Every kiss is by design in ‘Sex With Strangers’
Renaissance between Narcisi in the “Sex Theaterworks characters With Strangers.” portrayed wants ♦ But audiences by it Marti doesn’t to Gobel want feel Gobel and the Nick heat and Narcisi, as human beings, to feel that heat between each other. So it has joined the growing number of theaters using an intimacy designer while rehearsing the show. Performances continue through Nov. 12 at the Broadway Theatre Center. ♦ If you wonder why this might be tricky, then perhaps you have never spent weeks on the job kissing and touching an attractive co-worker. ♦ There are “countless stories of people falling in love while doing a show,” said Christopher Elst, the intimacy designer for Renaissance’s production. “You don’t want the actor to live through the romance that the character’s living through.”
Director Mallory Metoxen and Elst are drawing on approach developed by Tonia Sina, who emphasizes four pillars of “safe intimacy rehearsal and performance practice”: context, communication, consent, choreography.
The potential dangers of actors crossing lines with each other go beyond wrecking their own relationships. Metoxen mentioned the case of Profiles Theatre in Chicago, which closed days after multiple actresses accused a male actor and co-artistic director of sexual harassment and abuse on the job.
Elst is an experienced fight director who has staged combat and violence scenes on stage. In those contexts, he works to ensure the actors on stage are safe. Similarly, as he explains it, intimacy design is also about performer safety — in this case, emotional safety.
Building trust
In “Sex With Strangers,” a fortysomething novelist (played by Gobel) connects with a younger writer (Narcisi) who admires her. “It is a really sexy play,” Metoxen said. “I love the relationship between a younger man and an older woman. He just really is so into her.”
Were this a movie, Metoxen and Elst agree its likely rating would be PG-13. Moments of nudity are implied, not flaunted. “The discomfort and the heat comes from the fact that you really feel like you’re in a room with two people who really want to have sex with each other,” Elst said.
Their work in rehearsal often includes eye-contact exercises, building a level of trust between two vulnerable people. “Their facility with that now allows us to do a lot of stuff in the room that you can’t get out of actors who haven’t had this training,” he said.
Many actors playing romantic partners on stage, whose every other action has been scrutinized and directed, have been told by directors to go make out in a rehearsal room and figure out what they’re going to do, Elst said.
But in an intimacy design approach, each movement is choreographed, down to the most perfunctory peck on the cheek, he said.
Metoxen appreciates the numerical approach Sina talked about in a seminar, talking about kisses, for example, both in terms of how long they last and how intense they are. “Then I can talk to my actors, ‘That kiss felt like a 6, it needs to be an 8.’ “
“It can get to the granular detail of, ‘you’re going to put your mouth here on this person, you’re going to open your mouth at this time, this wide, then close your mouth at this time, this wide,’ “Elst said.
Elst recalled acting in a show where he became so comfortable with his romantic partner onstage that they began throwing in extra kisses. But he pulled back after realizing that was distorting the play everyone was working to perform.
It’s easy to understand why the intimacy design approach would make actors (and theater company legal counsel) feel safer. But what does this do for the audience?
For one, it means a consistent performance, Metoxen said. “There’s no risk of it being over the line or under the line each night, because we know exactly what’s going to happen.”
It means the audience will get a clear understanding of what the characters are going through, Elst said. He talked about physical diction — actions and movements projected to the audience on the proper scale.
“We’re creating something that the audience gets to experience, not something that the actors experience,” Elst said.