New York’s Naughtiest Show (Maybe Avoid the Front Row)
by Tim Teeman
The play Intimacy has jiggling genitalia, graphic sex, and fluids flying everywhere. But its author, director, and stars say there’s seriousness lurking between the sheets
The play was so sodden with sex and nudity, and talk about sex and desire and pornography, the audience left dazed. Was it really just almond milk, I wanted to know afterwards? When was a penis prosthetic used as opposed to the real thing? Cocks and crevices kept appearing on TV screens.
Whose were they? The playwright Thomas Bradshaw and Scott Miller, Intimacy’s director, said these were “stage secrets” they wanted to keep, though Miller revealed there “might” be sugar in the ejaculatory mix, “for the right consistency.”
Nudity on stage isn’t new, of course. Daniel Radcliffe famously shed his clothes, and image as forever-Harry-Potter, in a stage adaptation of Equus. Back in the 1970s, the cast of Hair freaked out with flesh showing. In recent years, partial or full nudity has been seen in productions like King Lear (where Ian McKellen won audience admiration not just for his searing performance) and the cancer drama Wit, where Cynthia Nixon’s dramatic shaving of her head overshadowed her disrobing. Last year, The New York Times’s Ben Brantley noted that there was so much nakedness on Broadway stages, it was becoming standard.
The shenanigans of Intimacy will shake any jaded theater fan from nudity ennui. The play, showing off-Broadway under the aegis of The New Group, is surely the most ribald stage show currently running in New York. The play is about three suburban family units: a father, James (Daniel Gerroll) grieving his dead wife, living with his sex-obsessed son Matthew (Cauldwell), and becoming slightly bug-eyed about youthful sexual wantonness, in the manner of Piper Laurie in Carrie, which conceals his own sexual desires. Another father, David Anzuelo’s Fred, fiercely protective of daughter Sarah (Déa Julien [1]) as she embarks on a horny affair with Matthew, has secrets of his own—and underwear to shed when he does. Then there’s Jerry (Keith Randolph Smith), Pat (Laura Esterman) and daughter Janet (Ella Dershowitz [1]): the latter, it emerges, is a porn star with much to teach her parents.
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| Ella Dershowitz |
The biggest audience “ewww” came when Jerry pulled his boxers down to sit on the john, letting forth a splattery-sounding fart. “Oh my gaaaddd,” said the woman in front of me when a naked Ella joined her clothed father on the couch—he imagined her doing so—to tell him it was OK if he finds the pornography she features in a turn-on.
Meanwhile, Fred—having stripped off—insisted Matthew have sex with him, even though the latter is having sex with his daughter. Boundaries between gay and straight and public and private dissolve.
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| Déa Julien |
One night, says Bradshaw, the actors heard someone exclaim from the stalls, “Nooo, that’s disgusting, but I can’t look away.”
“Working on a play like this is not another job,” he says. “You can’t phone it in. We’re asking the actors to be bold and brave.” He grew up in a wealthy suburb of New Jersey, “where you would be surprised at one went on behind closed doors.”
Elliott says that while that making the actors feel “comfortable” was important, “they knew what they were signing up to.” They stayed clothed during early rehearsals, before going nude—ironically —during dress rehearsal. While sex and nudity also featured in a previous Bradshaw play, Burning, Elliott sees Intimacy as a “romantic comedy with very naughty parts.” The nudity of the characters corresponds to the thematic preoccupations of the play, he says. As for the audience gasps and occasional exclamations, “That’s what theater should be,” says Elliott. “I love it when people express what they’re feeling.”
“I never set out to shock anybody,” insists Bradshaw. “On its own that would not be a very interesting endeavor.” The play focuses on porn because of its mass-presence in culture, he says. “Nudity does not feature in all my plays, but I believe theater should be a visceral experience. People are so used to the traditions of the theatrical landscape—how action unfolds, how people behave, how speech follows speech, how they dress, individual human psychology is reduced. You can feel the playwright judge the characters.” Such plays “rarely echo how people relate in the real world where they can act in irrational ways.”
