Actor Terrell Tilford is completely irritated with the fact that he keeps getting questioned about performing nude on stage.
“I don’t really understand why,” he said. “Can you explain that to me? It’s not really a big deal.”
The 35-year-old actor, who played Malik Todd on Showtime’s “Soul Food,” is now performing the lead role in “Take Me Out,” the 2003 Tony award-winning play for best drama by Richard Greenberg. The show is running until Oct. 31 at the Brentwood Theatre, the temporary location of the Geffen Playhouse until renovations for the Westwood location are completed next year.
Tilford plays Darren Lemming, a black gay superstar baseball player who comes out of the closet publicly. But what has made the play particularly controversial, next to the subject matter of homosexuality, is the large amount of full-frontal male nudity.
There are a total of three locker-room shower scenes that some critics have felt to be excessive. The second shower scene includes the entire baseball team.
Others feel the nudity is essential to the story’s confrontation of the gay athlete taboo.
“The nudity is justified,” Tilford said. “It’s surfacing Greenberg’s ideas on how people perceive and look at homosexuality and how it also affects certain people in their daily lives when it’s made an issue. It’s what people’s initial threat is.”
Director Randall Arney agrees that nudity is essential to the story. He even paralleled Greenberg’s play to the story of Adam and Eve, as Lemming’s coming out forces his teammates to recognize their own nakedness.
For Tilford, who is an avid art collector and gallery owner, nudity often serves an important purpose in any art, if not just for beauty.
“The human body is a beautiful artistic creation,” Tilford said. “And depending on how artists have used it, it can be something that’s either provocative or thought-provoking or just beautiful.”
But Tilford recognizes that some people are much more sensitive to nudity than others.
“It’s very easy or it’s very difficult for people to contend with nudity. It’s really very natural. I mean, we just take it for granted in many respects because of pornography, because of all the evil, bad sides of it.”
Tilford admits he has heard gasps from the audience during the shower scenes. But Arney insists that even conservative audience members have found the scenes not gratuitous and even instrumental to the show.
Nudity is just part of the play’s straightforward approach to issues of identity and intolerance.
“It doesn’t pull any punches,” Tilford said. “It puts the issues out there and allows people to come up with their own conclusions regarding it.”
And the issues being dealt with on stage at the Brentwood, especially intolerance toward homosexuality, are also those being dealt with currently on the national stage. Directors of the Geffen were well aware that the correct timing for the play would aid discussion of the issues it addresses.
With the upcoming presidential election on Nov. 2 and the World Series currently in play, these issues have become increasingly relevant. And it wasn’t so long ago (Aug. 12) that New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey became the first openly gay American governor.
But the issue of intolerance toward gays goes back much further. Playwright Greenberg was originally inspired to write the play after the contiguous events in 1999 of the coming out of San Diego Padres outfielder Billy Bean and the bigoted remarks of Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker in a Sports Illustrated article.
In tackling pertinent American issues, “Take Me Out” has received high nods from most critics, but some say the play’s message is too ambiguous.
But Tilford believes there is a clear message.
“Baseball is better than democracy,” he joked, “or at least how it’s practiced in this country.”
Arney said the play instead is just complex.
“It’s wonderfully funny and poignant,” he said. “There’s a lot of hope in the play, hope for democracy in America. By the same token, it also points out that there is still intolerance in our country and we have a long way to go, and the play has something to say about respecting each other and respecting each other’s individuality.”
For Arney, simply providing a platform for discussion is important in itself.
“We might be part of that great national conversation that’s going on now,” Arney said. “Just on an individual basis, I hope that we’re making people think and making people feel and making people look around at the people next to them.”
If nothing else, the play has at least caused some of the cast and crew to think differently.
“Somebody in rehearsal once said that America has been called a melting pot,” Arney said. “It’s much less a melting pot and more like a salad, where it takes all types of ingredients to make a salad, and you can toss it and toss it and they don’t lose their individuality, they just become part of the whole salad.”