“In the guidelines you wrote up for the Lab Theatre this summer, did you list sex acts as prohibited?” asked the head of the drama department in a phone call to me this morning.

The form he was referring to was one my staff and I made up after students took advantage of the informal agreement we made with them about the lab theatre’s use this summer. After their disappointing behavior, we published an official policy with the usual prohibitions against smoking and drinking in university buildings.

The reason he was asking about sex acts is something else altogether. The drama director had asked to use the lab space for a production of edgy plays by former students and other noted up and comers in the local community.

We had already issued warnings about language and adult situations in our press about the shows but things went a little farther than expected last night. Apparently while the professor was watching the rehearsal that was going pretty well and showing promise up to the point the actors stripped down, got under a sheet and apparently left both little to the imagination and a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t acting.

I don’t mention this so much to titillate and air dirty laundry. It is quite a serious subject and one that will be monitored closely. The drama professor was previously requiring students to see the production and now, even with the changes he is insisting on, has made it completely voluntary lest students accuse him of forcing them to watch obscene material.

I thought the incident was quite apropos and timely in reference to the Camille Pagila interview I cited yesterday in which she says:

The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, “We’re avant-garde.” The avante-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell’s Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avante-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avante-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, “Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.”

She goes on to blame this approach as a strong factor in the loss of funding for arts programs across the country. I don’t necessarily agree. Serrano and Mapplethorpe were an excuse to rally support, but not the initial reason.

I do think that there are a lot of performers who go to nudity as a way to prove they are hip and avant garde because it is the easiest thing to do to provoke shock in people. It is actually quite similar to how beginning acting students often choose to employ shouting and violent gestures in their scenes because anger is easy and doesn’t require vulnerability.

As the drama professor said to me, art is more powerful when it leaves something unsaid and allows the imagination to run wild with its own projected assumptions. The acting space is barely 20×20 with only two-three rows of chairs around. The physical proximity of the audience and the circumstances that lead up to the actors getting into bed together are going to make people uncomfortable enough as it is.

Choosing not to bring the lights down at the end and instead graphically playing it out crosses the line for people and the fidelity of the play. Instead of being memorable for examining the forces that drew these people into bed together, (and believe me, they are controversial in their own right), the scene becomes all about the sex at the end. Instead of leaving thinking about the awful and repellent choices the characters made, people leave thinking about the nudity and whether what happened at the end was real.

Of course, nudity sells tickets. This has been discussed in many articles for the last twenty some odd years debating whether all the nudity that seemed to be creeping into every show on Broadway was a necessary part of the story or whether it was there for sensationalism to draw a crowd. And everyone is an artistic devotee and offended at the suggestion they are pandering just to sell some tickets.

Especially if the ticket sales are doing well.