“To be sure, nudity can be justified artistically, but that fact doesn’t much impress me.” – Ed Hooks.
A few years ago, I saw a play in which the playwright employed nudity. It was set in a location where nudity would be expected and (intellectually) was central to the overall theme of the play. In the production I saw, however, the nudity, happening upstage right, was a total distraction from a long dialogue scene happening down left. As a playwright/director, I was astounded by the split focus and I began to question if this was a simply directing error or, more to the point, to question when/if/how I believe writing nudity into plays could be justified.
The details of that production (playwright and script) aside, it eventually prompted me to write my newest play, BARE STAGE. Recently, digging around in the internet for research, I came across the piece below, written by Ed Hooks in 2001 as part of his “Craft Notes” series. I wrote to Ed and he replied, saying he believes his comments “still hold up” and he agreed to let me post them here. We’d both be interested in playwright and director comments. [Note: these “Craft Notes” are no longer on the internet.]
CRAFT NOTES
by Ed Hooks
“Nudity on stage”
Not to pick on the good-intentioned cast of “The Grand Funk,” which I saw recently, but the production got me to thinking again about nudity. It’s difficult, in fact, to think of much else when a guy’s unit is positioned two feet from your face. And that is the point. Nudity, no matter how motivated it may be in the context of the play, totally destroys the fourth wall and demolishes the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief.
Samuel Coleridge was the nineteenth century fellow who came up with that term, “willing suspension of disbelief.” What it means is that, even though the audience knows full well that the activities on the stage are pretend, it decides to pretend that this is not the case. In other words, the audience knows that the actor playing Julius Caesar is not really getting murdered on the stage, and the actress playing Juliette is not really drinking poison. But in order to empathize and get the most mileage out of the theatrical experience, the audience pretends that it doesn’t know about the reality of the pretend situation. You see what I mean? It’s a tricky concept, but once you get it, it’s with you forever. You’re pretending to pretend, in a manner of speaking.
When an actor on stage takes off her clothes, the reality of her body makes it impossible to pretend. Suddenly, the audience is aware of the actress and her thighs, not the character. You sit there and try to figure out where you ought to be looking. If you look at her breasts, you feel like a lurker. You begin to wonder how other people in the audience are responding to the nudity, and you furtively glance around the theater. Meanwhile, the play on stage goes on without you. Until the actor puts her clothes back on, there is just no sense in continuing.
Acting involves an implied contract between the actors on stage and the audience. Everybody agrees to pretend together. But the implied contract is fragile. If an actor on stage becomes flustered and forgets his lines, for example, the contract is broken. If an actor gets nervous, and the teacup in his hands begins trembling on the saucer, the contract is broken. If an actor falls and hurts himself on stage the contract is broken. And, to the immediate point, if an actor takes off his clothes during the performance, the contract is broken.
I’m not anti-nudity by any means. Bodies are marvelous. I particularly like them in art galleries and have a true appreciation of what can be done with them. However, the naked human body is just too, well, real for presentation on the stage during a play. I have acted in several plays with naked people, and I found it distracting from that perspective, too.
Nudity in a movie creates a different reaction in the audience because there is already an inherent suspension of disbelief happening. The audience is watching serial photographs of real life, after, not real life itself. Nudity on screen is not real in the same way nudity on stage in a theatre is. In a theatre, the audience is breathing the same air as the naked actor, and that makes all the difference.
To be sure, nudity can be justified artistically, but that fact doesn’t much impress me. A recent play I heard about featured the angst of a portrait artist, for example, as he tried to capture the beauty of a nude model in front of him. She was undressed for most of the play according to the reviews, and I could see how that definitely made sense. But for me, it’s a deal killer. Even if justified, I would rather not be confronted with nudity in a play. I like to pretend, which is why I go to the theatre in the first place.
Ed Hooks (November, 2001)