Let’s dispense with the nitty-gritty. As would be expected, a show entitled Making Porn is replete with full frontal male nudity, explicit sexual content, almost clinically filthy language, and an age limit: 18 and over. Longtime devotees of Ferndale’s gonzo Ringwald Theatre should be neither surprised nor fazed at this news. Nor should any raise an eyebrow at how much more this brazen production has to offer. Director Joe Bailey boasts a long history of touring with this Ronnie Larsen comedy, and it shows in his ability to render the potentially exploitative material almost beside the point, instead coaxing out a smart and savvy web of stories as keenly contemplative as they are starkly hilarious.
The place is San Francisco, the year around 1982, the mood pulsing with panting desire, courtesy of sound designer Ari Zirulnik. Larsen begins by laying out types familiar to most depictions of performance-based industries. There’s young mega-fan naif Ricky (Bailey Boudreau), who hopes to break into male-on-male pornography via established star Ray (Dan Morrison), long past creative hunger and now merely cashing in on old successes. Meanwhile, empty-worded, ruthless producer Arthur (Bailey) would sell his own soul for profit — or, better, someone else’s, like his sainted partner/assistant, Jamie (Richard Payton). Finally, there’s down-on-his-luck Jack (Brenton Herwat), a straight actor who finally finds success in this surprising demographic, while his gullible, daffy wife, Linda (Lisa Melinn), chirps with guilt-compounding approval. Although the timeline hops and skips, the first act covers about a year’s time, during which Ricky, Ray, and Jack angle, negotiate, and reluctantly agree to take part in scenes for Arthur’s films, a few of which are enacted and/or staged with riotous detachment and git-‘er-done brusqueness.
Even if these behind-camera character arcs and scenarios are reminiscent of other works, they don’t feel played out here, thanks to strong material and the reasoned character work that backs it up. The story may be built on acknowledged tropes, but none of those can account for the marvel that is Ricky and Jamie finding each other, which Boudreau and Payton convey with wondrously smitten charm and refreshing candor. The story subversions continue with time, chief among them Linda’s inevitable discovery of Jack’s deceit, Melinn’s acutely outrageous response, and the cattily contentious rapport that evolves between her and Bailey’s deplorable Arthur. Moreover, not only do the characters defy expectations, but changing times also bring dire consequences, as San Francisco becomes the epicenter for a mysterious, deadly gay-male-centered pandemic that viewers will recognize as the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In this light, Morrison’s jaded salability, at first a font of weary deadpan humor, gains beautifully woeful traction as years pass and the business that lined Ray’s pockets takes the lives of men just like him.
But if there’s one surprising thing about such a challenging portrait of hard-core sex work and a global panic that manifested for a long time as homophobia, that would be how whimsically funny it can be, thanks to the rigor of Bailey’s spot-on tone and pacing. No matter how sexy, any business boils down to just that — business as usual — and this is no exception, up to and including a ten-minute intermission whose sole purpose is cleanup. As advertised, there are countless opportunities to ogle, but most come part and parcel with a thoroughly unsexed laissez-faire that climbs to fever pitch under Arthur’s boorishly tactless governance; moreover, carefully orchestrated deployment of upstage nudity and onstage costume changes — with seemingly limitless fetish wear serving as the cornerstone of Boudreau’s throwback costume design — effectively strip the salaciousness from the taboo. Even as a pall falls over the second act, the production still finds opportunities for humor to commingle with unsettling subtlety, in particular an exhibitionist scene in which Herwat’s expressive face speaks louder than the screaming all around him.
This Making Porn makes bank on a juggling act of boundary pushing, wildness, and sidesplitting irreverence that is at once a live peep show, a comic juggernaut, and an affecting chronicle of a key societal shift. The several stories told here in the span of less than two hours owe their effectiveness to Bailey’s easy discord between the artifice of stripping down for the camera and the real, emotional kind of living that proves to be a more vulnerable — yet more fulfilling — form of nakedness.