Physical Exposure

As I type this I should be writing any number of final exam essays, but, alas, I find my priorities are all discombobulated.

In my current show, Some Girl(s), by Neil LaBute, I play the character of Lindsay, a forty something professor at a university in Boston. She, like the other women of the show, have met with a significant ex of theirs, the same man, known only as Guy. Lindsay had an affair with him some years back while he worked as a grad professor and her husband worked as the head of the department. The affair was discovered and Guy disappeared, never calling and vanishing without a trace. She's returned to meet with him due to a phone call out of the blue, and she walks in intending to get him back for what he'd done to her. The only way to even things out remotely, she says, is to hurt his new fiancee the way she had hurt her husband. This involves Guy cheating on his new fiancee with Lindsay again. He protests, but the argument quickly degenerates into a bitter striptease, and Guy is left facing the prospect of being raped for revenge.

I am Lindsay, and getting half-naked onstage is a new thing for me. Weeks of rehearsal went by before I even came close to taking anything revealing off. I would establish the strip portion of the script by taking off my scarf and socks and shoes, but until I had a costume I didn't think my stripping would do any good, since it would take a different amount of time and it needed to be choreographed with a monologue, et cetera et cetera.

Then comes the day where I receive my black lingerie and my costume and I know that I have to and I know I'm going to, but there is still that initial terror of exposing myself to a bunch of people who know me. My peers would be sitting around, staring at me as I slowly pulled article after article of clothing off of my pale, not quite as toned as I would like body. People who I know don't necessarily like me, people who I know would judge me. It was terrifying in a way I'd never really felt before, because regardless of how scared I was and how fearful I got that my bra would slip or my underwear would ride up or my butt was a tiny bit untoned, I was going to be taking off my clothes and crawling across a bed to molest my scene partner. Didn't matter how I felt, I am an actress, and that is what I do.

The bra and underwear are lovely - they fit perfectly and there's no way I can really fall out of the bra, so I'm totally safe onstage, but it's knowing that there are multiple eyes glued to my butt or my chest, looking for an extra scrap of exposed skin, or finding all of my flaws and finding me unattractive because of that. I'm not a naturally sexy person, I don't feel, so taking the note to "be sexy" during a striptease was a challenge beyond challenges. How does one "be sexy" without getting cheesy or looking like a bad porno or something? And I had to be sophisticated sexy - Lindsay, as my director would fondly remind me, is a cougar.

So what did that mean? It was all a matter of at first faking a kind of confidence. I simply had to accept that yes, I was going to be standing on stage in all of my pale, redheaded glory with nothing but a few scraps of classy fabric keeping my dignity from the audience, and I was going to do it several times this week. There's nothing I can do to keep from shivering at least a little, it's effing cold with no clothes on, and the self-conscious nerves can't be fought back completely. However, I use my own nerves to channel into Lindsay. She's not as young as she once was, and is probably a bit concerned to be showing off her body to a man who is still young and fit like he used to be. That's the feeling that I try and share with the audience, not a twenty-something nervous as hell to show her friends her butt and boobs.

The more I do it onstage, however, the easier it becomes. I've received enough praise to boost my ego to the point where I'm much more okay with taking off my clothes. As long as what the audience sees is attractive and powerful and sexy, it doesn't matter how I feel, because I'm sending the right vibe. I was comfortable enough last night to be that sexy cougar in front of both of my parents in the audience and to not worry about what they might think of their daughter removing her clothes in front of dozens of strangers.

There is always that nervous tension about whether I'm going to fall out of my bra (though that is highly, highly unlikely) and whether my underwear is going to ride up and show off a little more than I'd care to be sharing, but that energy can be utilized for the character and her own body-consciousness. And I have more confidence now - there is very little people haven't seen of me, now, so there isn't anything to lose by risking things and exposing myself. Not lewdly, of course, but the risk and danger involved with doing things out of the ordinary for myself gives me more confidence in what I can do as a person and as a performer.

ACTF respondent is coming tonight. Last night was fabulous, let's make tonight even better.