Bare Truths of Character

The evening sticks in Jerry Mitchell’s mind as an example of how full-frontal nudity in live theater can actually be, well, “a family affair.”

It was a performance that Mitchell, a veteran Broadway choreographer, saw while sipping sangria in a provincial Spanish town, at an outdoor stage under a dreamy moonlit sky--”the most magical night of my life.” A tongue-in-cheek version of the biblical story of creation, it featured not one, but two Adams and Eves, bouncing around in the buff. At one point--”I kid you not,” Mitchell says--the two Adams started “shaking each others’ penises, and every time they did, a sound would go, ‘Bd-ringg! Bd-ringg!’” Meanwhile the all-ages audience pointed and shrieked with laughter.

Sure, you’ll find much more outrageous and explicit stuff just by surfing the Internet, flipping on cable TV or cruising your local suburban cineplex, says Mitchell, who’s choreographing “The Full Monty,” that mostly PG-rated homage to blue-collar male bonding that opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre. But seldom, Mitchell believes, can these other media match the visceral energy, the human expressive potential, that nudity packs in live theater.

“I think nudity on stage is much more powerful than nudity in film,” he said during a rehearsal break. “And it’s different in different countries. We are a much more uptight society about being naked than Spain, than London even, than Amsterdam for sure. Yet look at any advertisement and how do we sell underwear, how do we sell socks, how do we sell perfume, how do we sell anything in this country? It’s by having a naked body next to it. It’s such a different kind of aesthetic here.”

Nudity in theater can wear many different masks. It can be revolutionary or regressive, powerful or pointless. It can be comic, erotic, heroic, subversive, insightful or just plain god-awful. It may be as old as the art of theater itself, a vestigial remnant of ancient tribal rituals designed to sublimate or stoke primitive passions. In 1st century Rome, female mimes frequently stripped for the pleasure of onlookers. In the 19th century, naked actors posed in tableaux vivant re-creations of classical paintings and sculptures, shielding prurient interest with the fig leaf of art.

Several decades later, those performers’ descendants (of both sexes) are tossing away their underwear and inhibitions on stages in Los Angeles, New York and around the world. In David Hare’s “The Blue Room,” which closes today at the Pasadena Playhouse, a roundelay of couples in various stages of undress probe the perilous intersection of sex and power. On Broadway, a stage adaptation of “The Graduate” recently opened to a round of Bronx cheers, after an earlier West End version left London’s male critics in a lather. And after premiering two years ago at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, “The Full Monty” is still charming the pants off New York and London audiences with its story of six unemployed Buffalo steelworkers who resolve to earn quick cash by making like Chippendales dancers.

Once again, actors are getting naked. And whenever that happens, the artistic stakes go up; the creative temperature rises. The stark presence of an actor au naturel tests the invisible boundary between performer and audience, flirts with the danger zone where empathy can turn to embarrassment and seduction to squeamishness--or vice versa--in the flicker of a bare thigh, the flash of a breast.

As it happens, live theater may be one of the last bastions of meaningful nudity left in American culture. In Hollywood movies and on cable television, naked bodies have become as pervasive as minivans--and, consequently, about as exciting. The explosion of triple-X Web sites, the spread of video porn to suburban living rooms and the slither (or, if you will, the grueling forced march) of sex and sexuality up Main Street and down every back alley of popular culture have caused nudity to gradually lose much of its physical and symbolic potency.

But in live theater, nudity still matters. There, it still exerts the power to shock, titillate, unnerve and, occasionally, overwhelm. When nudity in live theater is used effectively, it communicates to an audience on a rare, heightened level of intimacy. It can take on metaphorical rather than literal shadings, which veil the human body even while mercilessly exposing its every bulge and blemish. Contrary to appearances, or audience expectations, sex is sometimes the last thing that nudity in live theater is really about.

“Nudity has become symbolic of sex, or a metaphor for sexual activity, in contemporary movies, which then tend not to explore sexuality very well,” says playwright David Henry Hwang, whose 1988 Tony-winning drama, “M. Butterfly,” turned a male character’s full-frontal display into a spectacular revelation about cross-cultural deception and denial.

