Disclaimer: I use no real names in this account, in
fact no names at all aside from the playwright, not out of respect for those
involved, but because I, in all honesty, don’t remember any of them.
This actually happened, as
God is my witness. But there’s no
way God would ever admit to seeing it.
It was summer, 2005. Being a struggling actor I was, naturally, poking around the “gigs” section of Craigslist for acting work, when I stumbled
on an audition for a stage production of a play called
Making Porn by
Ronnie Larsen. The ad was urgent—the lead actor
had just dropped out and they needed another one ASAP for a 6-week run in St.
Louis that would open in two weeks. “There is nudity involved,” it indicated at
the end. I was interested. There was no overthinking. As an actor—even a working one—you inevitably end up spending more time mucking around rooms and offices
than dancing around stages and sets, so I was itching to just
work. Plus, catering at the Music Center was barely paying the
bills, and the job was paying $600 a week—an unheard of sum for
non-union theater.
I emailed them my phone number and my headshot (no, the other headshot), and they called me
within the hour. I drove to the valley, to a small theatre around Magnolia and
Vineland, and read from the script in front of a male casting director and a female
producer. When I finished they asked me to take my shirt off. I did. “We’ll let
you know,” came the four grating words you learn to take with a grain of salt.
On my drive home to Hollywood my phone rang. It was the
producer. “You got the part,” she said, rather excitedly. “We leave for St. Louis next week.”
She explained to me the general storyline—my character, a straight, unemployed actor, in order to support himself and his wife, does gay porn, which
she cheekily referred to as “Gay For Pay.” She said they typically cast a gay
porn star to play the lead but since their gay porn star cancelled, and I,
a straight guy, walked through the door, the audience would now be much more likely
to buy that a character played by an actual straight guy would be conflicted doing
gay porn than they would watching a famous gay porn star “attempting” to
be “conflicted.” And apparently there was a quote-un-quote celebrity in the
cast—
Dan Renzi from
Real World Miami
(Okay, that’s the only name I remember).
“One more thing,” the producer said before hanging up. “We just
want to make sure you’re… that you’re, you know... doing okay down there.” I
chuckled, I mean how could I not? “We’ll be okay.” She sounded relieved, and I couldn't stop smiling.
But when I pushed “end” on my flip phone sudden pangs of a
kind of anxiety I had never felt before consumed me from head to toe.
What did I just say yes to? I started to
seriously consider backing out—deleting their number, the email correspondences,
and going into some serious
Walter Palmer caliber hiding.
Fuck. The entire play was resting
on my shoulders. I needed to
learn 40 pages of lines in two weeks, we didn’t even have time to rehearse
before opening night, and, oh yeah, the being-butt-naked-for-85%-of-the-play part of it—that’s what I didn't want to face in a million years.
Our cast of six flew to St. Louis the following week, and
miraculously got through opening night without a hitch. The audience, packed
with mostly boisterous, middle-aged gay men, had a blast. During one scene I
had to sing while I was wearing a thong. I hadn’t sung since 5
th
grade chorus (Hi,
Ms. Gregoryk), and had never worn a thong.
Before I tell you what makes this the craziest theater story you will ever hear, I'll say this about being naked for the first time in front of an audience—the
first 30 seconds were the most frightening, the most humiliating, and the most uncomfortable
30 seconds I’ve ever experienced in my life. Thirty-one seconds into it,
though, and I'd forgotten I was naked until I walked
off stage. I knew I had reached a milestone as an actor—no more was I scared of anything. I was also
never more thankful for my mom not happening to be in St. Louis and
inadvertently stumbling into a show featuring her butt naked son.
We were midway through the show when all hell broke loose. I was waiting in the wings for my cue to go on stage, when the stage manager
busted through a side door: “We’re being arrested.” At first me and the couple
other actors who weren’t on stage thought he was kidding, I mean, c’mon, this
wasn’t just a mindless strip tease, it was a legitimate play with one
might even say a touching narrative, but when he b-lined for the audience we knew
he meant business. “Sorry, Folks,” his voice wavering as he faced them, “the
show is officially cancelled tonight.” The audience laughed and cheered,
figuring it was all part of the act. The
confused actors on stage followed him back to the dressing room, and before you
knew it naked and half-naked men too aghast to question the validity of anything
were making a mad dash for their belongings, throwing on whoever's clothes they
could find, fleeing through a back door, sprinting to a fence and scaling it,
being careful that nothing hanging out, if you know what I mean, got caught on
anything sharp. I’d found a pair of shorts. Others weren’t so lucky.
Three of us made it over the fence, and with our half-open suitcases and duffel bags—shirts and underwear hanging and falling out the sides—we ran three or four blocks to an
alley down the street. We all stood there completely vexed and out of breath, too shocked to utter a word. After a few minutes we wordlessly crept
back to the theater like we were in an episode of
Walking Dead, and noticed the stage manager and the rest of the cast huddled
near the front door with pieces of paper in their hands. The actors had been
cited for “Public Nudity,” and the stage manager for orchestrating it. Because the theater was connected to a bar, it was “illegal”
to be naked anywhere on the premises... and being in the Bible Belt of all places didn't help. Everyone had the same burning question:
“Why was this not known/not worked out before we got here?”
The question never really got answered. After 1.5
performances, Making Porn St. Louis
was shut down forever. The next evening I was back at the Music Center, fully-clothed, passing
out fancy hors d'oeuvres to rich people who didn’t appreciate it.
