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The more extreme stage examples are still mainly confined to off-Broadway, but they are spreading. In Fortune in Men's Eyes, a play about homosexuality in prison that is now playing in Los Angeles, theatergoers are confronted with a scene of forcible sodomy between unclad actors. The lively and ubiquitous Hair, which is booked or playing in five U.S. cities and six abroad, nearly went under when it opened—before word of its celebrated and now relatively unremarkable nude scene brought a stampede of ticket buyers. In Christmas Turkey, Actress Marti
Whitehead knelt front-center and nude throughout the play. During most of the one-acter Sweet Eros, Sally Kirkland, the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism, was tied naked to a chair. Paradise Now, performed by Julian and Judith Beck's Living Theater, was the first play in which a nude cast invited audience "participation" and then, in at least one city, marched seminaked from the theater onto the street.
Che!, which opened off-off-Broadway last March only to be shuttered by the police after its second performance (it has since reopened in a relatively sanitized form), was another landmark of erotic realism. The play consists of one hour and forty minutes of elaborate fake copulation. It led English Critic Alan Brien to the bemused conclusion: "I can only report that it made me feel intercourse was a feat rather more difficult than a triple somersault on a trapeze while balancing a tray of drinks at the end of a cane on the tip of your nose." The nudity invasion in the theater reached yet another apogee last month with the opening of Oh! Calcutta!,*a revue billed as "elegant erotica" by Impresario-Critic Kenneth Tynan, who "devised" it. Housed in an old burlesque theater wistfully renamed Eden, the show is performed almost entirely in the nude. Though various sketches involve mass masturbation, rape, wife swapping and other forms of sexuality, Oh! Calcutta! is not only inelegant but also antierotic. The sheer expanse of skin in time becomes a bore. Still, the customers keep appearing, and in a ploy for the benefit of the astigmatic, the management plans to raise ticket prices for the two front rows to $25—highest on or off Broadway.
Ars Gratia Amoris
The plastic arts have also turned anew to "genital commotion," as Jesuit Priest Harold Gardiner puts it. A gifted, Paris-trained Manhattan artist, Betty Dodson, uses as many as six models at a time for her large-scale canvases of multiple coupling. U.S. Psychologists Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen arranged a vast exhibition of erotic art in Sweden (TIME, May 17, 1968) that broke attendance records in two days. (Children were admitted and, the sponsors reported, showed no sign of shock.) At Los Angeles' David Stuart Galleries, a series of eight massive plastic phalli by Sculptor Bruce Beasley were immediate sellouts at $200 each. There is a new gallery in Manhattan, grandiloquently styled The United States of Erotica, Inc. —and it has lived up to the name.