Nudity as speech: ‘Arguendo’ in New York

The First Amendment may be the most frequently reinterpreted and refined amendment in the U.S. Constitution. In its 200-plus years it has been broadened from guaranteeing freedom of speech to much broader forms of expression, like nude dancing. Yet I’ll wager that it’s never received the kind of uproarious treatment that the fearless actors of the Elevator Repair Service are currently giving it.

This innovative New York company thrives on bringing text to theatrical life in improbable and unique ways. Gatz, for example— a seven-hour word-for-word dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby— was a sell-out in New York in 2006 and has since toured the world. Subsequently, the Elevator Repair folks dramatized a chapter of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and created a version of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises called The Select.

Meanwhile, no one knew that Elevator’s unconventional founder, John Collins, has harbored a lifelong fascination with Supreme Court arguments. (“I wanted to be a lawyer in college before I came to my senses and went into theater,” he has remarked.)

Indiana’s G-string law

While researching copyright law for his production of Gatz, Collins found that anyone could download oral arguments debated before the Supreme Court. To his surprise, he says he found them both humorous and inherently theatrical, and he started collecting them for recreational reading.

That’s when he stumbled on Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc., a landmark 1991 Supreme Court decision on the government’s ability to forbid certain kinds of expressive conduct ”“ in this particular case, of all things, nude dancing. The case began when two South Bend nightclubs sued the state of Indiana for requiring their dancers to wear g-strings and pasties. The case eventually landed before the Supreme Court as a First Amendment issue.

You might wonder how a legal argument— even about nude dancing— could provide any kind of theatrical entertainment. But that’s just the kind of challenge that Collins and his process-oriented actors relish.

With the help of one of the Elevator troupe’s board members (a law professor), they pored through volumes of legal material related to the Barnes case. Arguendo, as they call their theatrical evening (it’s a Latin legal term meaning “for the sake of argument”), was performed at Philadelphia’s Live Arts Festival in September 2012 in an early three-character incarnation. Now it has morphed into a full-blown production at New York’s Public Theater.

Judges on wheels

Utilizing five actors as well as a huge upstage screen, Arguendo dramatizes the argument before the Supreme Court between Indiana’s Deputy Attorney General Wayne Uhl and Bruce Ennis of the American Civil Liberties Union, a nationally recognized champion of the First Amendment. All the dialogue in Arguendo is taken verbatim from transcripts and legal documents.

With a devilish delight, Collins casts three actors (two men and one woman) who take turns playing the Supreme Court Justices Scalia, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Souter and others. Dressed in black judicial robes, they slouch in their black swivel chairs in exaggerated judicial positions, or swirl their chairs around the podium like bumper cars in an amusement park while the case is being argued.

Legal double-talk

Behind the justices, projected onto the giant upstage screen, we see the voluminous transcription of the Supreme Court argument and Indiana state law— alternately magnified, reduced, distorted, slanted or turned topsy-turvy, reflecting the content and the justices’ responses. If the argument is dry and boring, the text is diminished and the justices creep around the stage in their chairs like crabs.

If the argument “zigzags,” so do the justices’ chairs and the text. If double-talk and redundancy clouds the air, the chairs rock back and forth and the video screen jumps. If the justices’ questioning sidetracks, the chairs slide, and so does the projected print. And so on.

The result is an 80-minute, sidesplitting “Supreme Court absurdist ballet,” if you will, the likes of which you’ve never seen before.

Adults-only car wash?

Rarely does a production offer an equal balance of theatrical entertainment and intellectual stimulation, not to mention zany satire. The Elevator Repair troupe has unearthed such tasty legal minutiae as the Indiana law stipulating: “One cannot leave one’s house and walk down the street naked.”

The justices’ questions can be obscure to the point of the ridiculous. “What about an adults-only car wash?” asks one, in a reductio ad absurdum examination of the meaning of “adult entertainment.” To top it all, Arguendo provides a hilarious interpretation of how the final Supreme Court ruling might have been made, involving a huddle of justices in their swivel chairs playing the child’s game of “rock/paper/scissors.”

At the same time, Arguendo raises some relevant questions pertaining to the meaning of “freedom of expression”: Is nude dancing “speech”? Is nudity “expression”? Is nude dancing “artistic”? How do you define “artistic”? Should the judgment of “artistic merit” be made by the court, the state or the individual? Can nude dancing incite adultery, or prostitution or even rape? And so on.

In case you’re wondering— yes indeed, there is nudity in this provocative production. How it occurs is so surprising and priceless that I’ll leave it to you to discover.♦


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