Charlotte Ford's "Bang' at Live Arts Festival

Director Emmanuelle Delpech's penchant for pushing her audience's physical comfort zones has played out in past Live Arts Festivals, when her Madame Douce-Amere spooned yogurt into viewers' mouths or pulled an audience member onstage to brush her hair. Now, she's bringing her sensitive and engrossing physical style— as well as more shared food— as the director of Bang, a show conceived by the Pig Iron veteran Charlotte Ford, who shares the stage with her co-creators Lee Etzold and Sarah Sanford.

The three of them perform a long, enthusiastic song-and-dance medley after flinging off absolutely everything but their wigs.

Granted, each of us inhabits a human body full-time. But if a theater performer— even at the perennially wacky Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festibal"“ hints at baring it all onstage, the mainstream media start salivating like Paul Ryan primping for a date with Ayn Rand.

Collective gasp

Nevertheless, the packed audience for the Saturday matinee performance of Bang seemed unprepared for the nudity. As Sanford's magnificently awkward character, Bar, threw off all of her clothes from the waist down (a long corduroy skirt, tights, sensible brown schoolteacher shoes) in a fit of pique over how ill her wardrobe matched the usual definition of sex appeal, the viewers gave a collective giddy gasp.

"Sickos!" Bar screamed at the audience as she removed her clothes. "Did you come here with your husband for a little T&A? What a modern marriage!"

My husband and I smirked in the dark.

"Who are you?" Bar screeched as she flung her large turquoise panties away. "Why are you here?"

Voice from the womb

The characters named Bar, Gail (Etzold) and Cheyenne (Ford) certainly had no idea how they dropped into the red velvet horseshoe of curtains beneath a lighted sign reading "SEX SHOW." Their deliciously unexpected entrances and brilliantly characterized clowning won the audience immediately.

Geeky Bar was terrified by the implications of the words "sex show"— until she discovered a hand mixer, a small clamp and a bottle of chocolate syrup. Gail gyrated joyfully in her generously tailored "mom jeans," yellow blouse and tall white heels. And free-spirited Cheyenne, in swooping blue pants and flowing hair, began speaking to the audience "from my womb."

Building a flawless rapport with each other and the crowd, the ladies snared a few male watchers for outlandish sexual gags (Cheyenne discovered a tiny stuffed "lioness" in her pants which required feeding and stroking). But the show's real genius took off when Cheyenne darted offstage and then appeared in a surprise video segment, prancing completely naked into the sunshine.

Just another costume

The camera followed Ford as she cavorted in Old City alleys and set the audience puffing afresh by waltzing into a coffee shop full of slack-jawed male customers.

After all the hype about naked bodies, Bang's bare-it-all aesthetic, seconds after shocking us to the core, turned out to be the funniest thing we'd seen all year. The absurdities of Bang didn't lie, as I'd expected, in the characters' unapologetic nakedness, but in our own overwrought reactions to witnessing the human body. Bang lured us, and then left us gasping at the hilarity of our own foolish prurience.

Most refreshing of all was the performers' claim on their own nakedness as just another costume. Rather than letting the viewer dictate the terms on which their bodies were viewed, Etzold, Ford and Sanford fearlessly harnessed their own forms— an act that, for many women, probably feels as alien as capering naked in public.

Through it all, the audience companionably passed that plastic bucket of cheese balls, with a lucky few popping open beer cans distributed by an amorous Gail.

Afterward I asked my husband what he thought of it all.

"Those women were funny and brave," he said.