“It’s as though because we can show nude bodies [in film and TV], that becomes the metaphor, or the stand-in, for any more complicated investigation of what nudity is,” Hwang continues. “I think that’s why, in a funny way, nudity has a greater impact on stage, because we’re to some extent relating with and empathizing with and interacting with a live person on stage who is exposed to us, and therefore it can be more powerful, and also more distracting and more embarrassing.”

Historically, stage nudity has been harnessed to a variety of metaphorical conceits and aesthetic strategies. To grasp nudity’s narrative, symbolic and pictorial possibilities, consider how differently it’s used in shows as varied as “Hair,” “Wit,” “Angels in America,” “Equus,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and “Naked Boys Singing,” the wildly popular gay musical revue that originated at the Celebration Theatre in Hollywood and is nearing the third year of its off-Broadway run.

Even a show in which nudity is pretty much the entire point, like the erotic musical revue “Oh! Calcutta!,” can be seen as a commentary on America’s shifting sexual mores during the late 1960s and ‘70s. (When it closed in August 1989, “Oh! Calcutta!” was the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history.)

Add to this mix, if you dare, the raw, confrontational, thematically rich performance art of Karen Finley, who often performs in the nude. Or that of L.A.-based Ron Athey, who deliberately abstracts his naked body by piercing, mutilating, stigmatizing and fetishizing it, transforming his muscular physique into a contested space on which elaborate metaphysical struggles are symbolically enacted. To some viewers, Athey’s performances bring to mind baroque depictions of St. Bartholomew, or a Renaissance Christ in the throes of agony/ecstasy.

“My work is about schisms and neuroses and spiritual dilemmas, so eroticism as such is not a big part of it,” Athey says. “You could say it’s the opposite of some of the gay theater one sees: It’s desexualizing the body.”

Derek Charles Livingston, managing artistic director of Celebration Theatre, which produces work by and about gay men and lesbians says that the not-uncommon use of male nudity in gay plays reflects “a comfort level of sensuality” among gay men “that straight men aren’t allowed to have.”

“That gives our writers more freedom and our audiences more freedom to accept [nudity] on stage,” he says. “The danger is that a lot of gay men who aren’t necessarily theater lovers but who go to the theater if there’s a nude man on stage, [think] that’s what gay theater is.”

Perceptions of nudity are not only culturally conditioned; they also lie in the eye of the beholder. Athey has several theories on this. “I think people that are heavily tattooed aren’t naked, and I think people with heavily muscled armature aren’t naked,” he says. “If there’s no hair and the skin is monotone, there’s still genitals, but there’s not that stark raving nakedness. It’s not the vulnerable body. I still equate nakedness with vulnerability.”

Even veteran performers may want to reach for a loincloth when making their nude debut. When he starred as the Marquis de Sade in the 1996 Geffen Playhouse production of “Quills,” Howard Hesseman says, the hardest part was getting naked for the first time. “I must credit my wife with giving me the courage to say, ‘Just do it; the sooner you do it, the better. Then you can leave whatever it means to expose yourself totally, physically, you can start leaving that in your dressing room, in the wings. You don’t have to bring it on stage.’”

During performances, Hesseman says, he was so intently focused on stage business--hitting his marks, synchronizing dialogue and movement--that “it was almost stripping by the numbers. I just forgot about the fact that I was nude.”

There were, however, a few instances “when I moved downstage and sat on some steps that extended out from the apron to the center aisle of the Geffen Playhouse. And I was peripherally aware of people in those seats. My sense of them was always that they were rearing back and slightly away as I approached,” says Hesseman, laughing.

Director Jack O’Brien, who has shepherded “The Full Monty” from his home base at San Diego’s Globe Theatres to Broadway, London and now L.A., says the initial experience of stripping “is a big thing” for the show’s cast. But, he adds, “nobody in any of the companies has come into it grimly, saying, ‘I don’t want to do this.’”

“On some level, they do want to do it, which is also very interesting,” O’Brien says. “There may be, sleeping inside all of us, a baby exhibitionist sort of struggling to get out. And that’s, of course, part of an actor’s makeup anyway, isn’t it?”

