Hey, Read This: "Sex Parts," My Best Friend's Washington Post Magazine Essay About Stage Boinking

My friend Rachel is the most underrated writer and the most underrated actor in DC.

I was an admirer of Rachel Manteuffel's writing for years before I got to know her, so kindly disregard that she's my best gal when I say unto you that it is imperative you read her essay in today's Washington Post Magazine entitled "Sex Parts." (Not her title, by the way.) It's about her decision to take a role in a play last summer that required her to perform a pair of sex scenes as explicit as I can ever recall seeing on stage–and I've been getting paid to review plays for six or seven years now.

The play was The Campsite Rule, a wicked-smart sex comedy by Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri. Not enough people saw it. There was no WaPo review, for numerous, complicated, and infuriating reasons, though my Washington City Paper colleague Trey Graham gave it an admiring notice, as did most of the theatre websites in town. I badgered my friends to go. I made sure I had my tickets to return on closing night before I plugged the show on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, so confident was I that the local DC contingent of the million people who download that podcast each week would instantly snap up all remaining seats once I told them about this smart, funny, sexy play written by and directed by and starring smart, funny, sexy women. I didn't even mention the explicit sex!

Shows what I know.

Rachel's day job is in the WaPo editorial department, where she regularly deals with big, important Washington types. She's a seriously accomplished journalist outside of Editorial; she won a Livingston Award for this 2012 Washingtonian story about precious objects left at the Vietnam Wall, and she was the first reporter in a city teeming with 'em to point out after the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial opened it 2011 that it misquoted the man.

All of which is to say she has an additional, entirely different set of reservations about sex and/or nudity than a full-time actor might have. Imagine showing up to interview someone at the Department of the Interior about that MLK memorial only to have that person realize 10 minutes into your conversation that they saw your boobs in a play one time. DC is a small town.

Rachel had knocked the play's lead role of Susan–a librarian in her mid-twenties who returns to her college for homecoming weekend and deflowers an 18-year-old freshman–out of the, er, Kennedy Center when she played it in a staged reading at the Page-to-Stage festival in September of last year. Since then, she and I had both hoped she'd have the chance to play it in a full production. There aren't many plays about women as smart and weird and generous as Rachel. Not 2,400 years ago and not now. But Susan was a rich character, containing multitudes (and occasionally, a lucky freshman's penis).  It was a role Rachel desperately wanted and deeply deserved, and to the surprise of nobody who knows her, she played the hell out of it.

But it wasn't easy. The Campsite Rule's candor and insight into sex and relationships and vulnerability and risk was exactly what made it a play worth doing, pun intended. It was also something that cost Rachel a lot of sleep in the months before the show opened. We talked about the what-ifs. What if she were asked to do something she felt was exploitative? What if the actor cast as Lincoln, the sweet kid she has to rescue from his virginity onstage every night, was a jerk?

Neither of those grim possibilities happened, mercifully. Playing Susan might've been the highlight of her performing career, and it delighted me to see her so delighted during the month the play ran. Now The Campsite Rule has given her one more gift, Rachel's terrific essay reflecting on the logistical and aesthetic problems of performing a sex comedy live. I promise you it's the funniest and most insightful thing you'll ever find in in the family-friendly pages of the paper that brought down President Nixon about pretending to bone someone in front of your parents and coworkers and exes and people from your church. Read it. Team Manteuffel Forever.

WaPo Book Review: Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

In tomorrow's Washington Post – the part of it that's already out today, in fact– I review Peter Bebergal's Season of the Witch, a book that actually manages to make the intersection of rock and roll and the Occult seem boring. The Bowie photo is from Nic Roeg's creepy movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, wherein the Thin White Duke plays an alien visiting Earth from a drought-stricken planet.

But other than the skull cap and the contact lenses, that's what he really looked like in 1975 when a 19-year-old Cameron Crowe interviewed him. His raging abuse of cocaine during this period had made him paranoid, and specifically convinced that witches were trying to steal his semen to create a homunculus. According to Bebergal. I regret that I couldn't find space to mention this in my 500-word review. (I don't remember anything about that in the Bowie biography I wrote about in the Dallas Morning News a few years back, but my memory is worse than useless.)

