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Old friends who rarely see me in the flesh send emails telling me my life is glamorous. They refer, of course, not to the geeky, lonerish me they know all too well -- the Melrose Place addict who naps too much and skips nights on the town to square off with writer's block at home. They imagine I've metamorphosed into the sum of my coordinates: New Yorker, entrepreneur, editor of a sex magazine in cyberspace. Cool, but my West Coast friends would be right to picture me at my desk most Friday nights, ordering in Thai food and getting down to such genuinely fun editorial duties as sifting through Lisa Carver's Diaries and scouring photography journals in search of talent to move you with.
Of course, to properly edit any magazine -- especially one like Hooksexup -- it's necessary to leave the deskchair once in a while, see what's shakin'. Lately, professional research has mandated regular trips to the theater. Yes, the theater! It seems that for each Times Square strip joint that's barred and shuttered by New York's smut-stamping mayor, a graying Broadway playhouse flushes with new life. Call me cynical, but I think this has less to do with a resurgence of appreciation for the arts, and more with an age-old appetite for nudity -- and celebrities. The stars are coming to Broadway to earn their stripes, and alongside seasoned stage actors, they're stripping down. But why? Is this mere salesmanship, or -- now here's where my idealism shines through -- an expression of unpretensiousness, of intimacy? Are actors simply trying to appear more human in an age when celebrity is God?
In an effort to find out, I spent my January pad Thai and video budget on tickets to The Blue Room, Broadway's most talked about offering, in which bona fide movie star Nicole Kidman plays five sexually frustrated characters on various (literal and figurative) routes to coming undone at the seams: at one point the breath-bated audience is given a rear view of the actress' birthday suit (it fits perfectly, by the way). In this much-ballyhooed scene, Iain Glen -- whose own stage-streaking, for some crazy reason, has not captivated the press nearly as much as Kidman's -- dresses the coltish beauty in her role as "the model." Kidman is a surprisingly good actor on the stage, and I was engaged right up to that moment, when her impossibly elevated butt rendered her about as earthly as Stephanie Seymour in the Victoria's Secret "Angels" campaign. As unfair as it sounds, Kidman's blessing is also her curse when it comes to playing "mortal." Later, I read the actress' take in my Playbill: " . . . it's far easier than doing nudity in film. You're not surrounded by lots of cameras and crew. You're just in the scene with the other actor . . . " No mention, I noted, of all the other people in the room. Surely there is also an issue of couth involved for Kidman: the legitimizing, cultured aura of the theater offsets the supposed trashiness of sharing the goods.
Maybe acting is like real life, where dropping trou on a crowded beach in the French Riviera is a lot easier, and less effective, than in somebody's apartment. With this in mind, I went off-Broadway to see a scrappy little production called Killer Joe. I'd heard the show was graphic, but was nonetheless jolted when the star (an understudy for Amanda Plummer) burst onto the stage sans culottes. I swear I could see her razor burn from my front row seat. It took so much energy to train my eyes on her face that I didn't hear a word of dialogue until she put her pants on, but by God, she had me rapt. I appreciate the guts it must take to face an audience wearing nothing but a T-shirt, night after night, in a tiny, cold theater. I appreciate that the actor suffered the nics and bumps of shaving her bikini line instead of having an expensive wax job done, because it's what her character would do.
But it wasn't until I saw a play called Stop Kiss, by Diana Son, that an actor's nudity moved me. Oblivious to my running nose and brimming eyes, I watched a character I'd grown to feel real affection for undress her wheelchair-bound girlfriend; I squirmed in my seat through the excruciating shivering of the handicapped girl while her friend fumbled with her buttons. And I began to understand that when actors take off their clothes, they're not philosophizing, necessarily, just freeing up a valuable tool, the body. But for the inspired playwright, a character's physical unveiling is something more symbolic: the culminant moment in a carefully orchestrated emotional stripstease.
