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When you hear “Porn Minus Porn, ” that is, porn without the sex and all of the naked people, you might think, “Why?” After all, the most deplorable part about porn, okay, other than its gender politics, is the writing. The dialogue always makes one wonder, “Why would anyone bother with anything other than the sex?” I admit that going into this show at Under The Gun Theater, I was less than optimistic about the possibilities of pornography without sex.
In the “Porn Minus Porn” Saturday night series, the Under The Gun Ensemble has been following “Life on Top,” an actual adult script, skipping over the sex to focus on the “rich character and plot development in porn,” as host Ben Bowman dryly puts it. Throughout the staged readings, an audience volunteer sits on the side of the stage and inflates a balloon as sexual tension grows in a scene, releasing the balloon to spiral off in a loud “pfffffffff” each time sex occurs in the script. The deflating balloon is a jewel in the crown that is this performance, sharply turning up the laughter that inherently arrives at these sexless pauses.
The ensemble on stage capitalizes perfectly on the idiotic structures, non-sequiturs and gross clichés that infest porn like bedbugs infest New York City. With lines like, “That girl was looking at you like a taco bar” or “How much lubricant do you really need?”/ “Why limit yourself!!?” it becomes clear that, like most things, when taken slightly out of context (or in this case, when the context/sex is taken out), porn almost becomes poetic, in the same way a pile of trash can become poetic with a black-and-white filter in some haughty Instagram feed.
Don’t think too deeply about what’s being presented here, or else the emptiness of a media so massively imbibed (porn, not Instagram… but still) might ruin the rest of your weekend with a nasty depression. Luckily, a comforting camaraderie develops when the comedians make no effort to disguise their disgust with the script that they’re reading for the first time and the audience realizes they’re laughing with the actors, not at them. (Joy Miller)
Under The Gun Theater, 956 West Newport, (773)270-3440, undertheguntheater.com. $12. Through September 26.
