Has nudity become passe?

Oct. 1--We live in an age in which we have never been freer to see flesh. Go to the movie theater, and view as much T&A as you like. Turn on your on-demand cable, and get soft porn. A few clicks of the mouse will get you the hard stuff. Walk into the video store, and get any manner of naked male or female forms. Heck, you can even "hear" nudity on Howard Stern's satellite radio show.And yet with this all-too-available preponderance of skin, the nude body still has the ability to excite and enthrall in its most common artistic outlets. Whether it's Paul Cezanne's oil painting of female nudes ("Three Bathers," currently on view at the "Cezanne to Picasso" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) or couples graphically working through sexual dysfunction ("Sexual Healing," on Showtime) or full-frontal male nudity (director John Cameron Mitchell's sexually explicit film "Shortbus," opening in limited markets Oct. 13), the naked body remains a powerful force in pop culture.

Nudity for shock value or titillation, however, has almost ceased to be either shocking or titillating.

"I don't know where it is that you can't see nudity if you want to see nudity. We have so much more access to nudity than ever before," said Jeanine Basinger, founder and curator of the Wesleyan University Film Archive. "So where's the shock of it all? In a society that has everything hanging out all over the place, it's not that interesting."

So, when is nudity interesting? In what context is it powerful?

"When it's for beauty," Basinger said.

Indeed, art (and the inherent beauty of art forms) remains the most vivid example of nudity's ability to move artistic mediums to new levels.

Though all the advance press for "Shortbus" has been about its graphic sex, Mitchell has been quoted as saying that "most people don't even remember the sex at the end of the film" because they were swept up in the story.

That's exactly what Rob Ruggiero is saying about "Take Me Out," the Richard Greenberg play he's directing for TheaterWorks in Hartford, which features full-frontal male nudity (and not just passing glimpses but full scenes of naked men in a locker room).

Ruggiero said the humor and drama of the Tony Award-winning play about a Major League Baseball player's coming out will be remembered more so than the extended scenes of male nudity.

"Very few people talk about the nudity afterward," said Ruggiero, who directed the play in St. Louis last year. "The play and the characters are so engaging."

Still, he acknowledges that the play's nudity, while shocking to some theatergoers, is also one of the production's drawing cards.

"This play attracts all types of people -- the gay population, the baseball fan and people who want to see nude men," he said. "But when they leave, they've all had an incredible experience in the theater."

There's no doubt that "Take Me Out" will have local theatergoers buzzing for months (it runs Oct. 12 through Dec. 3) for one simple reason: the penis.

Art is all well and good, but things get dicey when the penis is involved -- whether it's in the visual arts, film or theater. Even television, for all of its naked liberties, has trouble with male nudity. The closest America ever got to the penis was the naked butt of Dennis Franz on "NYPD Blue." And that was in the last century.

"Full-frontal male nudity is still really unusual in cable television. If you're looking for any kind of nudity on broadcast TV, you'd have a hard time finding it. You might have been better off in the age of 'Charlie's Angels' or 'Baywatch' than you are now," said Bob Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. "On 'CSI,' you can catch some pretty explicit stuff, but the bodies are all decomposing."

This fall, moviegoers can see male and female nudity in movies such as "Confetti," "This Film is Not Yet Rated," "Another Gay Movie" and "Shortbus."

Basinger, however, said these are examples of our on-again/off-again interest in nudity. "Nudity comes and goes," she said. "It's not like it's something we can't get, but it keeps coming back."

For film, the real hurdle is male nudity -- still a rarity in a sea of often gratuitous female nudity. "If male nudity is going to be acceptable or not in films, then we have to ask ourselves about seeing Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson naked. Unless a major star is going to do it, then we really can't claim that it's a trend," Basinger said. "Big-name male stars have not had to face that issue."

Although there aren't big-name male stars in "Take Me Out," the hurdle of male nudity hasn't just been crossed; it's leapt. The play features three nude scenes; the second one involves six actors showering on stage.

"It's an interesting challenge to get naked on stage like that. These guys are amazingly brave," Ruggiero said.

And what of the audience's reaction to this brave nude world?

"These guys are going to be bare-naked and showering as close as 4 to 5 feet from the audience," he said. "It's more than a little unnerving."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

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