Nudity and SNM

Hecate and Sexy Witch in a production still from SNM

SHOWGIRLS, Nudity, and SNM

Yes, I’m talking about the Paul Verhoeven debacle – that SHOWGIRLS.  What could it possibly have to do with SLEEP NO MORE?  Not a lot, actually, but it came to mind as I pondered my SNM experience.  Also coming to mind was the snarky but on point audio commentary by David Schmander on the version of SHOWGIRLS I giggled my way through.

SHOWGIRLS has a lot of nudity!  I remember stumbling onto it sanitized for tv.  Having seen the original, I have to admit being curious if the tv version would be a mere 10 minutes long when they got through cutting out everything that would have to be censored for American television.  Instead, I laughed wildly at the floating purple blobs CGI-ed over bare breasts during naked dialogue scenes that were deemed vital to plot (or the lack thereof.)  David Schmander’s commentary posits that for a movie with that much bare female flesh in it, SHOWGIRLS features the most unsexy nakedness he’s ever seen. Though meant to be titillating, it’s not.  It actually becomes kind of melba-toasty as the film goes on.

As we left the show the first night, I said to my student and friend who had accompanied me, the nudity in SLEEP NO MORE is also kind of unsexy, but for reasons of artistic competence, rather than Verhoeven/Eszterhas ineptitude.  We agreed too that the sexiest things we’d seen were when characters were fully clothed.  SNM’s nudity was used in a totally different way, for different reasons, and with different results. We also remarked that the show’s producers limit attendance to those age 16 and over.  The MPAA, in all its uptight, Victorian wisdom, would have given a movie containing SNM levels of nudity an NC-17, blocking it from the view of 16 year olds, most of whom are more than capable of appreciating this show.  I was reminded how nice it is to be in the ‘Blue State’ of New York, as my own hyper-Red, Bible-belt state of Texas would not have allowed 16 year olds into SNM.  It also made me ponder the use of nudity typically in cinematic and performing arts, and its use in SNM.

The first night I saw SNM, I saw two completely naked men (Macbeth and ‘Witch Boy’).  SHOWGIRLS, as with most mainstream Hollywood films, contains no full frontal male nudity.  During the course of my three experiences with SNM, I saw a total of four different totally naked men, two different totally naked women, and three (maybe 4, I’m not sure) different topless women.  It wasn’t my first experience with nudity on stage, and I am not a prig, so it was not really troublesome to me.  As I also draw, primarily figural stuff, aesthetically I was taken with how gorgeous dancer bodies are. Their lean, athletic lines and cuts, and the grace with which they move and alight.

The girls have no boobs to speak of – professional dancers seldom do – so the female nudity wasn’t something skanky out of a strip club, where what you actually see is extravagant plastic surgeon handiwork rather than heaven-granted /exercise sculpted beauty.  And the male nudity, which Americans seem ludicrously terrified of in their art – again, the ‘porn’ aspect was not in effect.  Porn is pre-occupied with ridiculously non-proportionate size and apparent virility – the interest isn’t in ‘every man’ or even in “Vitruvian Man’s” physical perfection, which all of the beautiful SNM guys matched.  So SNM was very different from nakedness most Americans are used to, aroused by, or prudishly shun altogether.

The nudity in SNM also has a different intent than we’re used to in American performative arts.  I saw Macbeth fully nude the first night I saw the show.  In the scene, he was in bed holding his wife, covered by a sheet.  She was clothed, but he was bare-chested and, I rightly presumed, nude underneath. Mostly though what I noted was his mood: brooding, distracted, ill at ease, almost tiger-in-a-cage frustrated, though he was still.  He eventually threw the sheet back, arose from the bed, and moved across the room to dress.  Totally naked man, and absolutely nothing sexual or exploitive about the moment.  Just a scene that has played out in bedrooms of married couples a million times a day.  It was casual, familiar, and drew little attention to itself.  The actor was also, for lack of a better word, “normal”— not a kind of scary aberration of nature, as some porn guys are in the genital department.  On a different night, I saw a different Macbeth come back into his bedroom suite, bloodied from a murder he’d committed, and exceedingly distraught.  His wife comforts him, helps him undress, and puts him in a bathtub where she tries to help him wash away the evidence of his crime and to assuage the guilt that’s palpably emanating from his entire countenance.  Again, nothing salacious about the nudity.  In fact, rather than being ‘turned on,’ I felt sympathetic toward him.  Even though you know what he’s done, I ached at his aching. I ached at his wife’s fervent but ineffectual attempt to comfort him, to take his pain away.  He was physically naked, yes, but not in a sexualized sense at all. The character was at the zenith of emotional vulnerability, and his soul was flayed bare as well as his body. 

Later, Lady Macbeth (I saw two different actresses do the role on different nights), driven mad by her own guilt and culpability, is institutionalized.  She is brought into a communal bathing room, stripped of all her clothes by a nurse there, and put into a bath tub of water, where she enacts the most heartbreaking, tortured, wordless version of ‘Out, out damned spot’ I have ever witnessed.  Yes, she is naked – completely – but it’s not a turn-on to anybody.  Lighting left her lower body mostly in shadow, though nobody was gawking anyway.  The choreography is the embodiment of mental anguish manifesting physically, and both actresses’ performance of it was absolutely riveting. It’s literally painful to watch, and my thoughts were, again, those of sympathy, with nothing remotely spicy ever entering my head.

