ON STAGE, ‘OFFENDING YOU IS A WAY OF SPEAKING TO YOU’

People have been calling theater a nasty business for centuries, and sometimes they’ve been right. In the seamier days of the Roman Empire, criminals were actually executed on stage as part of the play. By any definition, that’s nasty.

But nastiness generally depends on the culture. The Elizabethans could handle the bawdy jokes in “Romeo and Juliet,” while the Victorians were offended by the very subject of Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Who wanted his daughter seeing a play about venereal disease?

In the theater of the 1980s, practically anything goes. Nudity, simulated sex, raw language, theatrical shock tactics are likely to turn up on the very nicest stages. Whether this is a nasty state of affairs will depend on the viewer, but it’s not a new state of affairs--it’s been true for almost 20 years.

It’s the only way to guarantee a grown-up theater. The alternative is censorship or self-censorship. Supposing it were off-limits to write a play about morbid subjects. Animal mutilation, say. How could a play about a youth blinding a stableful of horses not be nasty?

Yet audiences found themselves strangely moved by Peter Shaffer’s “Equus.” Give the artist freedom, and he can help us to look at a forbidden subject and see its human face.

The touchier the subject, the more tact he will need. “Bent” (now at the Coast Playhouse) has a scene where two gay men under Nazi guard make love verbally. Some viewers are moved by this scene, but others find it--nasty. The playwright wasn’t able to lead them past the point of resistance, to the point of compassion. But that was the aim.

Compassion isn’t always the aim in today’s theater. David Mamet might answer complaints about the nasty language in his “Glengarry Glen Ross” this way: “Hey, don’t come to me . That’s how guys who run real-estate scams talk. I don’t like them either.”

Here the playwright sees himself as a reporter, someone getting out what Lenny Bruce used to call the information . When he’s as good a reporter as Mamet, it’s an absolutely valid defense. But when nasty language reaches a certain density, it begins to look like an assault on the audience.

That’s also allowed in today’s theater. A founding text is Peter Handke’s “Offending the Audience” (1969): “You butchers, you buggers, you bullies, you rabbits, you foul-mouths, you sellouts, you deadbeats, you. . . .”

Why so nasty? Because “offending you is a way of speaking to you.” So Jerry, in Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” can only speak to Peter with a knife. In such exchanges, however, something ought to be said.

Scatology in the hands of an expert (Steven Berkoff in “Greek”) can be exhilarating. It can be a way of demystifying taboo words and making them jump through the hoop. But repeating the same forbidden word ad infinitum (Lanford Wilson in “Burn This”) does not lead to breakthroughs. Plonk, plonk, plonk.

Grotesquerie, also known as black humor, can likewise be liberating, as in Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.” Remember the story about the woman so depressed that she hangs both herself and her cat? That’s too awful not to be funny. However, it is a hard story to top, as is clear from Henley’s later plays. Hyperbole gets our attention in the theater, but doesn’t necessarily hold it.

The preceding has treated the theater’s chief weapon, words. What about nasty deeds on today’s stage--scenes of sex and violence?

They are rarely as realistic as in film, and rarely as disturbing. Something about the symbolic nature of theater cools them down. Nudity is still available to stage directors. We are likely to have some in the Mark Taper Forum’s upcoming repertory of Joe Orton plays. But it is often eschewed as being distracting to the audience, demeaning to the actors, and somehow not as sexy as suggested nudity.

Intercourse, whether naked or clothed, is always simulated--even a sex scene as lurid as the the one in Taper, Too’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” had the element of a pantomime about it. I haven’t seen anyone urinate on the stage since Sam Shepard’s “The Curse of the Starving Class” 10 years ago. It always did seem a bit of a stunt.

There was also much talk in the 1960s about Theatre of Cruelty. Not much progress was made towards institutionalizing it. A few chickens were killed to protest war, but the audience became distressed for the chicken.

Here’s how innocent the theater audience still is about violence in the 1980s: When Gloucester gets his eyes put out in “King Lear,” people still squirm. We can deal with all kinds of disturbing information on the screen these days. But in the mind’s eye, where we see a play, we are still very tender.