There’s little doubt that nudity sells seats, whether it’s highbrow, middlebrow or no-brow: Jude Law in Cocteau’s “Indiscretions” on Broadway in 1995, or “Jeff Stryker Does Hard Time” at a West Hollywood playhouse a few years back. But without adequate artistry, theatrical nudity may be all cheese- or beefcake and no bun.

Take the recent Broadway opening of “The Graduate,” an adaptation of the 1967 film about a confused ex-college student’s sexual peregrinations. In his review of the play, New York Times critic Ben Brantley led with a dismissive two-word sentence: “Twenty seconds.” That, Brantley noted, was the amount of time that actress Kathleen Turner appears stark naked as the wily Mrs. Robinson--the only noteworthy feature in a yawner of an evening.

Compare this with the reaction to another 20-second nude interval, in Margaret Edson’s drama “Wit,” which won a Pulitzer, a Tony nomination for its star, Kathleen Chalfant, and later was adapted for cable with Emma Thompson in the lead. “Wit,” which premiered at South Coast Repertory in 1995 and was produced at the Geffen in 2000, concerns a middle-aged English professor who uses John Donne’s ecstatic poetry to buffer herself from the ravages of cancer. At the very end she slips out of her hospital gown and walks naked toward an enveloping light, the last of her intellectual defenses stripped away, at peace with her human destiny. Usually, the part of the audience that isn’t sobbing breaks into wild applause, as much for the actress’ courage and generosity as for the scene’s lyrical perfection.

At its least effective, theatrical nudity can be a distraction at a crucial moment. When Hwang was writing “M. Butterfly,” he says, one early draft didn’t include the famous nude scene in which Song Liling, a Communist male spy impersonating a female Chinese Opera performer, reveals his true identity to his male French-diplomat lover by stripping. (The play, incredibly, is based on a true incident.)

Hwang says he was mindful of a comment made by the show’s director, John Dexter. Referring to the mid-century stage idol Alfred Lunt, Dexter said: “If you have a penis here and you have Alfred Lunt here, everybody’s always looking at the penis.” “I think John’s comment speaks to the dangers of nudity,” Hwang says dryly. Ultimately, though, he decided to include his coup de theatre because he believed that “the diplomat’s belief in Song as a woman was so incontrovertible that he needed to be slapped with unassailable evidence.”

As often as not, theatrical nudity is about physical and emotional vulnerability, a psychological as well as physical disrobing of character. “Baring it all doesn’t just necessarily mean taking off your clothes,” says “The Full Monty’s” Mitchell, who conceived, directed and choreographed the lucrative fund-raiser “Broadway Bares,” a comedy burlesque performed annually for the AIDS charity Broadway Cares. “It means letting people see it all--not just the genital area, but the whole soul.”

It’s ironic that the minimal, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nudity in “The Full Monty” has earned the show a risque reputation. In historical terms, “The Full Monty” might almost be seen as leapfrogging back before 1968, when “Hair” sent Broadway into a tizzy by ending Act 1 with nearly its entire cast in the buff. “Hair,” of course, sought to capture the zeitgeist of the rebellious, let-it-all-hang-out ‘60s, when sex was openly politicized and cavorting naked in the mud at Woodstock was a form of agitprop exhibitionism.

Where “The Full Monty” makes something akin to a political gesture is in drawing attention to the nude male body, a subject more typically the provenance of avant-garde artists and photographers than of big Broadway musicals. In “The Full Monty,” the male characters have been stripped of their jobs, their dignity--the accouterments of masculine identity. Metaphorically, they’re already naked because they’ve lost the trappings of what writer Susan Faludi (“Stiffed”) has called “masculine utility,” the vestments that career, marriage, fatherhood and a defined social role have traditionally conferred on men.

The characters’ triumph lies in finding a way to convert their disempowerment into an occasion for emotional growth and connection. These hulking guys are humanized by experiencing, for once in their lives, what most women (and, the show implies, many gay men) experience every day: being judged on the basis of their outward appearance. The men of “The Full Monty” rise above those limitations of the flesh. For the men of “The Full Monty,” Mitchell says, “nudity suggests freedom,” the freedom “to accomplish anything.”

