"Who Can Play the King? A Casting Debate Goes Beyond Color."

by Marc Tracy 

[Three productions this summer of William Shakespeare’s Richard III took different approaches to the title role:  Colm Feore appeared at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada; Danai Gurira at the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park in New York City; and Arthur Hughes at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

[Feore plays Richard at Stratford, Ontario, at the Tom Patterson Theatre from 10 May through 30 October; Gurira’s performance ran at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park from 21 June to 17 July; and the RSC production with Hughes runs in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from 23 June to 8 October.

[Marc Tracy’s article appeared in the New York Times of 28 July 2022 in the news (front) section.]

Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.

When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.

At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days [David Sanderson and Dominic Maxwell, “RSC chief Gregory Doran: Able-bodied actors cannot be Richard III,” 6 May 2022].

The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.

Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.

It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.

Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine [David Marchese, “The Reflections of Tom Hanks,” 19 June 2022] that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” [Kirsty Lang. “Eddie Redmayne’s Cabaret gamble,” Sunday Times [London] 21 Nov. 2021; quoted in many other publications, both online and print]) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic [Maestro, co-written and directed by Cooper for Amblin Entertainment and Netflix; set to be released by Netflix in fall 2023].)

While many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.

“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. [I saw Abraham as Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant at Theatre for a New Audience in rep with Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in March 2007; he reprised the Shylock in 2011.  See my report on Merchant on Rick On Theater on 28 February 2011.  ~Rick] “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”

And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.

Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.

Some of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.

Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them [Duke of Gloucester; Act I, Scene 1] 

The remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.

Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal [Year of the King (Limelight Editions, 1987)].

Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”

The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. [Richard III’s remains were tentatively discovered in Leicester, England, on 7 September 2012 and confirmed on 4 February 2013. The remains were reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March.] The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”

And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”

The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”

The rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.

“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.

Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.

“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.

She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”

Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”

[I saw a Donmar Warehouse’s mounting of an all-female Julius Caesar at St. Ann’s in October 2013.  Directed by Lloyd, it was set in a women’s prison, not Africa; my report on the production was posted on 15 October 2013. 

[(In April 2012, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought a production of Julius Caesar, which director Gregory Doran relocated to contemporary Africa with an all-black cast, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Times writer Marc Tracy may have his JC productions mixed up.)

[I’ve written on ROT on “Non-Traditional Casting”; see my post on 20 December 2009.  ~Rick]

But as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.

Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”

In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”

The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.

“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”

[Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, wrote “The Method – a Review,” posted on ROT on 12 March 2022, on Butler’s book.  ~Rick]

Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York [Edward IV (Richard III’s predecessor) and the Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII, Richard’s successor)], and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.” 

[Cost of Living by Martyna Majok premièred in 2016 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  Produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club, it ran Off-Broadway at New York City Center from 2017 to 2018, winning the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.  In addition to winning the Pulitzer, the play was also nominated for the 2018 Outer Critics Circle Award.

[Mozgala won the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for his performance as John, a brilliant and witty doctoral student, and was nominated for the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle Awards.  He’s expected to move with the production for his Broadway debut when Cost of Living opens at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 3 October.]

“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.

“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”

Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.

“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.”

[The casting decisions made by the three Shakespearean directors—Gregory Doran at the RSC, Antoni Cimolino at the Stratford Festival, and Robert O’Hara for Shakespeare in the Park—touch on non-traditional casting, but the emphasis on literalism and authenticity looks as if it impedes the broader access that non-traditional casting is supposed to afford directors, producers, and actors.

[“Non-traditional casting” is the Actors’ Equity name for its policy of encouraging producers and directors to consider women, minorities, and the handicapped for roles that don’t specifically require them, but also don’t specifically exclude them.  The idea is to give underrepresented actors chances at roles they might not otherwise get.

[But if only a Jewish actor can play Leonard Bernstein—one of the complaints leveled against Bradley Cooper and Maestro—or only a disabled one can be cast as Richard III or Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie, then part of the rationale for non-traditional casting is lost.

[The casting choices the directors made, as Marc Tracy observes, are each “a different approach” with respect to non-traditional casting.  Placing Colm Feore in the role of the last Plantagenet king is traditional casting.  He’s a white male actor with no disability.  (His and Cimolino’s interpretation of Richard’s disability may be less traditional, based, as it is on the examination of the king’s recently-discovered remains, but it’s not unknown, even before 2012.)

[Casting Danai Gurira in the part at the Delacorte is a classic non-trad choice: she’s African American and female, not the conventional choice, though she “acted” Richard’s disability.  Director O’Hara engaged in color-blind and gender-blind casting for the title character in his production; this depends for its success on the talent of the actors and the receptiveness of the spectator to the world of the play established by the production.  This kind of casting can add a wonderful new dimension to a production, as well as provide a terrific performance that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.  

