By Moira LawlerPLAY Writer
You’re sitting in a dimmed theater, watching the latest rendition of a Shakespeare play. You feel your eyes starting to get heavy as the actors ramble on in Old English. It is becoming increasingly difficult to focus your attention on the production, and your comprehension of the actor’s words is fading.
Just before you begin to slouch further into your seat and concede to your body’s dying desire to nap, the play suddenly becomes a little more interesting. A penis. On stage. Right there, in front of you.
Even though breasts seem to be shown fairly often in movies these days, nudity in theater is still not all that popular. Nudity on stage was much more common in the 1960s and ’70s during the “free love” era, with shows like Hair and Oh! Calcutta!
Northwestern theater professor Harvey Young says this time period was about “coming into contact with one’s own body,” so nudity on stage was prevalent.
“You think of the free love movement, you think of nudity,” Young says.
Now, three decades later, the use of nudity on stage is less popular but, at the same time, less shocking. Breasts being shown in film have certainly become more typical. Audiences hardly think twice when the naked female body is presented by the media.
“Audiences are pretty used to it now,” says NU theater professor Linda Gates. She once coached an all-nude acting company. “It’s lost lots of its shock value,” she says.
The naked male body, on the other hand, never ceases to grab our attention – often leaving people jaw-dropped. Susan Bordo’s The Male Body, a book Young uses in his class, argues nudity in the media is often only female. This perhaps is the reason that while seeing nude females is not very surprising, the nude male remains a shock.
But is shock value the reason nudity is included in some productions?
Nudity makes the production potent, says NU theater staff member Amanda Dehnert. It invokes hyperreality since it is often unexpected and, in a sense, taboo. She says many stories actually require nudity. While directing is an interpretive art and the decision to use nudity is a director’s personal choice, to not use it, Dehnert warns, could possibly be a misinterpretation of the author.
To demonstrate the author’s purpose accurately may require nudity to make the scene more relatable. During the ultra-conservative 1950s, Dehnert explains, it was not uncommon for a married couple to have separate beds on stage. That audience did not perceive the scene as reality. Now, with a higher acceptance of the naked body, it would be more or less acceptable to see two nude people in a bed together, if that is the reality the director is trying to portray.
Despite the audience’s ability to relate to nude bodies in a particular scene, they will sometimes still be in shock when a nude person is standing before them, even if it does simply fit right in with the story. Many directors choose to include nudity to make the audience more aware.
“Theater is all about illusion,” Young says. “What breaks that sense of illusion is nudity … there is nothing more real than a nude body on stage.”
Young says there are three things that snap the audience out of a dramatic moment on stage: kids, animals and nudity. The audience becomes more aware, astonished even, since these things remain pretty uncommon in theater.
Gates agrees the occasional use of nudity makes the production more real but says the degree of reality depends on the play and on the acting. If nudity is used sparingly, Gates says, it works to make the play resemble reality. Gates also thinks the “heightened reality that the theater provides makes the play … less real.”
Another reason why a director might choose to include nudity in his or her production is obvious: Sex sells. Broadway’s Oh! Calcutta! is proof. The show featured completely naked bodies, both male and female, and received lots of attention. Despite its controversy, the nudity helped sell tickets to more than 4,000 performances – quite an accomplishment in any day and age.
Nudity, Young assures, will never disappear. Our jaws may drop slightly at the sight of a nude male on stage. But maybe someday that too will become the norm, as the naked female body has. Free love, anyone?
Weinberg freshman Moira Lawler is a PLAY writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
