The sexual act is hard to get across onstage. Directors have had to unlearn
all the old ways it was once done. Billowing drapery, the dimming of
lights, a sudden curtain: that entire evasive language is old hat, as
obsolete a thing now as barrel staves and buggy whips.
It wasn’t always like that. When the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler
staged his ten-act play Reigen, better known as La Ronde,
in Berlin in 1921, the result was a mob scene. There were rumblings that
this was a pornographic play about linked courses of infidelity by an
obscure Jew who combined undisguised sedition with inexcusable snark about
the upper-class spread of syphilis. On opening night, there were armed
members of the Anti-Semitic League for Protection and Defense in
attendance. And to the audience’s shock, there was sex in La Ronde
—though its only visible trace was the modest curtain and blackout that
divided each respective act in half, like Hogarth’s Before and After. The depth of Schnitzler’s psychological insight
in the play impressed the mature Freud, but the run itself fell through
after members of the audience rioted at the opening, sabotaging it. La Ronde was instantly banned.
In the text, Schnitzler indicated each of the blackouts with five simple
dashes. La Ronde has since been adapted numerous times. Most
productions “fill in” the notorious dashes with greater or lesser amounts
of explicit fucking. Joe DiPietro’s 2008 version, one of several
adaptations on gay themes to appear in recent years, is showing now at
Pride Films and Plays, abrasive title and all. It maps Schnitzler’s plot
onto ten hookups between males in present-day New York City: a soldier and
a gay escort in a public park, the soldier and a graduate student at a
bathhouse, the graduate student and a college kid he tutors at the kid’s
home, and on down the line, until the escort reappears for a quickie with a
prominent closeted power broker. The tripartite scene structure is
retained, with the unwelcome addition of fake interpretive-dance sex in the
middle.
These soundtracked passages of almost uniformly inept Meisner capoeira are
all the more grating because the interactions on either side of them are so
vibrant. See the hot, hilarious hotel scene between married Jack (Jay
Espano) and a nameless bartender who moonlights in porn (Roy Samra). Samra
has impeccable timing, both as a comedian (with one unforgettable bit in
particular about this thing “[he] did with his tongue on this guy’s balls”)
and as a shapeshifter (he can go from porn-star bravado to quavering bundle
of nerves on a dime). He’s also the one member of the cast who I could say
brought his character’s body into the movement portions. The rest of them
just looked like actors trying to remember their choreography.
Jack, a traveling businessman, is HIV positive. He lies to Samra’s
bartender about this at first. He then comes clean. Nobody in this play
keeps a secret from anyone else for very long. Everybody in La Ronde, by contrast, is a practiced and inveterate liar, even
about his or her possible infections. Theater might well be defined, along
the lines of Schnitzler and another of his adapters, Eric Bentley—whose
distinguished gay version of La Ronde antedates DiPietro’s by more
than 20 years—as “bodies with secrets.” Flouting that ironic dogma by
making these men so open, intimate, and forthright in the scenes with
dialogue is perhaps what makes the ham-fisted coyness of the sex scenes
here so doubly disappointing.
Then again, everything about sex in today’s plays feels like a cop-out
somehow, since such a premium abides elsewhere in theater on the authentic,
the intimate, the skin-to-skin contact, all except here, between
penetration and climax, when things are most real. And audiences, who go to
the theater for flesh and entropy and occasionally get it, have come to
hate “using their imaginations” at plays, both when it comes to sex and in
general. They want the same thing the men want in this play, which they
also call “intimacy”; and the first rule of intimacy, whether in the
bedroom or between a play and its spectators, is for there to be, to the
best of everyone’s ability, nothing secret at all.
There will always be secrets, of course. The question is always how overt
to make them: when to draw back the curtain, and when the action absolutely
must stay concealed in order for the play’s desired illusions—whether of
love, spontaneity, or what have you—to take effect. v