[The choice of Arthur Hughes at RSC, though, is in the realm of the new drive for literalness and authenticity in casting.  Now, I don’t actually know how Doran ended up putting Hughes, an actor with a disability, into the role of Richard—he may have selected Hughes from the pool of candidates because he was the best choice for the production or he may even have developed the production of Richard III around Hughes in a part he felt the actor was destined to play—but if the director went into the casting process with a litmus test, he eliminated actors the same way earlier directors did when they dismissed disabled actors or other non-traditional choices.

[Now, don’t misunderstand me: I understand and applaud the impulse to cast disabled actors, trans actors, Jewish and Muslim actors, and others as disabled, trans, Jewish, or Muslim characters.  At the same time, though, I understand F. Murray Abraham when he points out, “Once we impose any kind of control over [casting], it’s no longer free.” 

[There’s an inherent conflict, perhaps irreconcilable, between non-traditional casting and “color-conscious” casting.  “Acting, after all,” asserts Tracy, “is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.”  I trained as an actor, and I believe that, too.

[Maybe the friction between the two views on casting will eventually be worked out and some equitable path through the thicket will be found.  But maybe not, and those in the casting business who are proponents of an open non-trad system, and those who advocate a color-, gender-, and ability-conscious system will always clash.

[The first practice results in actors like Robert David Hall, a double-amputee who played the medical examiner on TV’s CSI (2000-2015), and the late Clark Middleton, afflicted with crippling juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, who played recurring roles on Law and Order (1997-2000) and The Blacklist (2014-2020).  The second gives us performances like Cole Sibus (Stumptown) and Chris Burke (Life Goes On), actors with Down syndrome who both played characters with the condition on TV; Gregg Mozgala as John, a character with cerebral palsy, in Cost of Living; and Madison Ferris, who suffers from muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair, as Laura, a disabled character, in Glass Menagerie.

[Marc Tracy is a reporter on the Culture desk of the New York Times.  He covers debates over representation, appropriation, and politics in the arts.]

Sex—And Gender—On Stage

[Sex on stage is one of the most difficult matters for actors to handle.  And it’s not just nudity and making love that actors have to encounter in some performances.  There’s also the issue of men playing women and vice versa.  Below are two articles that treat each of these acting problems.  First is a first-hand look at the work of some top-flight male actors who presented a classic repertory of two Shakespeare plays on Broadway in which, as in Elizabethan times, the female characters were portrayed by male actors in drag.  In 2013, Mark Rylance and a company of actors from Shakespeare’s Globe in London brought productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre for a limited run (10 November-16 February).  The repertory was a sensation on the Great White Way that season.  The article was originally published in Playbill magazine of December 2013.

[In the second article, an actress relates how she negotiated two explicit sex scenes in the Washington Rogues’ production of Alexandra Petri’s The Campsite Rule at the Anacostia Playhouse in Washington, D.C.  The play ran from 23 July to 16 April 2014.  This article was published originally in the Washington Post Magazine on 26 October 2014.]

“BOYS WILL BE GIRLS”

by Melissa Rose Bernardo

Mark Rylance, Samuel Barnett, and Paul Chahidi on the waxing, wigs, and corsets of Shakespeare’s leading ladies.

You may know Shakespeare. You attend Shakespeare in the Park every summer. You may even have a Shakespeare app on your phone (guilty!). But you haven’t really seen Shakespeare until you’ve seen the double bill — Twelfth Night and Richard III — running in rep at the Belasco Theatre. The critical smash hits — imported from Shakespeare’s Globe in London — rely on Elizabethan-era conventions: Candlelight; bare scenery; live music on such instruments as the hurdy gurdy; and actors — including two-time Tony winner Mark Rylance (Jerusalem, Boeing-Boeing), Samuel Barnett (The History Boys) and Paul Chahidi — in the female roles . . . just as it would have been in the Bard’s day. Rylance stars as the mutilated Richard III, then as the lovestruck Olivia in Twelfth Night; Barnett plays hard-hearted Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, and Viola, who disguises herself as Cesario in Twelfth Night; Chahidi doubles as the eventually-beheaded Hastings and the sleazy Tyrrell in Richard III, then plays saucy servant Maria in Twelfth Night. These leading men — er, women — gave us the dish on their roles (“There’s a lot of my mother in Olivia,” said Rylance), and we discovered the following surprising facts about these women and the men who play them.

Shakespeare can be intimidating for actors too.
Before joining this production at the Globe in 2012 — where he played Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian — Barnett had no real experience with the Bard. “I’d done a bit at drama school, but that was years ago. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing with it, and therefore I didn’t enjoy it,” he confessed. “And I’d auditioned at the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] when I’d gotten out of drama school about five times, never gotten anywhere. . . [.] So there was a huge part of me going, ‘Just don’t, you won’t get the roles because you’re no good at Shakespeare.’”