And later still, I wandered upon the much blogged about ‘witch rave’ scene.  Basically, three people – two girls and one guy (I saw two different actors do the ‘Witch Boy’ role and three, maybe four, girls play the witches) – converge and become intoxicated on substances, Hecate’s influence, and the ambiance, and they dance together.  Their dance gradually becomes a frenzied Bacchant revel, or something out of a Puritan’s nightmare about consorting with the Devil in the forest.  At first glance, it seems that it is going to be erotic.  The girls tear the boy’s clothes off, the girls strip off their own tops, there is kissing, touching, and ménage a trios-like cavorting.  It is excessive, and though the choreography and such are set, the depiction is of characters out of control, who have lost reason, lost a sense of right and wrong, and have become the wild personification of the most feral human instincts and desires.  And then it gets darker.  Out comes the blood (theatrical “blood,” but still…), out comes some ‘Satanic’ imagery, and out come the MACBETH warning prophecies: a bloodied baby, Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane, etc. 

And then it gets darker still, but not as you might expect.  The witches begin to sober up, come to their senses, come to an awareness of what they have done, and they are horrified by it and that they were capable of it in the first place.  Each sorrows and suffers in her/his own way – you can only watch one as they all end up different places after the rave scene.  I never did see the Witch Boy’s ordeal, but one night I saw a girl witch do a frenetic dance of torment.  At the end, she collapsed on the floor in a fetal ball of emotional agony, weeping real tears, and she reached out to a spectator.  The actress is about the age of the college kids I teach, and I suddenly felt very protective.  I wanted to reach back, to pick her up, to hold her in my arms, as I have done with many momentarily distraught theatre kids in my teaching career.  I saw the same instinct in the spectator standing next to me, but unlike me, she actually DID reach out to the girl on the floor, but Hecate forcefully intervened.  As Hecate shook the witch, roughly, and redressed her, I realized that the actress had been topless for the entire turmoil dance. I hadn’t noticed because it wasn’t what I was looking at.  It was the pain I connected to, not the nudity, which was again an expression of vulnerability, not something sleazy.

The second night I saw the show, after the rave, I didn’t stay for that witch’s ‘gnashing of teeth’ dance.  It was a little overwhelming the first time, and I didn’t need to experience that again. But I accidentally stumbled upon a room where the other girl witch was dealing with her guilt and pain at having been so Bacchant earlier.  She was crouched in ball in a corner of the room, holding herself, rocking, keening without sound.  She eventually found a basin of water and a wash towel, and she proceeded to do almost what Lady Macbeth had done – try to wash it away. She frantically scrubbed her torso, her face, her neck, her hair – trying to remove the blood, the sweat, the smells of the other people, and her ‘sins.’  Then she slowed to a stop, dipped the wash rag into the water again and turned to the spectators – she had three of us at the moment. She looked at each of us yearningly, helpless and childlike.  Then she seemed to offer the rag to a spectator, who did not take it, not knowing what to do or being totally uncomfortable about the situation.  She offered it to the 2^nd spectator, who also didn’t take it, and I saw what looked like a little desperation on her face, so I followed my instinct this time and reached my hand out to her. She looked at me with relief and gave me the rag.  She then turned away from me, squatted back down, and moved her long blonde hair out of the way, exposing her bare back to me. So, here is a topless performer, and a spectator being invited to touch her.  And all I felt were compassion and fierce maternal protectiveness.

It was actually a little cathartic for me.  I was able to do for this girl what I wanted to but couldn’t for Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the other witch – comfort, care for, try to ‘make it better.’  I gently washed her back, her shoulders, her neck.  I got the blood off, I dried her with the dry bottom of the rag, and she let me.  I could feel the character’s tension relaxing under my touch.  As she began to rise, my next instinct was to hold up the towel and block her from view of the other spectators while she put her clothes back on, but she leaned in, took the towel from me, and whispered ‘Thank you’ in my ear.  It seemed an utterance coming from both the character and the actor because no one else had been willing to participate.  She then, totally in character, dressed, did a quick something with her damp hair, put her jazz shoes back on, took a deep cleansing breath, and she was out the door to her next designated location and activity. 

As far as genuine, arousing raciness in SNM goes – the scene in which Lady M uses a dance to convince her husband to do what he wants to do and kill Duncan simply DRIPPED with seduction and eroticism!  And both actors were dressed. A roughly athletic, homoerotic dance between the porter and the boy witch in a phone booth oozed carnality.  Both were fully dressed.  An equally vigorous and steamy pas de deux between the ‘Sexy Witch’ character and another male character, all over furniture and up the wall, quickened my breathing and heart rate. Again both were dressed.  A dance between a woman and man on a pool table gushed ardor all over the room, and they were both dressed.  All THAT stuff was sexy as hell, but none of the nude scenes really were.   

SLEEP NO MORE is an amazingly challenging and contradictory text that wreaks havoc with tradition and a spectator’s sensibilities and expectations.  I think SHOWGIRLS wanted to do that, to evoke ancient archetypes and profound emotion, but critic and commentator David Schmander bestowed upon SHOWGIRLS this dubious honor: “’Showgirls’ triumphs in that every single person involved in the making of the film is making the worst possible decision at every possible time.'' Conversely, with SLEEP NO MORE, every artist involved in the creation, arrangement, layering, and nightly execution of this exigent wonder was/is making absolutely the best possible decisions at every possible moment. 

So, yes, expect nudity at SLEEP NO MORE, but be forewarned that it won’t be what you’re anticipating.  While there are wonderfully sensual delights to observe, most of the tantalizing grip of this show comes at the cognitive and affective levels, not the libidinal one.  It’s blissfully visceral, yes.  But not like *that.*