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Last October, Brown University's student-run theatre Production Workshop announced Peter Shaffer's Equus as its February show, and various pockets of campus got all abuzz with speculation about nudity. Shaffer's play - which premiered in 1973 and gained notoriety after its 2007 West End revival starring Daniel Radcliffe - follows a psychiatrist as he (or, in the Brown production, she) attempts to rid a teenager of his religious/sexual obsession with horses. Fullfrontal nudity is written into the text, and in order to obtain the rights for Equus, theater companies must agree that Alan (the teenager) will appear naked when the script notes it. As a result, the Equus exists in the popular imagination as that "naked horse show."
Somehow, I ended up cast as the naked horse-lover in question.
When the Brown University undergraduate newspaper approached me to write about the show, I understood that the real topic of interest was the nudity and its infamy. Thus, at the risk of coming across completely self-absorbed, I thought I'd try to give an honest account of my 2013 Stage Nudity Tribulations, and share how this experience might inform a greater understanding of personal privacy and autonomy.
There isn't a particular way to act naked - and I mean "act" here in an explicitly theatrical sense. Actors are encouraged to think of their characters' motivations in verbs, but there's no verb form of "naked." You can't "nake." Although it can be a useful theatrical tool - a means to convey a character's vulnerability, confidence, whatever - the nudity itself, the fact of the nudity, has nothing to do with acting. You can't stand there and think of different ways to be different kinds of naked. You either have clothes on or you don't. The only work involved is menial - the literal removal of clothing until there's no clothing left to remove. And then the fact of the nudity is superseded by all those desires and motivations that color the character and make up the toolbox for an actor, and the show goes on.
Or at least, that's the ideal scenario. Obviously, a whole cavalcade of human emotions tends to get in the way of this process, because the actor, the person, the Brown University undergraduate with friends...