‘Naked’ Takes Gutsy Look at the Body Politic Inside All of Us

In a season of domestic political upheaval, an era of global political cataclysm, there’s also a political struggle going on closer to each one of us.

Despite diet and exercise fads and an over-dependence on medical aid, how many of us are aware of the continuing political battles taking place within our bodies? Soldiers and rulers, media wags and couriers, entertainers and lovers, collide and communicate within ourselves. They are the parts of our bodies. Maybe it’s about time we took a look at the world within us.

That’s the idea behind “Naked Body,” a one-man show opening Tuesday at the Blue Line Theatre, written and performed by Michael Connor and directed by Helen Greenberg.

Don’t get the wrong idea.

“People hear the title,” Connor says, “and they think, ‘Oh, a one-man version of “O Calcutta!” ’ I don’t want to go out opening night and see a bunch of Navy pilots going, ‘All right, where’s the girls?’ ” When Connor did the show at an Italian-American playhouse in the Bronx, one of the owners said, “We don’ wanna see no cheeks that ain’t got ears.”

The nakedness of this body is interior. The 30-year-old performer describes his show as “a bloodstream of consciousness show.”

Physicality has always been a part of his life. His father was a professional boxer who migrated to the military. Connor and his older brother used to “fight and box and wrestle.” That was after the first time Connor imagined his body talking. Diagnosed as hypoglycemic when he was small and told he couldn’t eat sugar, he said, “Wait’ll my taste buds hear about this!”

He eventually wound up in college premed studies, but it just didn’t work out. “Other people would be dissecting their rats, and I’d be trying to revive mine,” he says. Besides, he had other irons in the fire. At 16 he conned his way into a nightclub as a comic, a field he spent years in, traveling coast to coast. He also worked professionally as an actor, in and out of New York, and for three years at the Idaho Shakespearean Festival, playing Hamlet and Prince Hal, among other roles.

All the while “Naked Body” was incubating inside. He developed a routine about a stomach for his comedy act, and soon realized that bit was getting more of a reaction than his other material.

Because of his stomach routine, he says, “I was also finding my voice for the first time. Every comic, when they start out, is derivative. I was like other people. That was the first time I heard myself coming through. I stayed with it.”

Eventually the idea built into a play about the human body. It was rehearsing at a struggling arts center called “Bajando” in a very tough Brooklyn neighborhood. “Bajando, “ says Connor with a laugh, “is Spanish for duck. “ An actress named Helen Greenberg was cast for the production.

“This isn’t a play,” Greenberg said at the first rehearsal, “it’s a one-man show.” Connor fired her on the spot.

But Greenberg knows her way around a theater. She has just finished a successful off-Broadway run in Charles Grodin’s “One of the All-Time Greats,” directed by Tony Roberts. She has worked in the rarefied air of regional theater, at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and as a member of the sketch comedy group Brain Trust (with whom she will be appearing in Los Angeles in January).

After Greenberg was fired from the original “Naked Body,” there was a long pause before she and Connor met again. By that time he was willing to listen to her, and turned the play into its present form, with Greenberg as a director. About a year ago, they were married. She chuckles when asked about directing her husband. “I’m the only one who can handle him,” she says.

It’s obviously a combination that works. “Naked Body” has been successful wherever it has appeared since its debut at the West Bank Cafe on New York’s Theatre Row. Its comedy and its insights not only appeal to general audiences but have impressed medical professionals.

One such audience member is Dr. Robert Pollack, professor of biological sciences and physiology at Columbia University in New York. After seeing “Naked Body” at the school’s Alma Shapiro Theatre, he says, “I was kind of startled by it. It’s disturbing and entertaining at the same time. Having a body play the parts of the body is a sort of weird, involuted thing to do. He pulled it off with a very, very good physical performance.”

Pollack continues: “It’s sort of dance and--you’ll excuse the expression--white-man rap at the same time. There’s something intrinsically theatrical about the body, thought of as a conglomeration of parts that talk to each other. It’s an altogether engaging, gutsy thing for him to have done.”

The physician appreciates Connors’ idea that the mind and the body are one. “Other cultures on the planet,” he says, “have no difficulty that the body and the mind are all of a piece. We have for thousands of years forced that separation way past where it’s biologically sound. When that wall breaks, we call it one or another kind of sickness. What Connor does, is kind of break the wall under the ritualistic protection of theater. In another culture it would be a kind of shaman’s performance.”

Although, as Pollack says, this is very serious stuff, “Naked Body” is also a comedy, and a very physical comedy at that.

One reason Connor has mostly veered away from stand-up comedy, he says, is that he’s basically a clown. “When I started doing stand-up,” Connor says, “you could count the people doing it. It was glamorous, terrific. All of a sudden it became generic; it became not an art form anymore. There are only a few clowns.”

And, of course, Connor had started to develop a new body of work for himself.