The gender role-reversal that animates “The Full Monty” underscores the difference that still exists between onstage male and female nudity. “Female nudity is as old as the hills. We’ve been muses for men for eons,” says actress CCH Pounder, who recently took part in a symposium on “I think nudity in women is so tied up in fertility and reproduction that it does have a different connotation. A man’s nudity is always a much more vulnerable thing.”

For Pounder, those differences were encapsulated in a trip she once made with some female friends to a male exotic dance club. “Most of us were fairly prim and proper, but by the end everybody was having a grand old time, even if you weren’t participating, just the voyeurism,” Pounder recalls. “It was just a scene of sheer, raucous joy, of women screaming and emboldening themselves as they approached these G-strings. It was such a turn of events.”

Male nudity, of course, has long ceased to be a novelty in so-called “gay theater,” a term that’s become increasingly slippery since the mainstream success of plays like Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” For a time, in the early- to mid-1990s, male nudity in gay-themed plays practically seemed compulsory, a reaction, some say, to the conservatism of the Reagan-Bush years and the devastating toll of the AIDS epidemic.

“AIDS, I think, made a lot of gay men feel ugly physically,” Celebration’s Livingston says. “Not only our bodies were being beaten, our spirits were as well. It was the thought that sensuality had been so degraded by those first years of AIDS that we needed to break free of it.”

Conventions of nudity in gay theater remain different from those where the implicit viewpoint is heterosexual. “The roots of [nudity] in gay theater came from a very wonderful place, a very honest place: ‘I wanna see, it’s taboo, let’s do it!’” says playwright Oliver Mayer, whose “Blade to the Heat,” produced at New York’s Public Theater and the Mark Taper Forum, probes issues of cultural identity, hidden homosexuality and the psychological depths of male violence among a group of boxers in the late 1950s.

“Historically, I think there was a great reason to get naked in gay theater,” Mayer goes on. “One thing I hate about straight theater--’highball-on-sofas theater’--it’s all about layers of civilizing talk. It’s not active. If anything, people just put more and more layers of protective stuff on themselves. A lot of it’s language. I don’t want to write plays like that.”

When Mayer decided to include a nude shower scene in “Blade to the Heat,” he says, he was consciously creating an erotic spectacle for straight as well as gay viewers. “I wanted to show him in his altogether to a large audience that I know, after 15 years in the theater, is a white audience and a privileged audience,” he says. “I confess on one level to the prurient side: I knew they’d get excited. I knew it would be exciting, celebrating, and in a deeper way that it would be something they’d never seen before.”

Conversely, when the show was staged in Mexico City, the director used nudity not for erotic effect but as a blunt political instrument to “pummel his culture,” Mayer says, not disapprovingly. “Everybody got naked all the time [in that production]. The gods of Latin culture signified like crazy.”

In politics and art, nudity and issues of free expression have long been joined at the hip. Ever since the days of the first Christian emperors of Rome, the political powers that be have tried to keep a lid on staged nudity. According to the Cambridge Guide to the Theatre, the emperor Justinian mandated that mimes, tumblers and acrobats wear drawers, and the medieval church’s ban on public nudity meant that the Adam and Eve of the mystery plays had to wear “form-fitting doeskin.”

Although the political dust-ups of the ‘80s and ‘90s that pitted Sen. Jesse Helms against performers like Finley and Athey have subsided--due in part to the fiscal denuding of the National Endowment for the Arts--1st Amendment issues surrounding nudity and sexual expression haven’t gone away.

“I think we are living in a period of regression in those areas in many ways,” says Arthur Allan Seidelman, who directed “Hair” for the Reprise! series last June at Brentwood’s Wadsworth Theater. Citing the conservative politics of U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Seidelman says, “We’re constantly battling the forces of discontent, the forces that think the human body is corruption.”

“Good” theatrical nudity may continue to be hard to define, but most of us think we know it when we see it. And through repeated exposure, rather than feeling blase, we may gradually become more comfortable in our own skins.

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“The Full Monty” opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Los Angeles. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. (May 26, June 2, 2 p.m. only; May 23, 30, June 6, 2 p.m.) Ends June 8. $25-$75. (213) 628-2772.

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Reed Johnson is a Times staff writer.