The Naked Playwrights

A much-expanded version of The Erotica Project is now being published in paperback (200 pages, $14.95) by Cleis Press in San Francisco, best known as a publisher of books about sex and sexuality by authors ranging from Annie Sprinkle to Gore Vidal. It's a collection of 75 short, sometimes very short, monologues, evenly split between Slugocki's and Wilson's writing. They're told by a variety of characters, ranging from adolescents discovering the orgasm to mature wives discovering their husbands with younger women; from junkies to college girls, groupies, a woman with scoliosis, a few males. The tone is sometimes poetic and romantic ("Feed me fresh figs from your garden, keep me golden, burnish me with your breath"), sometimes dreamy and sometimes flat-out smutty, with titles like "Cock in Your Mouth" and "Whack Me Off" and some fairly hardcore scenes like "...she's got the drummer in her mouth, sucking on his doglike cock, and the lead singer is fucking her in the ass, and the manager is eating her pussy. And Tommy G, Master of Ceremonies, is just laughing away."

Oh, and there's a bunch of those nude photographs of the co-authors, in itself a rare, brave and even political act considering that Slugocki is 42 years old and Wilson 36.

Slugocki instigated the project. A playwright and producer who's done a lot of work for stage (Public Theater, Circle in the Square, etc.), tv and NPR, she wrote her first erotica in 1995, she tells me, "basically when my 11-and-a-half-year marriage ended. It was a very different proposition, being married. For me, the whole thing of sexual expression had become quite domesticated. You know, wash the dishes, have sex with your husband... I didn't question that. It was part of the contract. Which is not to say that it was unpleasant. It didn't cross my mind to examine it at all." Single again, she found herself pondering issues like the title of one of her pieces: "The Etiquette of One-Night Stands."

"I remember going out on a first date?I was working at P.S. 122 at the time?and this woman that I worked with was like, 'Oh girlfriend, you have your condom?' And I said, 'No, I don't.' I didn't remember ever buying one in my life. I'm in my late 30s at this point, not a kid. I said, 'Well, it's the man's job to have a condom.' And she said, 'No, it's not.' I went to Wholesale Liquidators and picked myself up a couple of condoms," she laughs.

Nothing much in her background would be considered preparation for a career in smut. She grew up in the Midwest, "the eldest of six children, Polish household, very ethnic, very Catholic. Went to Catholic grade school. I was, of course, traumatized by all that." Coming of age in the Midwest in the 70s, "the double standard practically could strangle you... If you were a boy, you were encouraged to have as many sexual partners as possible. But if you were a girl, you could really get yourself a reputation, and that could do some damage."

Did she have a reputation?

"I had a bit of a reputation," she smiles, "although I had friends who had more of a reputation. I suppose I was a bad girl, but not as bad as some of my friends."

Asked about the kind of literary erotica she found herself writing in the mid-90s, she replies, "I was really tired of all the pornography I was seeing on the newsstands. I thought it was such a one-dimensional way of looking at women's sexuality. It's not that I really mind pornography so much. I really believe in freedom of speech and expression. It just seemed as if women were so objectified. So, I thought, what if you were to look at women's sexuality, not woman as object, but woman as a person... Sort of what gay people did with the word 'queer.' It was a very pejorative term and they took that and made it a term of empowerment... I so admired that. So, I thought, what if I were to do the same thing with women and their sexuality, which has been so objectified in porn? What if instead of as a means to objectify women, that the expression of that sexuality became a means to empower women?"

In 1997, WBAI produced a half-hour radio dramatization of two Slugocki stories, read by actress and occasional New York Press contributor Christen Clifford. Slugocki expanded that into a series, directed by John Gould-Rubin, with Wilson joining her as coauthor. The staged performances developed out of the radio series.

Wilson is an award-winning playwright (Hurricane, Cross-Dressing in the Depression) and screenwriter, and teaches both at Duke. Her background is effectively the opposite of Slugocki's: she grew up in the hippie, free-love San Francisco of the 60s and 70s.

"I'm the child of two English professors," she tells me. "My father's boss was a lesbian and my godfather was one of the first AIDS cases... I was raised in a very open sexual environment. There were few taboos. We grew up watching parents in hot tubs, wife-swapping and so on."

So if Slugocki is in some way rebelling against her Catholic upbringing...?

"I should be a right-wing Republican who never talks about sex," Wilson replies. "Then I went to Smith College in 1982 and was struck by a very different environment, which was 80s goddess-worship feminism. In and out of the classroom, I felt that I was being told that the enemy was men, that intercourse was essentially rape, and it was implied, if not said sometimes, that you couldn't be a true feminist unless you were a lesbian. This in fact was a very repressed environment... My writing about sex is more a reaction to that environment. It made me more like, 'I like men! I love men and I'm a feminist and I see nothing wrong with that.'"

This may explain why Wilson's the more overtly politically incorrect of the two writers. Her "Cock in Your Mouth," for example, begins with a man telling the female narrator that he'd like to see her that way. Instead of a standard feminist's outraged response, the piece suggests that the remark was the foundation of a relationship?that the woman liked being talked to that way. One of the most commented-on pieces in the show was her "Intern," in which a Monica figure brags about wearing kneepads to the office and going down on the boss, or any other man she chooses. Panning the show in The New York Times, reviewer Anita Gates referred to "Intern" as its "low point."

Slugocki and Wilson's posing nude for the p.r. helped sell out HERE and Joe's Pub, though unsurprisingly they caught some heat for it, which Slugocki characterizes as "Arthur Miller never posed nude." (Thank god.) Her response? "I don't care. It did its job. It was supposed to get the project notoriety and attention, and it did."

Critical response was a mix of some very positive reactions and some oh-my-word tongue-clucking.

"It was seen as being very risque. We weren't being good feminists by saying we just want to get fucked sometimes," Slugocki recalls. The Times' Gates huffed and scolded like a cartoon biddy, comparing The Erotica Project to a "truly vulgar" cabaret revue she'd once unwittingly seen in Paris and moaning about the "terrible feeling of being trapped at a pornography display."

"Certainly a lot of the material is not what would be considered politically correct," Slugocki admits, "which is what I love about it, because that gets to be very tiring as well, to try to stay in the narrow boundaries of political correctness. Earlier on, we had gotten some shit from the Voice?though some writers there were very, very supportive?saying there were some people who felt it should be more inclusive. Why are you limiting it only to heterosexual women? Why aren't you embracing the rainbow of black, Latino, gay? Our response was that is not who we are. We are white, heterosexual women. It seemed silly for the sake of political correctness not to embrace that. I also feel that the gay population had been very successful in terms of carving out a niche for themselves, in terms of expressing their sexuality, getting their books of erotica out, magazines and so forth. I felt like they're doing a great job on their own. It didn't seem like they needed The Erotica Project; they were doing a great job on their own."

Wilson says she hopes readers of the book "are compelled to write their own erotica... I think a lot of people want to, and I think it's very freeing to do so."

In addition to the book, a website, www.theeroticaproject.com, is due up any day. The site will offer for sale a CD spinoff from The Erotica Project called Sex at 19. Meanwhile, producers are raising money for a commercial Off-Broadway run of the show.

Slugocki's latest play, The Witches' Tryptich, is ending its run in the Village this week, and she's written a PBS documentary series, The Great Days of Witchcraft, for which producers are also raising funds. A film Wilson adapted from a Mary Gaitskill story will begin shooting in the spring. She just completed another script for Forensics Films, "a film that takes place in Paris. About an exhibitionist little girl and a voyeuristic man who develop a relationship." And her play The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, previously performed in San Francisco, will open in New York at LAByrinth Theater in March.