"Nuda Veritas' at Fringe Festival

Any man who's ever marveled at the incomprehensible, ever-evolving, and self-justifying attitudes and actions of women in relationships could tick off a number of baffling questions that no amount of experience with the fairer sex has yet answered:

Why do women date bad boys who mistreat them?

Why do they suddenly lose interest in their decent husbands?

Why do they initiate 75% of all divorces?

Why do they over-analyze every little thing that we men do?

Could a play entirely about relationships, written by a woman (Melissa James Gibson), and entitled Nuda Veritas ("of all things") finally help answer these eternal conundrums that not even Freud could solve?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. While every artist seeks to arrive at some truth, Gibson's play proves only that art can just as easily obscure it.

Destroying hubby's shirts

For 50 minutes on stage, not one but four women at least pose all the right questions in their quest to get at "the naked truth." Each takes a microphone in hand— as another cast member portrays her spouse or lover— and, in spoken word poetry, declaims problems that plague the end of every relationship.

"One day he didn't come home, and that same day I didn't go looking for him," Christie Parker shrugs. Laurie Norton relates a couple's history: "In February we climbed each other instead of the walls, but by March we have become tiresome." Charlotte Northeast spins a yarn about destroying her husband's shirts when his indulgences in haberdashery began to frustrate their relationship. Melissa Lynch declaims a desire that left her feeling "complicated things about his mind and uncomplicated things about his body." Throughout, romance invariably degenerates into habit, boredom and doom.

Unintentional laughter

The play packs plenty about women's lives into fifty minutes, and the outstanding performances prevent Gibson's text from nose-diving into pretentiousness. In a choral repeat about being overwhelmed by thoughts, Norton deadpans, "I thought about my random thoughts in a structured way." Moments like this infuse the text with humor. But mostly, Nuda Veritas unintentionally provoked derisive laughs (from me, at least) at these women's "no fault" attitude toward any relationship with a man who no longer excites them.

As Gibson tells it, a woman's attempts to avoid repeating past mistakes are pointless and, what's more, would only exacerbate her man's confusion. Northeast destroys her husband's shirts not because his dorky habits leave her cold but because her husband never made any clothes for her. Parker complains about a still loving a man who didn't love her the way she loved him, and just figured that "something" was missing.

Ignorance is bliss?

Part of me wants to advise men to go and see this play just for the sheer earnestness in which these women indulge in self-deception. (If anyone can make the dissemination of falsehoods appear sincere, it's four women wearing white.)

But that wouldn't help any man or woman looking to avoid these pitfalls based on what a woman, after the fact, says must have occurred. Thanks to the obfuscations of these four characters, when I left the theater I actually knew less about women than when I entered. Director Natalie Diener, who did a superb job with both the multimedia and the timing, should have hung a sign on the door that read: "When it comes to relationships, watch what a woman does, not what she says."

A lesson from Tennessee Williams

If Gibson boned up on her evolutionary psychology, she might discover that the desires motivating her characters to say one thing and do another are not peripheral neuroses but integral parts of a woman's sexual nature that— like men's aggression and "propensity to rape"— civilized society seeks to suppress. In one moment, when Parker describes her intoxicating desire for a stranger, Gibson almost arrives at this truth.

But these characters fail to grasp the constantly vacillating nature of their biological desire and their concomitant dissatisfaction with men who bore them. Tennessee Williams grasped it in A Streetcar Named Desire, with Blanche Dubois recoiling at the sight of her sister's return in ecstasy to an abusive husband. Blanche can't bear to confront her true sexual nature. That's the truth that's missing from Nuda Veritas.♦


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