Well, I’m not sure they behave in the real world like the characters in Intimacy either, but when I tell Bradshaw how jolting their sing-songy voices are discussing sex, desire, and relationships—big issues resolved cartoonishly quickly, with a marked lack of agonizing or examination—he laughs and says their voices are like an unfettered id. Forget the gasps, he says: at a recent performance he saw “one older lady look at her husband and touch her heart during the last scene.” He surprises me by saying he didn’t intend it as a sex comedy, but rather as a portrait of a man negotiating the grieving process.
As for the actors, Cauldwell, who for much of the time is naked, partially clothed, or rubbing, jutting, and spurting with a sweaty commitment to his craft, says “people are only shocked because they are watching what they do in everyday life. We’re not trying to make sexy images, we’re trying to be real.”
It’s not a difficult role to play, he says, because he first went nude in plays at college and “because rehearsing it means you get desensitized.” Cauldwell (21, playing a 17-year-old) hasn’t got genuinely erect yet, “because while I don’t mind being naked, I’m still in public.” He has more than one prosthetic penis at his disposal.
It is Dershowitz’s first experience of being naked on stage. “I’m nude four times in the show,” she says. “I absolutely love it. A friend said nudity is just a costume, that it’s not my body, but my character’s body.” She pauses and laughs. “That’s not how you feel. Like, you’re on stage nude. But it’s like being in someone’s living room. You’re very aware people are watching you. But we forget we’re naked. The scenes make much more sense with your clothes off. I don’t feel exposed, although when we did our first technical run-through I realized I was naked in front of more people in one moment than in my whole life.”
Dershowitz’s favorite nude scene is non-sexual, when she puts lotion on her body, “like people do at home anyway.”
The play is about intimacy not sex, the 23-year-old actress says, though laughs that her friends called it “the naked play, that porn star part” when she first got the job. “Later I told them, ‘No, it’s not about that.’”
She doesn’t mind if people come for the nudity, “though afterwards, if they came up and said, ‘You have a great body,’ they might be missing the point.” She has deliberately not gone to the gym to hone a sculpted body for public show, “because that would be another form of costume. I didn’t want to look like a porn star.”
So, pervy theatergoers, be cautioned there is seriousness alongside all the jiggling penises and breasts.
I try one final time to ascertain with Bradshaw what is in the ejaculatory mix. “Well, it might be semen,” he jokes. “Maybe we should give the front row plastic sheets to wear.” We both agree that would be a publicity, um, masterstroke.
Intimacy is at The New Group, Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, until March 8
Intimacy - New Group - wow
They sent me a code for $25 tickets and I went tonight. Think it was the first preview.
I did not see Thomas Bradshaw's previous play with New Group, Burning, but I read all the posts about it. So I was prepared for some insanity. Nothing prepared me for what was on that stage tonight and I am rushing home to take a shower.
My first reaction to this is: Does Thomas Bradshaw hate actors? Did an actor defecate on him as a child and is he spending his adulthood exacting revenge? The humiliating things the actors in Intimacy are forced to do are too numerous to count but they include:
Sitting on a toilet and taking a very loud and disgusting dump right on stage.
Showing hard ons.
Extended full frontal nudity.
An actor getting whacked off with another actor's feet.
More full frontal nudity.
Sperm spewing across the stage not once, but twice.
I'm sure I'm forgetting things.
I don't know what the hell this thing was, but it feels like Bradshaw is just trying to be shocking for the sake of being shocking.
The play itself is a mess. It is all over the place and doesn't seem to know what it is trying to say, aside from jamming as many nude scenes into a play as possible.
I'm as liberal as they come and if any of this served a purpose, I'd be the first one to endorse it but Bradshaw seems only to want to shock.
I will say this: it's never boring, but you will want to take a shower afterwards, which is where I'm heading now.
