Actors bare more than souls in GableStage's 'Blue Room'

By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com

Published Thursday, June 14, 2001

Theatergoers who jam into the intimate, in-your-face space that is GableStage expect edgy character revelation from its actors. But the two actors in the company's new production of David Hare's The Blue Room will add another kind of revelation when they doff their clothes for the play's serial sexual couplings.

"Being willing to bare your soul is what theater is all about," GableStage artistic director Joseph Adler says. "This involves baring your soul and your body."

Such body-baring can be many things -- racy, routine, risqué, metaphoric, exploitative. But it often proves to be very lucrative as well.

The London and Broadway producers of The Blue Room learned that when they hired Nicole Kidman as their marquee name three years ago. The sultry star of Moulin Rouge and soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Tom Cruise so moved one overstimulated British critic that he pronounced her "pure theatrical Viagra."

Never mind that audiences saw Kidman only from the rear, and for mere seconds: Such is the power of even fleeting nudity onstage. The public's frenzied desire to see a major movie star live and in the buff enshrined Kidman's vehicle in Broadway history as the hottest-selling nonmusical ever.

"I don't think The Blue Room sold out that fast because of David Hare," says Florida Stage artistic director Lou Tyrrell, who has dealt with onstage nudity as both a performer and a director.

Adler didn't see The Blue Room when Kidman did it on Broadway. But he's doing the GableStage version his way, and when it opens Saturday, audiences are going to see much more of actors David Mann and Stephanie McNeil than the Broadway crowd did of Kidman and her co-star, Iain Glen.

"If you do a play about lovemaking, you'd be hard-pressed not to show nudity," Adler said of the play, in which each actor plays five characters -- all of whom take a turn at seducing and surrendering.

Ubiquitous as nudity is in contemporary culture -- from Jennifer Lopez's Versace dress at the Grammys to David Duchovny baring his buns in the Ghostbusters wannabe Evolution -- onstage nudity can be a far more powerful experience for both actor and audience.

For one thing, the performers and their observers are in the room together, live, in real time. Artful nudity can enhance a drama or pull the audience out of it. It can distract or underscore, serve as metaphor or (as in plays like Party or Naked Boys Singing) be about little more than the act of staring at attractive people without their clothes on.

The rare exhibitionist aside, most actors find being comfortably nude onstage a challenge, especially initially.

"When I was 18 I played Alan Strang in Equus at the University of Tennessee," said Matthew Wright, a Florida Atlantic University associate drama professor and Carbonell Award-winning actor. "It was really tough. I thought, 'I can't believe I have to do this [be totally nude onstage].' But it was totally about his vulnerability . . . and ultimately, you're vulnerable if you're naked."

Pamela Roza knows the feeling. She has flashed her flesh twice in Adler-directed plays at GableStage, first in Tracy Letts' Killer Joe (she won a Carbonell Award for her loud-mouthed portrayal of a trailer-trash stepmom), then this season as an adulterous actress in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing.

The latter required merely a brief flash of her breasts. But for Killer Joe, Roza had to play her first scene naked from the waist down, with only a thin tank top between her and total nudity.

HOME FOR HOLIDAYS

"After I said yes, I went home for Christmas to Mississippi, to the Bible Belt, to a really strong Southern Baptist family," Roza recalled. "The whole time it was running through my head. On opening night, my hands didn't stop shaking until intermission. It wasn't until the middle of the second week that I could do it and not have to suppress Pam."

Getting actors to feel comfortable with such extreme exposure requires a deliberate, sensitive process, Adler says.

"I would never ask the actor to disrobe at an audition. But I tell them that they would have to in the play and ask them about it," he said. "Only in the process of rehearsal do we deal with the disrobing. You have to establish trust."

Florida Stage's Tyrrell went through a similar process in making Carbonell Award-winner William Metzo comfortable with being nude for his role as the Marquis de Sade in Douglas Wright's Quills.

"There's nothing more embarrassing than nudity if it seems inappropriate, or if it's in a bad play or at a bad moment," Tyrrell said. "In Quills, it was a metaphor for a larger issue in trying to strip the Marquis of everything, including his freedom of expression. It's a powerful device."

"People said to us, 'Oh, that's the play with the naked guy.' Bill [Metzo] knew it would be a major challenge for him as a 62-year-old actor. But he thought it was an important moment. He was nervous. He had to be so comfortable in his skin before he could do it. Only in the technical rehearsal did he go completely naked."

And only when the performers have achieved that comfort level does nudity come into play. Even then, the process continues.

"You can't judge onstage nudity until you've seen it with the proper lighting, on the finished set and in the right context," Adler said.

McNeil says Mann and Adler have helped her achieve the necessary comfort level. A dancer and musical theater actress who went after the part in The Blue Room to expand her resumé and challenge herself, she says she can even endure her parents seeing the play, as long as they don't tell her which night they plan to attend.

EXERCISE IN TRUST

"I have not felt uncomfortable at all, haven't felt pressured to run onstage, take off my clothes and jump into bed with David," she said. "It's been a good exercise in trust. I have to trust that I'll be safe."

Mann, her onstage partner, finds it "bizarre" to be dealing with so much onstage nudity, but hopes the audience will ". . . get inured to it halfway through. If you hear about a play with a sex scene, you wait for it. You get lifted out of the play. This is more about the different kinds of sex and the idiotic things people do."

One audience member who may have a tougher time dealing with the interactions in The Blue Room is Mann's wife, Amanda Clark. The stage manager at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Clark had trouble watching her husband in a much less sexual moment in the play Far East.

"At one point I kissed [actress] Barbara Sloan in the play, and [Amanda] would just look away," Mann said.

The Blue Room will go far beyond that, and Clark is both pragmatic and frank in discussing how it feels.

"The stage manager part of me and 80 percent of the wife part hope they have chemistry, that they're hot onstage. The sex and nudity don't mean anything if the play doesn't work," she said. "And 20 percent of me thinks, 'This is weird.' Stephanie and I met last week, and I like her. It would be much more difficult for me if I didn't work in theater."

Shock, eroticism, discomfort, lust, jealousy: They all come with the territory when a play features an unclothed performer. Sometimes, though, nudity onstage can have an impact that the actor couldn't possibly anticipate.

"It can be life-altering," laughs artist Kathleen Holmes, who first glimpsed Tyrrell, her husband, when he was nude onstage in a 1978 production of Streamers at Gainesville's Hippodrome State Theatre. "I didn't know him then. But I sure did remember him."

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.