I also lament not being able squeeze in something about Bebergal's discussion of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who argued “that the Satan of his church was not a literal personification of evil, but rather a stand-in for ‘the spirit of discovery, freethinking, and rebelliousness. He told the Los Angeles Times: “'It’s just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.'”

The Good Books: Sex with Strangers and Elmer Gantry, reviewed.

Luigi Sottile and Holly Twyford in Signature Theatre's Sex with Strangers.

Mary Kate Morrissey, Charlie Pollack, and Jessica-Lauren Ball with the ensemble of Elmer Gantry.

This is my last pair of Washington City Paper theatre reviews to be edited by departing managing editor Jonathan L. Fischer, who as I mentioned last week is moving on to become a senior editor at Slate. I'll miss having him edit me every week but I know he'll do great things there. Godspeed, Jon.

WaPo Book Review: One Lucky Bastard: Tales from Tinseltown

"Passion without pressure" is how Roger Moore describes the kissing technique he says in his (second) memoir that Lana Turner taught him in 1956, a century or so before he replaced Sean Connery as 007. Gross. This poor girl. Gross.

Roger Moore was 45 when he made his first debut as James Bond ­ -- older than Sean Connery, who’d played the role in five films before he got fed up and abdicated, then was coaxed back and quit a second time – and approximately 110 by the last the last of his seven appearances as 007 12 years later. On the DVD extras for Live and Let Die, his 1973 debut as the superspy he and no one else refers to as “Jimmy” Bond, Moore tellingly bemoans the “30 minutes of daily swimming” he endured to develop the not-particularly-athletic physique he displays in the movie. In the three Bonds he made in the 80s, he rarely looked hale enough to survive a tryst with one of his decades-younger leading ladies, much less a dustup with punch-pulling henchpersons like Tee Hee or Jaws or May Day.

Such was the strength of the Bond brand: Audiences would buy that this guy, who looked and acted like the world’s most condescending game show host, was an elite assassin, as long as he looked good in a tuxedo. Which just happened to be Moore’s primary, not to say only, skill.

To his credit, Moore was aware of his limitations in the part, and in general. This ingrained self-deprecation is present even in the title of his new, low-impact memoir, One Lucky Bastard (which I review in Sunday's Washington Post), wherein Mr. I Hate Swimming, sorry, that’s Sir I Hate Swimming, now, allows that current Bond Daniel Craig -- the most chiseled man to play the part, in concordance with our unforgiving expectations of 21st-century action heroes, but also the best actor, too -- “ looks as though he could actually kill, whereas I just hugged or bored them to death.”

One thing I loved about writing this review is that it meant my best gal Rachel Manteuffel and I were both trying to get references to cunnilingus through the Post's Standards & Practices Dept. at the same time. You'll have to wait another week to read her story, but see to it that you do. It's funny and insightful and honest, like everything she writes, and very, very sexy.

The Spoils of War: FURY, reviewed.

This is the scene that makes writer-director David Ayer's FURY something more than just a gritty combat picture.

Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal as the crew of FURY, an M4 Sherman tank.

Logan Lerman is a green member of Brad Pitt's tank crew in David Ayer's FURY.

I expected that David Ayer, the writer of Training Day and the writer-director of End of Watch and Sabotage, would make a gritty World War II combat picture. But I was surprised how much an interest his film takes in the plight of women, and its willingness to show American soldiers behaving badly during the "Good War." My NPR review is here.

Fetch Clay, Make Man and ABSOLUTELY! {perhaps}, reviewed.

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Roscoe Orman and Eddie Ray Jackson as Stephin Fetchit & Muhammad Ali in Fetch Clay, Make Man. (Round House)

My review of Round House Theatre's strong production of Will Power's Fetch Clay, Make Man, a play about the unlikely friendship of Muhammad Ali and Stephin Fetchit, is in today's Washington City Paper. I also review Constellation Theatre's update of a century-old Luigi Pirandello play, ABSOLUTELY! {perhaps}.

If you want to see if your eyes are fast enough to catch the "phantom punch" Ali used to put down Sonny Liston in the first round of their 1965 rematch -- the punch that serves as Fetch Clay's MacGuffin -- it's at about 7:20 in this video.