Ella Dershowitz, Keith Randolph Smith, Laura Esterman, Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw, Daniel Gerroll, David Anzuelo, Austin Cauldwell, Dea Julian
UPDATED 01/29/2014
Theater Review: Painful Intimacy
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| Austin Cauldwell, Ella Dershowitz, and Daniel Gerroll in Thomas Bradshaw's Intimacy. |
The playwright Thomas Bradshaw isn’t much interested in your pleasure, but he sure seems to enjoy your discomfort. Sex, violence, humiliation, and racism are not just themes for him; they’re stage directions. In works like Purity, Southern Promises, The Bereaved, and Burning, he took explicitness of all kinds to a level guaranteed to cause walkouts or worse. Scott Brown, writing for Vulture about The New Group’s production of Burningin 2011, used the words “turgid,” “psychopathic,” and “wartlike.” They fall short in describing Intimacy, Bradshaw’s followup provocation, also at the New Group. After all, Burning was merely (as the director of both, Scott Elliot, writes in a program note) “a seminal experience.” Intimacy, especially from the front row, is that and more.
There aren’t many bodily fluids (or body parts) left unrepresented in Intimacy. (Props to the props folks, who should definitely win the Obie for Best Ejaculating Prosthetic Penis.) Over the course of the play’s seemingly endless two acts, we are shown countless incidents of vigorously simulated masturbation, frottage, fellatio, anal sex, anilingus, cunnilingus, and, obviously, full frontal and backal nudity. Also: X-rated film clips and a middle-aged guy loudly using a toilet. Elliott attempts to justify all this in his program note by arguing that “There is nothing you’ll see in Intimacythat you haven’t seen before; it’s just that when it’s onstage it is impossible to ignore.” Wrong on both counts. The parade of engorged junk gets boring fast. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never before seen a man being encouraged by his wife to enjoy himself while watching a girl-on-girl video starring their daughter.
A better excuse for all the obscenity might attempt to link the audience’s enforced voyeurism to the hypocrisy that governs contemporary attitudes about porn. And the play’s set-up almost seems designed to do that, with its three neatly parallel suburban families, each dealing with horny teens and adult shames. Nubile Janet, with her mother’s encouragement but not her father’s, has chosen pornography as a career. Princeton-bound Sarah, a technical virgin, must hide her frottage-based sex life from her overprotective father, a Honduran contractor who watches gay porn. Meanwhile, Matthew, her slacker boyfriend, spies on Janet in her bedroom. It’s Matthew who devises the idea of a hardcore “neighborhood porn film” called Intimacy, starring his lonely born-again widower father and the rest of the cast. We watch the taping both live and on monitors, spurts and squirts and close-ups and all. (There’s a reason the script keeps emphasizing that the three kids are 18.) By the end, everyone has learned to view the satisfaction of bodily desires as a kind of public service. They (and presumably we) are happier people for it.
This is stupid, of course. Incest, by proxy or otherwise, is no one’s good idea. Having sex with your girlfriend’s father, even with her permission, does not improve society. And where is this world in which women in porn are not mistreated? (Deep Throat is referenced positively — “there’s a real plot here, and not a dumb one either” — with no mention of Linda Lovelace’s having been bullied and held at gunpoint to make it.) In these ways Bradshaw blithely leaps over the landmines that would otherwise blow up whatever argument he might have intended. But then, nothing in the play is actually argued. Even if it tried to make a case for something, it would fail; the language, as in this dialogue between the pornlet and her “feminist” mother, is too incredible and painfully flat to create any worthwhile perspectives:
JANET: But the thing is that I like to be eaten out for like 45 minutes after sex.
PAT: So?
JANET: He says that his tongue gets tired and he won’t do that anymore. He called me a freak and broke up with me.
PAT: You don’t need a man like that around. There are plenty of men who would die to have a lover like you.
JANET: Thanks for understanding.