Shakespeare can also be painful. Very painful.
“In our first production, where Eddie Redmayne was Viola,” recalled Chahidi of a 2002 Twelfth Night with Rylance, “I went to the waxing parlor with Eddie. We were sent to some backstreet waxing parlor — I don’t think they’d ever had men there. We went in thinking, ‘How bad could this be?’ We went into adjacent rooms — the walls were paper-thin — and all you could hear were our screams.”

They’re not playing women, per se.
“With Queen Elizabeth, she’s royalty. So I will play the status, rather than being a woman,” explained Barnett. “I try to play the emotional reality and I’ve sort of let the costumes, the wigs and the audience’s imagination take care of the rest.”

Chahidi remembered first tackling Maria a decade ago: “We did research, how women of that period might move. We experimented with our voices. It got quite scientific! We went through all these contortions, we had all these worries, and I came back to square one and realized: All I needed to do was play the character truthfully. And it just so happened to be a woman.”

Not everything you see is original practice.
“The dressing on stage was not something the Elizabethans did,” admitted Rylance of the pre­show routine where the actors transform themselves in view of the audience. “But at the Globe we said, ‘We’re spending all this money and all this detail on these clothes . . . [.]’ We found that it confirmed the atmosphere that we want — everyone being in the same room.” In Twelfth Night, the auditorium, Rylance explained, becomes “part of Illyria.”

It’s not costumes; it’s couture.
Said Rylance of designer Jenny Tiramani: “She’ll show the actors what the options are, so you work together — like if you were a really wealthy person, if you were having a fashion designer making you dresses. And the corsets and the detail and the jewelry — the exquisite nature of the clothing, for me, has a resonance of the exquisite nature of the language.”

Those dresses are built for class, not for comfort.
“The corset restricts your breathing. The farthingale — the hoop bit that goes underneath the skirt — restricts how far you can step out,” explained Barnett of his regal Queen Elizabeth regalia. “In fact, as Elizabeth I wear two corsets! I am pinned into everything I wear. Sometimes I am cut out of my costume.”

Paul Chahidi’s awe-inspiring cleavage is the envy of his male costars.
“Women point . . . and ask, ‘How do you do it?’ Anyone in a corset this tight will have magnificent cleavage!” said Chahidi, emphasizing that it is “all natural!” (“Lest anyone think I’m doing something that the Elizabethans didn’t do,” he added.) “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but there is a tension and rivalry between me and Mark. He is maybe a little self-conscious about the size of his cleavage.”

Rylance conceded that Chahidi’s décolletage is “rather spectacular,” likening it to “a deep river valley.” But, he reminded us, the role of Olivia demands a conservative, non–cleavage-baring black gown: “I’m much more discreet and in mourning. My dress comes right up to my neck. Otherwise I would win hands down.”

*  *  *  *

 “SEX PARTS: AN ACTOR’S EDUCATION IN ONSTAGE NUDITY”

by Rachel Manteuffel

I’ve been a stage actor for 10 years, but this summer was the first time I’ve ever really considered taking a role with two explicit sex scenes and nudity. Despite my apprehensions — how my body would look, how the role would change the way people perceive me, in theater and in real life — my biggest concern was the potential for lameness. Sex delivered badly onstage is just as depressing as sex done badly in real life, exponentiated by the presence of an audience.

I really wanted the part, the lead in a sexy comedic romance between two brainy people more comfortable quipping than feeling, just like everyone I know. The premise was that a woman at her sixth college reunion starts up a relationship with a virginal 18-year-old freshman, and awkwardness ensues. It was called “The Campsite Rule,” after columnist Dan Savage’s advice for older or more experienced persons in sexual relationships with mentees: Leave them better than you found them.

It was hilarious and new, produced by the Washington Rogues and written by my friend and Post colleague Alexandra Petri — stuff no one else is saying about young people’s relationships. And it was wicked hot. When we did a test reading for an audience, the producer noticed couples snuggling closer as the sex scene progressed, even though we were just standing there, fully clothed, reading from scripts.

The play contains stage directions such as: She puts the condom on him. Good luck staging this.”

As with that stage direction, every script is a challenge, and every production, an answer to it. Theater is about effective illusion. There are hundreds of ways of staging the application of a condom without being pornographic — heck, the whole scene could take place in pitch dark — but a lot of those solutions will vaguely disappoint the audience, who will conclude we couldn’t figure out how to fake it cleverly, or we didn’t have the courage to go further with it.

But nudity isn’t faked. That’s the person’s body . Mine, in this case.

