Erik Patterson Handjob / The Echo Theater Company, performing at Atwater Village Theater, Los Angeles / the performance I attended was on Sunday, September 9, 2019

actually touching

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erik Patterson Handjob / The Echo Theater Company, performing at Atwater Village Theater, Los Angeles / the performance I attended was on Sunday, September 9, 2019

 

While Erik Patterson’s new play, performed the other afternoon at the Echo Theater Company’s venue at Atwater Village Theater in Los Angeles, is not precisely a major theatrical masterwork, it is, nonetheless, certainly an intriguing drama, which will allow you to leave the theater with a great many questions about gay sex, sexual exploitations, sexual abusiveness, racial identity, and the white community’s inability to perceive racial concerns—as well as what writer’s do to individuals in involving them into their literary “plots.” There’s lots to chew on here, and many issues that simply cannot be answered by either the author or his audience.

      First of all, the play itself seeks out the limits of sexual taboos in theater. Certainly, we’ve seen nudity in the theater numerous times in the past decades, and audiences have perhaps grown rather more sophisticated than the early days when this kind of theater might simply have been closed down—just as were numerous art exhibits, performance pieces, films, and other art works because of their depictions of nudity, let alone, as in the case, gay nudity. We can breathe a little more openly, and none of the audience members of this production, male or female, gay or family groups (no children that I could perceive) hardly blinked an eye when the major events of this production occurred, although many of the audience members, as I was, might have been mildly titillated.

     After all, the major premise itself is a slightly kinky one: a handsome and well-modeled black man offers himself up to his basically gay clientele as a “shirtless cleaner.” A self-proclaimed heterosexual man, Eddie (Michael Rishawn) will come and clean your house while, having whipped off his shirt, he allows his customers to simply gaze upon him. Given his well-developed torso, he is, indeed, something to behold; but one has to question what any of his customers get out of the encounter. Even at age 72, I might wonder what pleasure there is at observing a beautiful man without being able to touch him or at least fully communicate with him. But Patterson’s major figure, Keith (Steven Culp), a playwright—or as he describes it, a writer of dialogues—basically doesn’t seem to mind his passive state. After all, he lives surrounded by dozens of books, many of which he has not yet read; and he cannot reach out, it appears, to really discover why this beautiful being is selling himself into this most strange situation. What is Eddie really doing in the act of allowing himself to be paid by the gay gaze?

     The problem with Keith is, that despite his fascination with the young man, he seldom asks questions, and when he does it is most just an interest in furthering his “studies” of such a bine, without really probing the man/boy behind them.

     Obviously, that is also the problem of the play, which Patterson makes clear by embedding yet another play within his own, this created by Keith, based on his not terribly profound knowledge of his subject. In this “play” version (and “play” is a good term here, since it is not simply a theatrical event, but a playing with/and a playing out of his supposed encounters with his shirtless cleaner).

    In Keith’s play, another shirtless cleaner, Bradley (Ryan Nealy)—in this case a white boy—hires himself out for the same tasks, in the same set, to Kevin (Stephen Guarino), but is willing to go a bit further than Eddie for another $40 dollars. He is not only willing to drop his drawers, for an additional $40 dollars will allow Kevin to give him a hand-job as long as his lips don’t touch his cock.

     The scene where he undresses and lies on the bed with a full erection (from my vantage point in the audience I couldn’t quite determine whether his erect cock was an appendage or real, but given the argument of the play, we should presume that the actor actually gave us the full monty; although, I later read it was a prosthetic device. But a bit like Eddie, the “real” was simply too much for him, particularly when the actor playing Kevin actually takes out his own penis (obviously the real thing) to masturbate as he gives pleasure to the young man.

     Bradley, suddenly, mid-coitus so to speak, balks, shout out the Kevin’s action awa not in the script, and refusing, accordingly, to continue the sexual act. The director, black feminist Susan (Tamara Graham) and her assistant, Kate (Gloria Ines) immediately enter the scene to try to convince him that Kevin’s impulsive act was justified, and to remind the actor that, after all, as they had argued in rehearsals, it was important for the play-goers to see two gay men actually “touch” one another. The playwright, Keith also appears to justify his sexual depiction of their encounters, particularly, he argues (some ingeniously) given that our culture is perfectly willing to witness hundreds of scenes of gun murders without being able to accept the action of two men attempting a sexual act before the public eye.

