In a little over a week we will open The Little Dog Laughed, a show that will ask audiences to enjoy themselves hugely at the expense of the sharks and mavens who make up the Hollywood dream machine. We will also be placing every audience member within 4 rows of two handsome, funny, highly charismatic men who will, when the scene and the moment demand it, strip entirely into their all-togethers and prepare to make out.
This is hardly groundbreaking, from a theatrical standpoint. The famed Mrs. Henderson circumvented London obscenity laws during the first World War by creating burlesques backed with utterly still, utterly naked women in classic grecian poses. The burlesques were hugely popular, and the censors turned a blind eye because the lovely ladies could be construed as ….scenery, as long as they didn’t move a muscle.
Go back a few thousand more years to the classical eras in Greek and Rome and you would find the public spaces riddled with the muscular marble likenesses of gods and goddesses in poses ranging from grace to abandon. The common factor? The nonchalance with which their most private places were displayed peeping from togas or framed by greenery. It was these statues, of course, that allowed Mrs. Henderson to make her case- after all, if we do not consider elegantly nude to be obscene when carved in marble, why would be consider the same pose obscene when rendered in the flesh?
The Broadway stage is no stranger to a little flesh, either.
In 1987 Kathy Bates opened Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune in her altogethers- the opening scene revealed her and Kenneth Walsh humping away in a hotel bed, barely covered by a sheet. This particular bout of theatrical nakedness was made groundbreaking in part because, unlike Mrs. Henderson’s nymphs and naifs, Kathy was a “woman of stature”- an actress on the rise whose own agent had told her she was going to need to drop a few pounds before being seen in such revealing light. She left her body defiantly alone and opened the door for a generation of actresses who created roles that weren’t dependent on the standard size 2 ingenue to size 6 grand dame arc of the traditional Hollywood career.
Something you maybe didn’t know? According to PCS House Manager Patty Hunter, a former New York actress who knew Kathy during that time, the preview night tested Kathy’s resolve: Normally, the play begins with the two actors arriving in blackout into the bed, only to have the lights come up on their sheet covered bodies. But on the first preview there was a lighting glitch and the lights popped on, full blast, while she was still in naked transit to the bed, nothing between her and the audience but a sudden vacuum as 1200 or so people sucked in air and gasped at the unexpected vulnerability of a naked plus-sized woman who had not yet prepared herself to be so exposed.
I have to wonder: for Kathy, in that moment, did her nakedness became a political act? One that inadvertently commented on just how accustomed we are to accomodating naked flesh that is feminine, petite, and carefully posed- and just how shocking it can be to witness a woman shaped infinitely more like our own mothers and sisters, naked in a moment when she is not expecting to be seen?
Of course, the stage is no stranger to a little masculine full frontal, either- before Tracy Letts started winning Pulitzers with August: Osage County, he produced a little show called Bug that called for 10 to 15 minute scenes where the lead actor and actress (in a haze of drug fueled paranoia) bounce off the walls of a seedy hotel room wearing nothing but their (emaciated) birthday suits.
The nakedness in that play was fascinating for how completely un-sexual it was. As the two people pick and tear at each other and build tinfoil cocoons to escape the delusions of their fevered brains, you are forced to confront their bodies as sheer biology- the houses of fluids and activities essential to our well being that we continue to know practically nothing about.
Of course things get more interesting, and controversial, when nakedness is combined with gayness. Even plays that dealt explicitly with gay relationships often tiptoe around naked side of their relationship in ways that “straight” theater has not done for decades.
Look at the entire genre of plays that shrouded gay relationships in a veil of depth and piety created by the inevitable AIDS death or tragedy that ended the play. Naked, yes. Gay, yes. But sad, and therefore noble, and therefore art.
Richard Greenberg takes naked gayness into a lighter, but still political place in Take Me Out, where a baseball team is forced to cope with a star player who decides to come out of the closet. The discomfitting impact of this revelation on the team is illustrated explicitly by a series of hilarious shower scenes where the 8 naked sportsmen struggle to adjust their locker room etiquette to accomodate the possibility that more than just batting averages are being evaluated during their post-game shower sessions.
Leight uses nakedness here to make an overt point about the lines between cameraderie and attraction, about the rules of gender and the body and about the ways in which heterosexual men have grown accustomed to having their nudity be un-objectified. Look at locker room behavior, he says. Look how even injecting the idea of naked attraction into its midst can strain the fabric of masculine relationship. The nakedness in Take Me Out is placed in quotation marks, with capital letters, to make a very well aimed, but somewhat sharp point.
And that, perhaps, is why it feels so groundbreaking to watch the frank and casual way in which The Little Dog Laughed treats two men, nearly strangers, and their overtly sexual nakedness with each other. They are naked together, not in a deeply revelatory way, but in a deeply casual way. A deeply normal and flippantly purient way.
The political act in The Little Dog Laughed is not so much that these boys are in the buff (Broadway’s certainly been there and done that) or that they’re gay (because I should certainly hope that no longer holds power to shock in the theater) but because they are not pious or preachy in their nudity or in their gaiety…they are shallow, and funny, and naked… and desperate and callous and conflicted and, well, a lot like us.
Which is not to suggest that Douglas Carter Beane has set out to make some revelatory political statement with this play about a gay movie star deciding whether to come out of the closet. It is, in fact, the apolitical nature of the choices these characters make- the highly personal and nuanced ways they leap from choice to choice (who to kiss? where? for how long? in front of whom?) that makes the show so interesting. Sexuality, nakedness, love, brutalizing emotional revelation…these things crop up with the same frequency, and are treated with the same intelligence and insouciance as the choice to have another beer or another shot at fame.
They’re not naked in any capital “N” sort of way. They don’t fall in love in any capital “L” sort of way. Mitchell’s agent Diane is not evil in a capital “E” sort of way. They do what they do because that’s what makes sense and feels good at the time.
And when what they choose to do happens to still be illegal in some states, and what they hope to become is still so feared by the Hollywood mythmakers that Diane’s character is still agreed by most to have made the most politically appropriate suggestion on behalf of her client… well.
I won’t spoil what that suggestion is right here. But I will say that it is so profoundly impious, so unrepentantly shallow and so defiantly against the rules of good romantic comedy (as well as the rules of gay friendly sexual politics) that you should be utterly horrified.
Unless you agree.
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{Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia) pours on the charm to seal a deal on behalf of her client in 
{Mitchell (Brik Berkes) and Alex (Dennis Flanagan) find an unexpected moment of connection after a hook up turns into something deeper.} 
{What are you THINKING? Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia) tries to get her client off of the “raft made of rent boy”}
{Some romantic evening indeed. Mitchell (Brik Berkes) and Alex (Dennis Flanagan) prove that a kiss is not always just a kiss.}
{After an unguarded moment of tenderness, Alex (Dennis Flanagan) watches over an exhausted and beleagured Mitchell (Brik Berkes)}
{Caught in the Act! Rising star Mitchell Green (Brik Berkes) tries to explain a “slight reoccuring case of homosexuality,” spurred on by the sweet natured rent boy Alex (Dennis Flanagan) to his scheming agent Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia).}
{Nothing to see here: Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia)tries to steer the media glare elsewhere as Mitchell (Brik Berkes) and Alex (Dennis Flanagan) fall in love.}
{Hank Stamper (P.J. Sosko) sizes up his exhausted little brother Leland (Karl Miller) after his first full day as a choker setter on the family logging site.}