So when the director, Megan Behm, asked me what I’d be comfortable with, I didn’t want to be the limiting factor, the one who wasn’t willing to go all out — the reason the scene would ring false. Megan said that the show would be funny and fun, not exploitative; that she wouldn’t let me look stupid or slutty — so I told her I’d trust her and would do anything the show needed. I could still chicken out, but it would be that: chickening out.

I wanted this role, for all the reasons above, and one more: I am interested in exploring where funny and sexy intersect. In our culture, women’s sexuality doesn’t tend to be funny. Women’s bodies are almost never a punchline the way men’s can be. For better or worse, there is a cultural seriousness to female nudity. And when women act sexy, at best they are setups for punchlines: Meg Ryan’s extended fauxgasm in “When Harry Met Sally” wasn’t the joke; it was the tension-building prelude . “I’ll have what she’s having” was the joke.

What’s more, things generally aren’t funny and sexy simultaneously, as if those two parts of the brain can’t fire together. I was hoping that this show — written by, directed by and featuring funny women — would be able to bridge that gap.

Megan had never directed a sex scene , but she was an experienced fight choreographer, which she assured us was the same thing. Matthew Sparacino, my younger scene partner, was a stranger to me until I started wearing only underpants in his presence and we simulated — and coordinated — cunnilingus and boinking.

In Shakespeare, comic fight scenes are punctuated with dialogue, while tragic fight scenes are wordless. Our show was like that, but the fisticuffs were connubial. There were two sex scenes, one long and slapstick, with dialogue built around each stage of the process in a dorm room’s twin bed; for much of it I was standing in my undies with my dress caught over my head as I frantically struggled to remove it.

For the bit to remain funny, Megan discovered that the dress had to stay on enough to cover my breasts. It had to stay there long enough for the audience to realize its getting stuck wasn’t a technical mistake (live theater!), but if I ever pulled it all the way up, the sudden emergence of my parts would distract from the funny dialogue.

Which was why we ended up killing the nudity entirely. A naked actor is all the story the audience can process for some time. If you’re not convinced, try it at home.

So: I didn’t have to show my breasts, but it wasn’t because I was lame. Later, I was topless, though, beneath that flimsy, shifting sheet, which left a frisson of danger. But that scene was so carefully choreographed I felt safe, safe enough to pursue the strange planned spontaneity good theater can have.

I felt so safe that one night I turned early — my line was “Don’t look at me like you’ve never heard of brunch” — and flashed the audience, in spite of our hours of careful rehearsal and all my neurotic worries.

Predictably, the audience didn’t laugh, but in a weird way, my body did get to be the punchline — not for the people in the seats, but later, for me and everyone else involved in the effort to make that not happen. Art.

The other sex scene was not supposed to be funny at all, and, just as in Shakespeare, there wasn’t any dialogue. The script left the choreography entirely in the hands of the director and cast. Because Alexandra is diabolical, the stage direction said only that “something sexlike happens and it is actually sexy.”

Here are some more things I learned:

1. Female friends will come up to you after the show, delighted and congratulatory, to tell you what they saw. “Nice abs!” one said. “I caught some side boob!” observed another. “I saw you have cellulite, and it made me so happy,” said a third. I’ve decided that is a compliment.

2. Male friends will say, “Nice job,” with lots of eye contact.

3. Nudity for the entertainment of a crowd is still a decision with moral implications. I asked a friend if my going topless in this show would make her lose any respect for me. “Well,” she said, “is it really, really necessary for the story?” (That means yes.)

4. In interviews, movie stars say that sex scenes are too awkward, with too many other people around, doing their jobs, to be actually hot. Matthew was never distracted or creepy in the slightest, but, yes, it did get hot sometimes. In rehearsal, when we would do something new, I would sometimes think: Oh, he does that in real life, and that’s what it looks like when he does it. It is professionally necessary that neither of you ever acknowledge any actual real-life hotness in real time. The professional way to disclose this is to write a magazine article about it months later.

5. Nightly rehearsals are intense and, thus, wildly accelerate the pace of normal relationship development. Matthew and I got weirdly comfortable with each others’ bodies. Once, as we were listening to directions, he rested his head on my thigh. I haven’t been 15 years married to anyone, but I think that’s what it would be like. At one point, during a kiss, he burped in my mouth.

6. The dedicated actor is at work 24-7. The world is one’s studio. One might, for example, contrive to experimentally place oneself in an intimate circumstance in real life that approximates an act one will be performing onstage, noting how it happens in real life and using that information. I should have mentioned my handy research partner in the program under “special thanks.”

7. The audience — friends and colleagues, family members and even strangers — were generally much cooler about the show’s content than I imagined. Except one commenter on the discount ticket Web site Goldstar who grumped “Advertised nudity is a lie.” I hope this essay has been especially helpful for him.

[Rachel Manteuffel is an editorial aide at the Washington Post.]