When I performed in “The Bacchae” last April I had to wear this tunic under my armor, but there weren’t any pants. They gave me a pair of ‘spankies’ which were flesh-colored underpants to wear over my underpants. When I tried them on, I was dismayed to find that my briefs still stuck out (particularly around the ass portion of the garb) and I figured it would be pretty stupid if I was walking around onstage and people caught a glimpse of my BVD’s when I was kneeling or turning.
So I crammed my underwear inside the spankies, concealing them. This kind of backfired, since nobody really knew I was wearing flesh-covered underwear, during some scenes where I was walking up steps and turning the tunic thing kind of flipped up from the motion and people claimed to have seen my ass.
Yep, that’s right, all the people who went to see the play- my family, my professors, my friends, girlfriend, and two of my piano students along with their mother got a glimpse of what they thought was man-ass.
A solution might have been to wear ill-fitting, poorly-dyed flesh-colored tights, like in the recent film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Kevin Kline as Nick Bottom acted the role of Pyramus. Nobody could mistake the shoddy tights for his actual skin. Of course, that scene was played for laffs…
The Bacchae is a play of divine mystery and requires a certain sense of awe. See the book The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysus by Arthur Evans, for a description of an innovative, transgendered San Francisco production of The Bacchae, that sought to recapture the ancient mystery of the play through queerness and genderfucking, felt to be true to the nature of the ancient Anatolian rites from which the Dionysian dramatic festivals had arisen in the first place.
Kudos to you, Incubus, for your thespian daring. The Bacchae is my personal favorite of all Greek plays. Wish I’d been there to see your butt!