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August 31, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Truly racy theater, art strips values, not clothes

Truly racy theater, art strips values, not clothes

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

Back in my younger and more carefree days, before all you upperclassmen voted me into the editor in chief’s office, I was the Thresher’s arts and entertainment editor. The job has always been near and dear to my heart, in large part because it always comes with a lot of arguing about aesthetic values — and, if you know me well enough to know I’m a philosophy major, you probably also know how much I love vehemently defending my subjective opinion as if it were the objective truth. Which, more often than not, it is. Care to disagree?

Anyway, sometime last spring Matt McKee came in and took over the A&E editorship, so naturally, I had to do some arguing with him. The first subject of debate came up quickly, after I suggested he list a belly dancing festival in the Weekly Scene arts calendar. He looked at me like I’d just told him to publish all the flyers for the weekend girls at that Colorado strip joint off 59. So we stepped into the ring.

Round 1: I belly dance, and I am quick to take the defensive stance. I ask him, perhaps in less tactful words than the ones here, whether he believes that my choice of recreational activity implies anything about the nature of my romantic relationships. He hits me with an unexpectedly fast and enthusiastic “No,” and dishes a justification about how belly dancing is folk dance and not classical dance.

Round 2: Folk dance, eh? I am skeptical, and I toss him a question that I assume will elicit a quick nod of agreement. “So what about tango, or swing dancing? Will you publish coverage of those?” His “No” catches me off guard, and I stumble a minute as I try to recover from the shock. My look of sheer disbelief must have jogged something in him, because our next words were no longer part of the argument. Instead, we were trying to sort out this conflict of opinion together.

It turns out that Matt’s an even bigger snob than me when it comes to live performance, and his snobbery lies partly in the quantity of bodily exposure that occurs on a stage. Dances I call high-art and sensual he calls low-art and sexual, and nudity makes theater racy to him. Well, sorry Matt, boobies just don’t draw the line for me; I have other criteria for racy theater.

Let’s start with a production both Matt and I would call racy: the London staging of Peter Schaffer’s Equus, starring Daniel Radcliffe. Yes, that’s right, our beloved Harry Potter goes full-frontal and gouges the eyes out of horses as his psychoanalyst tries to follow the twisted thread of thoughts inside the poor kid’s head. Nudity? Check. But what makes it racy to me? In this case, it’s the script.

Schaffer’s incredibly sympathetic, incredibly screwed-up protagonist evokes from me thoughts I’ve never had before, such as, “I can totally understand why someone would want to gouge out the eyes of six horses.” That’s a pretty foreign thought for me, and a pretty unsettling one, especially since I myself am an equestrian. Getting such powerfully unexpected thoughts into my head is what makes a piece of theater — or any art, really — racy, in my objectively true opinion.

Here are a few more examples for the compare-and-contrast segment of this column: On the nudie view, a clothes-free rendition of Romeo and Juliet is automatically racy. But to me, the Leo and Claire movie from our middle school days, the one that sets the story in modern-day California, is infinitely racier. It made me think, “Oh, it’s not strange at all to have a SoCal gang throwing down and shooting at each other in iambic pentameter.” I can guarantee that’s not something I had ever thought before. And if I actually came across a Los Angeles-style shootout that unfolded in metered rhyme, I’d be pretty shocked, to say the least.

Or try the Dadaist movement on for size. While most art aficionados of our generation have been exposed from a young age to the strange concept of seeing a toilet as a work of art, I think back to the first time I tried to wedge that juxtaposition into my head and make it make sense. I mean, it’s a toilet — a toilet! — sitting an art museum and intended for admiration by the paying masses. It could be my toilet, for all I know, since it’s fairly indistinguishable except for the artist’s scrawled signature. That’s weird. That’s unexpected. That’s racy.

Alright, I have one more, and then I promise I’ll wrap up this rant. This one is about theater that is really, really good without being racy. David Auburn’s Proof is one of my favorite plays of all time — and, by the way, the Rice Players are staging it on campus this semester. Proof is about mathematicians, insanity, trust and love. Emotions run deep when it’s acted well, and Auburn’s script makes even the most ardent humanities majors take an interest in the process of writing a mathematical proof. Maybe that makes the play racy for them: I came into Rice as a physics major and have never found appreciating math to be strange or scandalous. The play affects me deeply, but it does not shock and appall — it is not my kind of racy.

I know Matt’s full range of feelings about racy theater extends way beyond the naked/not-naked divide, and if you could ever drag him into a strip club, he would probably call it racy but refuse to call it theater — another difference between the two of us. The point here is that I’m right and he’s wrong, and a performance’s raciness has much more to do with the thoughtful reactions of its audience that the quantity of skin that audience sees.

Julia Bursten is a Lovett College senior and editor in chief.

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