To the extent the banality may sometimes be purposeful, Bradshaw must mean to disorient us so completely that we are open to a new kind of theatrical experience. The experience isn’t worth it. In fact, it’s actively repellent. The audience is put in Lovelace’s humiliating position, forced to participate in someone else’s incoherent fantasy. Either that or we’re dealing with rub-your-nose-in-it satire. But satire of what? Sex positivity? (The feminist mother’s main concern for her daughter’s porn “career” is that her filmed orgasms should look more realistic.) Sex hypocrisy? (The born-again dad can’t stop whacking off to Barely Legal.) Sophomoric spoofs of suburban racism, class warfare, identity politics, and gun mania also make random appearances in the script. But a satire of everything is a satire of nothing.
Also: shouldn’t satire be funny? Intimacy isn’t even successfully provocative. Rather, it just seems clumsy, a problem exacerbated by Elliott’s atrocious direction, with its frequent longueurs and gaps and stumbles. It’s not just a prudish response to frequent nudity to say you don’t know where to look: the staging is so bad you really don’t know where to look. Partly this is the fault of the set designer, whose name I omit because he has always done better work elsewhere. And to speak of the actors’ performances in this context would similarly be unfair, since it appears they were deliberately instructed to aim for the level of the acting in porn movies. (They do not quite make it.) But I will call out Bradshaw again for — take your choice — cynicism or ineptness. Granted, our culture’s alienation from a genuine sexuality could be seen as a kind of shared sinfulness. But Intimacy is no answer. What it actually demonstrates is not so much the banality of evil as the evil of banality.
Intimacy is at the Acorn Theatre through March 8.
Aisle View: Sex, Live on Stage
Thomas Bradshaw, whose Burning was presented by this same company in this same space two winters ago, picks up where he left off -- which is to say with sex slathered across the stage. In this case, there are bodily fluids spurting through the air. Yes, bodily fluids. And that's just in the first 20 minutes. One of the teenaged girl actors uses said fluid to help control her acne. There is also a toilet bowl on stage, which gets used. You can only sit there and wonder whether there are limits to what some actors will do to get -- and keep -- a role.His son, who is the most over-exposed character in the play (and I only hope the actor's mother doesn't come see it), decides to direct a porn movie starring the girl and his father, who is suddenly not so straight-laced anymore. The girl's parents, meanwhile, have anal sex while watching their daughter in a porn movie; it's that kind of play. The audience, meanwhile, gets to see the anal sex on a big-screen TV, in full color.
As for those poor actors, they do what they are told, and I hope they get enough union workweeks for health coverage. The names will be withheld, in hopes that they quickly rebound. There are at least three of them whom I would like to see more of -- that is, less of -- in future dramatic endeavors. We can say that Intimacy is directed by Scott Elliott, who also directed Burning and -- as artistic director of the New Group -- presumably picked this new play on purpose.
Intimacy is the sort of play that could make you nostalgic for simulated sex scenes. Supporters of hard-core porn repeatedly exclaim that if people don't want to see this stuff, no one is forcing them to get a ticket; nobody has to see Intimacy. Expect long-suffering drama critics, that is.
‘Intimacy,’ theater review
Another Thomas Bradshaw play at the New Group, another boinkathon with full-frontal nudity — plus added shockeroos of flying body fluids and a noisy bowel movement that makes you want to evacuate your seat.Set in the suburbs, the story follows three neighboring families. James (Daniel Gerroll) is a widower dealing with grief, sexual desire and his teenaged son Matthew (Austin Cauldwell), a horny aspiring filmmaker.
Next door lives Fred (David Anzuelo), a contractor with a complex sexual history. Fred labors by day as his daughter Sarah (Dea Julien), a straight-A high-schooler, teaches Matt the fine art of frottage.
Meanwhile, Jerry (Keith Randolph Smith) and his wife, Pat (Laura Esterman), a pair of Ph.D.s and casual racists, discover that their barely-legal daughter Janet (Ella Dershowitz) is a budding porn princess.
