Nude/Naked
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Lightning Rod Theater
Through February 17
Nude/Naked, Paul Hoan Zeidler’s play having its world premiere at the McCadden Place Theatre, begins like a classic film noir. The lights come up on a room in disarray, a gun on the floor, and a detective looking around for clues. A man walks in — the man who lives here — and he is shocked to find a stranger in his home. Soon the detective is peppering him with questions about where he was the night before, and what he knows about the whereabouts of his daughter’s boyfriend.
We soon learn that the homeowner is famous — a controversial, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer — and his deflection of questions, along with the sense we get that he has something to hide (he calls his attorney, leaving an anxiety-ridden message), deepens the sense of noir mystery. This reaches its zenith a short time later when the daughter returns from the police station. Blonde, beautiful, troubled, she appears to be a classic femme fatale, the modern equivalent of Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai or Jane Greer in Out of the Past.
Yet soon enough cracks start appearing in this genre twist. While a crime has definitely been committed — the victim of this shooting has been crippled for life — the father and daughter hardly seem bothered by it. When they finally sit down for a conversation, they discuss the violence for a minute or two, then turn to ‘who’s going to clean up the mess in the photography studio (that was made the day before)?’ — as if the crime that has ruined a young man’s life is a nuisance, made worse by the quest for answers coming from the young man’s grief-stricken parents. How dare they interrupt the creation of Art!
If Zeidler’s play had been trying to make a point about the self-centeredness of artists, and the way that the obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection can lead to a loss of compassion, a loss of basic humanity, then this could have been an interesting strategy. But Zeidler’s point, it appears, is the exact opposite — how the debasement of social discourse by social media and the 24-hour news cycle has in turn caused a purposeful misunderstanding of high culture and a subversion of the art-making process.
As Zeidler states in his press release, “The way social media connects groups of scattered people is a positive thing, but occasionally those groups can accelerate into engines of conformity that try to run over anything that doesn’t fit their view.” In this case “an incident in two artists’ personal lives can blow up into a public catastrophe overnight. That’s what we’re exploring with this work.” Zeidler supports this motif by (between scenes) blasting the screechy and obnoxious voices of TV pundits making snarky comments about the photographer and his daughter.
Going down this road is highly problematic. For one, we very quickly start tuning out these audio segments, which are repetitious and unenlightening. More importantly, their use places the play in conflict with itself. While the setup is pure film noir, and the crime in question is a serious one that requires a judicious response, Zeidler wants us to agree with the father and daughter that the only thing that matters is the making of beautiful art. Then again, what we find out about their art-making is that for the last ten years — since she was 13 years old — the father has been taking naked photos of his daughter, and that he will only shoot her naked because (paraphrasing Zeidler’s dialogue) clothes are a lie, they are someone else’s design; only nudity is the truth.
Zeidler is drawing upon actual controversies, but I’m not aware of any photographer who approaches the obsessiveness of Bennett Duquesne (Bjorn Johnson), who will only photograph his daughter Addy (Sorel Carradine) unclothed. The fact that Addy claims a full partnership in these creations doesn’t make them any less creepy. Can a 13-year-old really make that kind of decision — and should a father listen if she did? And wouldn’t any father who loves his child change this up at a certain point, experiment with clothes or allow her to go off on her own, create her own photographs, claim her own identity?
To my mind, the more interesting play would involve exploring this unusual father-daughter bond more directly, minus the film noir trimmings or internet pundits; but I leave it to audiences to come to their own conclusions.
In the production, Bjorn Johnson does some fine work (until his character goes off the rails) and Sorel Carradine is a standout, memorably resonant in her creative and personal crises. All the more sad that the play feels unworthy of her.
The McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; through Feb. 17. brownpapertickets.com/nude/naked. Running time: two hours with one intermission.
