I normally don’t like to use From the Ledge as an outlet to rant and rave about life’s daily annoyances, but I was just incensed by this ridiculous, childish, temper tantrum of a controversy involving About Face’s splendid production of The Little Dog Laughed (which I wrote about here) and its diva playwright, Douglas Carter Beane. It seems that Beane was upset that director Eric Rosen took out the full-frontal nudity specified in the script in the scene when the agent Diane discovers her client Mitchell being intimate with the male hustler, Alex, and instead had the actors play the scene in their underwear. Beane demanded the production to be shut down (shut down!- is this Chicago or is this Pyongyang? What kind of state of mind does one possess to even contemplate a demand like this?), but what I could only imagine as really intense ass-kissing and floor-wiping by various parties, Norma Desmond’s fraternal twin Beane relented and agreed to let the production finish its run…but not without extracting a pound of flesh from Rosen, who had to publicize this imbroglio by writing a letter containing an apology to all media outlets about the mortal sin and crime against divaness that he has committed. You can read about it in detail here, and read comments about it in Chris Jones’s blog here.
Well, I have news for Joan Crawford Jr. Beane- I saw both the New York production and the Chicago production, and that full frontal nude scene was absolutely gratuitous, unnecessary, and totally designed to arouse the prurient interests of dirty old gay men! Ok, so Johnny Galecki and Tom Everett Scott, who played the leads in the Broadway production, were both wonderfully endowed and blest by nature, but memo to Evita doppelganger Beane, I really would still have enjoyed the production even if I did not have those momentary glimpses of assorted appendages. I am the last person to react against nudity in a theatrical production (as BFF Sydney says I have a knack for sniffing out a full-frontally nude actor within a 10 mile radius, sort of like how a pig can sniff out black truffles, but I digress), and I definitely defend and support the nude scenes in plays like Take Me Out and Equus, because they are necessary to advancing the story and making important dramatic points. But the contested scene in The Little Dog Laughed played as well, and as effectively, for this particular audience member (and I would suspect for many audience members), when it was done with the actors in their underwear. I understand Beane’s point that the nudity was in the stage direction, that he feels that his work was altered (I think that’s again a childish exaggeration- if the scene was cut altogether, that would have been the alteration), and that About Face was contractually obligated to follow the script to the letter as part of the licensing agreement. I get that. But if that was the case, shouldn’t the estate of Samuel Beckett be asking Chicago Shakespeare to “shut down” the fantastic production of Peter Brook’s Fragments because the three women that Beckett specified in one of the short plays is played by two men in drag and a woman? Should Shakespeare come back from the dead to rally against that radical re-do of Titus Andronicus at the Court? Is the creation of art to be ruled with an iron glove by legalistic details and footnotes? Where do you let the business and contractual side of art end and freedom of creative expression and vision begin? I think in all of this About Face and Eric Rosen come off as classy and true artists, and Beane comes off as a second-rate Imelda Marcos throwing a hissy fit about missing penises. I think there are bigger things that all of us- artists and audiences alike- should be burning precious molecular energy on: the state of arts education, the cuts in arts funding, the writer’s strike, etc .etc. And if anyone of us, middle-aged gay playwrights included, wanted a view of bare, virile, young male flesh, there’s always Halsted St.
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