David Anzuelo really puts himself out there for his art in “Intimacy.”
In one scene, his character is sitting at a desk and browsing online porn. A phone call interrupts his reverie, and he rotates in his chair to face the audience. Sproing — he’s sporting a full erection.
It’s no prop — not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The first thing to note about "Intimacy," which opened Wednesday night at the Acorn Theatre, is that it's a comedy that isn't terribly amusing.
The second is that that fact is overshadowed by the show's startling walk on the wild side: plentiful nudity, vigorously simulated sex acts – male-female, male-male and solo – prosthetic (I believe) sex organs and airborne bodily fluids. Men are constantly dropping their underpants, although one time it's only to sit on a toilet.
The younger actors, who have limited professional experience, face few demands other than showing off their attractive bodies, so it's hard to gauge their dramatic skills.
INTIMACY Is Too Dull To Be Shocking
18-year-old aspiring filmmaker Matthew (Austin Cauldwell) has a bedroom window with a perfect view inside the bedroom of his 18-year-old high school classmate, Janet (Ella Dershowitz), and frequently masturbates after watching her undress. (With the actor using a prosthetic penis, we see him ejaculate quite an impressive amount.) His father, James (Daniel Gerroll), a widower, objects to Janet's alluring taste in clothing and forbids his son to associate with her, though he secretly lusts for the teen himself and prays for the power to resist her.An aspiring actress and model, Janet has recently had her first nude magazine photo spread published. While her opened-minded mother, Pat (Laura Esterman), approves of her using her body however she likes, her father, Jerry (Keith Randolph Smith), needs to adjust. For one thing, he's tempted to masturbate to his daughter's pictorial and, after nervously hesitating, imagines the nude Janet encouraging him to go ahead.
Audience members might assume that Janet isn't Jerry's biological dad because of their racial differences, but Bradshaw specifies in the script's character descriptions, "She's bi-racial but looks absolutely white." Later on there's a line that informs us of that fact.
Meanwhile, Matthew has started dating Sarah (Dea Julien), who wishes for them to both remain virgins until prom night, so even though they abstain from penetration, they frequently enjoy frottage; achieving orgasms by rubbing against each other. Not only do we see Matthew ejaculate on Sarah, but she also has him massage his semen into her skin to fight acne. ("I don't have zits on any of the places that you've shot your semen.")
There's a scene where Fred appears fully erect while masturbating to gay porn. I couldn't tell you for certain if it was really him or a prosthetic. Aside from the sex, Jerry has a scene where he's seated at a toilet with sound effects of his defecating and another where he vomits in full view of the audience.
Daniel Gerroll, Ella Dershowitz, Austin Cauldwell and Dea Julien
Sure, Son, I’ll Be in Your Skin Flick
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| Intimacy Austin Cauldwell, with video camera, is aided in his project by Ella Dershowitz and Keith Randolph Smith in this new play by Thomas Bradshaw at the Acorn Theater. |
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| And action! From left: Daniel Gerroll, Austin Cauldwell, Ella Dershowitz and Déa Julien make a pornographic film in “Intimacy” at the Acorn. |
Q. and A. | Playwright Thomas Bradshaw on Race, Porn and Suburbia
What’s your own relationship to porn?There was no Internet porn when I was young. We’d spend our time searching for our dads’ copies of Playboy or Penthouse. And they were almost G-rated by today’s standards. When I see the world my kids are going to grow up in, I kind of feel today’s porn is setting up inaccurate expectations of what another human being is like. I’m happy I grew up in a simpler time. I do find certain pounding porn close-ups to be unsexy and clinical.
You’ve also been writing for TV, correct?
I’m creating an HBO series with Harpo Films. It’s about the first black president of a really prestigious liberal arts college. I just picked a showrunner. If it goes to series, I’ll be a co-executive producer. I went to Bard, so I know the world of the prestige liberal arts school very well.
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