     The recalcitrant actor, now dressed in a robe, continues to refuse the “hand-job,” forcing us, ultimately, as in a Wagnerian opera to experience the grand, but rather paltry, sexual act as “coitus interruptus.”

    In the last scene of the play, Eddie, still hired by Keith as the “shirtless cleaner,” has now apparently seen Keith’s play and is angrily appalled by its use of his own life story. There are several issues at work in this last scene: one, happening earlier in the play, is that at a certain point when he as agreeably cleaning with smiling approval of his sexual admirer’s gaze, Keith attempted to grope him. When Eddie was offended, Keith immediately apologized and withdrew. Eddie, it is clear, has not been able to forget the incident, and now reminds Keith of his action.

     This might have been a kind of #MeToo moment, except that in a world wherein we finally realize that Eddie has been working as a kind of prostitute all along, performing in a “don’t touch me world” in which he is encouraging just that, it is, if nothing else, rather hypocritical if he were to claim abuse of the very act he is depending on his money. How can a man whose clientele includes mostly gay men who long for his body not perceive him as promising their sexual involvement? Is it all simply a game that is not insignificantly about power and beauty? And, in this case, in fact, there has actually been no “real” sexual abuse, but simply a response from what his audience cannot but perceive as a sexual come-on. What is truly happening here when Eddie suggest that he will reveal Keith’s action on Facebook and other sources as being a sexual abuser? Who might be described as the real abuser?

     In fact, Eddie has not lost any sexual innocence, but rather has been denied his own identity. Keith does not truly see him as black and has hired a white actor to play him, insisting, like so many stupid liberal white before him that he sees Eddie not as a black man but simply as a human being. But, of course, Eddie is most definitely black, and the fact that Keith has used him as a character in a play, replete with many quotes that have come from his own mouth, has wiped away his true existence. Playing with the playwright, Eddie presents him several alternatives of himself—none of them the playwright might have imagined, and perhaps none of them true: he is a microbiologist or a student at Julliard studying playwrighting. Does it matter that he is truly, perhaps, just a prostitute, selling his torso to older gay men?

     Yes, it does matter. Both have helped to destroy each other’s lives, when if they might simply have unclothed themselves and laid down in a bed, it would have resolved everything. This, ultimately, is a play of sexual frustration, of people who can’t comprehend that there’s imply nothing wrong with loving and touching one another, black or white. Keith has no power other than his checkbook, and Eddie has no sexual discord other than that which lies behind his highly defined torso. Both may be destroyed by the sexual limitations of the society at large; but why, we must ask? Neither have any power in their worlds, whereas, both might have enjoyed their secret empowerment in bed.

      The hand-job should have been completed, even if it isn’t the ultimate of sexual pleasure. And yes, give the other guy of moment of pleasure as well. Why are we rejecting pleasure and embracing the guns that assure us of a Wagnerian death? We don’t need to die to experience love, do we? Are we all perverts for seeking the pleasure of human flesh?

      What is the difference between sexual interchange and abuse? What is the difference between liberal values of racial differences and the inability to perceive what being black, or any other color means in a basically all-white world of power?

      Living in Los Angeles, I don’t have those answers, since I do not live in a dominant white world. Nor did I as a young gay man in New York City. Was I an abuser in a world in which, to me—as an attractive young male—everyone I met seemed to be gay? No one ever told me to stop!

No one every once said, you’re abusing me by hugging, kissing, and touching my cock! And certainly, I never once felt than anyone who came on to me as a sexual abuser, even the sometimes older men who loved to gaze at my youth.

      What has changed? Something has shifted, it spears to me, as we have grown into an increasingly frightened world, where we are now afraid of dealing with one another’s bodies. Perhaps in hindsight, I might have thought as myself as desecrated. I never once felt that, only enjoyment for being a young who equally took pleasure in others as they did in me. Maybe we are all to hardened—and I am not at all talking about intentional and serial abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, the monsters of sexual abuse—to even explore our own sexualities. Poor Eddie, working as a kind of male prostitute who didn’t comprehend that he had already given up his identity, or perhaps, could not even accept his own sexual identity.

     Patterson suggests than in the play with this play, there is a brutal fight between the confused sexual being and the one seemingly accosting him. That is a terrible possibility, but perhaps a better one than the horrible outing Eddie proposes on Twitter and Facebook, the social communities we have created to keep people from being who they might truly be. Maybe actually touching might be a better solution.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2019

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2019).