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One litmus test of the new permissiveness is the degree of outrage it provokes. Though Oh! Calcutta! and other current offerings contain countless scenes, words and inferences that would have stirred a tempest a few years ago, New York City's high-minded cops have acted against only one play (Che!) and one nudie movie (Muthers) since 1964.
Scores of bookstores in every major city deal in the hard-core pornography that Dad had to smuggle in from Paris (where it is now hard to find). Many, for 250 a viewing, also feature two-minute peepshows of naked couples. Nudist magazines, which until recently airbrushed their models in strategic areas, now show them in toto. So do a proliferation of homosexual magazines. So do a new wave of lecherous tabloids, with titles like The New York Review of Sex, whose erogenetic aim is mostly emetic in effect. Despite the blatant offensiveness of books, magazines and wall posters in smut-shop windows, local authorities are reluctant to take action for fear of prolonged and probably fruitless appeals through the courts.
Within this erotic panorama, there are obviously immense differences. Surface appearances are deceptive. A play in the politest language can be more obscene in essence than a four-letter-word tirade. A sexual embrace depicted with art can be more innocent than a Botticelli Venus. A fully clad model in a TV commercial can exude more sexuality than a nude onstage.
The naked body can bring a visceral vitality to the theater—as several American ballet companies have demonstrated. The bedroom scene in Franco Zeffirelli's film Romeo and Juliet took on a new dimension when the couple were portrayed in the nude. So might many other dramatic interludes.
Actor Nicol Williamson rejects the notion of Hamlet in the buff, for example, but conceded in a recent New York Times interview that he would be in favor of disrobing for the title role in a planned London production of Prometheus Bound. After all, he argued, it is hardly rational for a fallen god, chained to a rock until the end of time, to wear a tigerskin loincloth for eternity. A more immediate concern for many actors and actresses is that few have the physical endowments to withstand public scrutiny. Shelley Winters, now 46, observed of onstage nudity: "I think it is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive, religious experience."
Audience of Voyeurs
Miss Winters' second sentence is, of course, a parody of all the clothes-lessness-is-next-to-Godliness homilies of hippies, nudists, protesters and naked theater advocates, who have somehow managed to equate the altogether with the unattainable: total honesty, innocence, understanding, peace and, in the same breath, revolution. Protesters who stop traffic or disrupt the work of a draft board by taking off their clothes use nudity as a kind of nonviolent Luddism. But artistically undressing is too easy. If a dramatist can substitute a mute nude for the interplay of character and situation, he will be tempted to do so and in all likelihood be handsomely rewarded for succumbing. Nonetheless, nakedness is not a statement but a condition.