warm toward each other. Ok, Mother [to Margo], we'll start with a little sound-and-move-ment exercises. Now, get your asses up there and love!"

After a particulary lachrymose s.-and- M.--there wasn't a dry eye in the house--Margo invented a new exercise: "Go down to the floor when you feel like it. Now sit up and hold hands and I want you to make eye contact with everyone in the group. Look into the other person's eyes--beyond the point you look away in embarrassment, to see what else is there. Otherwise, we lose the involement. Shhhhh, don't talk. Look! If you haven't made good contact with somebody, reach out for them.' The silence and solemnity of the moment were almost palpable; and sensing that they had gone far enough, Margo switched the William Tell Overture to full gain and deliberately shattered the mood. Yelps and laughter rent the musty air. Then the men simulated masturbation, as they do in a scene from the show, John Lennon's puerile Four in Hand-- in which the new member of an onanist society is turned on by the Lone Ranger, the show's lone nod to homosexuality.

"When we did this in New York," said George, "we had our pants open and our cocks out, but nobody noticed, they were so busy watching the film scenes"--of sexy nudes that precede the Lone Ranger. Mike Thoma added that in the opening ensemble number, "They'd ask, what slides? There, they were so busy looking at this and cocks and cunts, nobody was looking at the film."

Which brings us to the nub of my singal complaint about Oh! Calcutta! that everyone even remotely connected with the show seems to have infected it--onstage and off--with an emotional virus that operates at the most elemental, immature level of human sexuality. Instead of stoking Eros, they is in an undulating expanse of skin, this veritable veld of flesh, is too often overborne by a party pagan but mostly pubescent delight in dirty words. Shonk is never readily sustained, through either nudity or obscenity. A long, hard look behind the scenes often produced, curiously, but an echo of the worst of what's out front: a calculated, seemingly cultish effort to substitute vulgarity for what might have been a visceral vitality, amateurism for professionalism, sensation for thought. A telescoped sampling from the first fullcast number in rehearsal:

Margo: You're holding one hand across your crotch and one across your tit. My grandmother used to call me Tit.

Anna Lee: That's a nice nickname. How are you, Tit?

Margo: That's flash, Martin. You don't like my flash?

Martin: Why don't you go fuck yourself?

Margo: I don't have the equipment.

Martin (ogling Anna Lee): Holy Margo.

Margo: I don't care, I like my tits.

Anna Lee: I think they're pretty.

Martin (kissing them): I do, too.

Margo: He insults me, now this.

Martin: You got your get your hair out of your cleavage.... Are the people going to be watching my ass, Margo?

Margo: Don't worry. By the time you do it, you'll be beautiful.... Now, you always close robes right to left.

Martin: That's abnormal.

Margo: The whole thing is abnormal.... No, Martin, it's as though you're pulling your cock out with your two hands. Now, don't hold onto your thing, just hands over crotch.

Martin: My robe is sticky. I think I got peanut butter in here.

George: In New York, Bill Macy went to a a bar mitzvah and they asked him what he ws doing in Oh! Calcutta! He took his cock out and laid it on the banquet table and said, That's what I'm doing."

... Hey, we better swirl these robes lower or we're gonna be snapping crotches.

Martin (tangled in robes lower or we're gonna be snapping crotches.

Martin (tangled in robe: Oh, fuck, the slit is the real fuck-up.

George: When in doubt, slap it over the rhythm section. Our curtain call will be the robes and do a bump. The girls lower their robes and make them fo around. Can you make them go, Anna? Le't hear it for the cast. (Shakes hips so penis slaps things noisitly.)

Martin: Mine's get you a hand mike.

Gorge: Props!

Mike (watching Martin flash midstage): Keep it covered. You think they're gonna pay twenty-five dollars to see that piece of shit?

Martin (looking down dolefully): It's nothing, is it? I'm going to hang a birdseed bag on it to make it longer.

Gardner Compton, who designed the show's tricky mixed-media light sequences, stopped his cameras, came over and said: "Now I know why you have such a small notebook for this assignment--all you need is room for four-letter words." He was almost right and, ironically, none of it was as funny as, say, Martin's straight-faced remark while watching George and Margo rehearse their stunning nude Pas de deux, One on One: "That's Pornography!

After the first preview, the cast was wrung out and George Welbes, particulaly, was depressed but lucid. "I really think there is something in the material of the show that does not allow acting," he said with some acutiy. "It's a good-time, throwaway burlesque show, and it should be played that way. I went into it with total committed energy and it was terrible, terrible. It was like an awful lot of energy you put into something that isn't that worth while, the feeling that with half the effort, I could be twice the man."

Mike Thoma, looking worn and suety, assembled his players for the first round of cast notes. "Michele [who replaced Adrienne], you stepped on a line during a laugh--be grateful for every one of those. In Jack and Jill, I'd like to get a little tuch showing in that run-around. And in the rape, I don't want the cries too much. Be selective about the noise. I would like to feel that his cock has just hit your Adam's apple--hhhggguuurrr. Tony, in Was It Good for You Too? give us some activity that will slow you--like playing with your cock for half an hour. And in Coming Together, Going Together, see if you can say 'pussy' without that sense of rush--it's just a matter of articulating the thing--'puus-see,' in the line: 'I talk about pussy, but I eat corned beef.' Simon, your 'What the fuck are they doing up there? was cut off. You've been begging for that line for weeks, and you fucked it up. In Four in Hand, everybody stops thinking about their fantasies when the Lone Ranger comes in, and that's when you stop jerking off--the point was blutted, because we didn't have the film.

Thoma ordered more sensitivity exercises, several hours of them, in fact, on the very day of the premiere. But once more, the possibilites of exhilarating freedoms and uncluttered pleasures were diluted by the same perverse, narcissistic indulgence that can make even sexuality boring. During an exercise leading into Much Too Soon, in which the naked couples first explore each other tentatively, innocently, then group-symmetrically until they freeze in Rodin like poses, Martin placed his head where Simon's thighs met and Margo said, "I don't want you to eat her." "No," said Simon, "my mother's coming tonight." Then she complained about "the way Martin's dirty foot comes around between my legs"; but Martin enjoined her not to worry, because "It'll be clean tonight."

It was, but the show wasn't. It opened at the Fairfax before a tepid, celebrity-studded audience; once more, it was roundly scored by a rash of critics (three notices in the Los Angeles Times alone, including one by the cinema reviewer). Earlier this year, the unrelenting pressures of city censorship, a lot of quasi-offical obloquy and a lawsuit the local producer against the local producer for failing to make royalty payments conspired to cut Oh! Calcutta! down, at least for me time being. All this in the very root country of anything goes. Alas.