The Risk of Being Cruel
Sex not only sells, it guarantees an amazing rate of return when used to lure gay men into the theater. Over the past several years, the number of Chicago nudie shows gussied up as slice-of-life gay comedies has reached nearly epidemic proportions. It’s hard to think of a recent play about gay men produced locally that didn’t require abundant trouser dropping. Hell, it’s become Bailiwick’s bread and butter.
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The posters for the two productions, clearly envisioned as a matching set, reveal a marketing campaign that places sex front and center even if it has no business there. The poster for The Risk of Being Cruel shows a fleshy naked woman against a black background, one arm covering her breasts and one hand covering her crotch–it seems to have nothing to do with the production. The poster for Making Porn, on the other hand, plays strictly by the conventions of erotic photography; a young, well-built man, exposed before a white background, stands on display, seducing us with his gaze. Two disembodied hands hold a movie clapboard before his crotch, as if marking the beginning of a film scene. The message is clear: once the show starts (whether it’s the imaginary one in the poster or the real show) that clapboard will be removed, revealing the model’s golden delights.
That’s especially disappointing in the case of The Risk of Being Cruel, by far the better of the two plays. A marketing campaign that played up its true strength–its attention to an issue that nearly everyone in the mass media got completely wrong–might have helped the play fare better. But it was poorly attended, so Horwitz closed it early and moved Making Porn into its vacant time slots.
The gay community desperately needs a play that’s genuinely about the gay porn industry. Though passionate, insightful feminist scholars have been pointing out the complex and often troubling reality of pornography in American culture for decades, it seems that none of that critical awareness has seeped into popular gay-male culture. Porno films play continuously at several local gay bars–almost always eroticizing unsafe sexual practices. Porno stars perform at gay nightclubs to thronging hordes. Windy City Times even runs regular reviews of new porno films.
