Copyright The New York Times
Arian Moayed and Carla Gugino, two seasoned theater actors, walked onstage Wednesday night knowing next to nothing about the play they were about to perform. They didn’t know who their characters were; they didn’t know the plot; and they certainly didn’t know the lines, which would be fed to them through earpieces. Gugino had asked the director, Ben Kidd, for a little hint: Could they at least be told where the story was set? “It’s just much more fun if you don’t know,” he told her. As the play they were starring in, “Good Sex,” began the narrative was gradually revealed to them. They were playing ex-lovers, reunited in the apartment that they had once shared, revisiting their past intimacy and resisting the pull of what felt like an inevitable recoupling. Moayed and Gugino were the latest daring participants in an experiment conceived by Dead Center, a theater company based in Dublin that has staged the show in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. For the play’s U.S. premiere, new actors are stepping into the roles each performance of its four-night run at Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, giving audiences a voyeuristic window into how actors negotiate sex scenes while also trying to figure out a play as it unfolds. “There’s a funny sense of relief in the fact that you literally don’t know what the next moment is — you can’t control it,” Gugino said. The slate of actors have an appetite for risk. On Thursday, Elliot Page performed opposite John Cameron Mitchell. Still to come are Constance Wu with Morgan Spector, and Chris Perfetti opposite Brandon Flynn. Part of a new arts festival called Powerhouse: International, the play is being staged inside a former power station along the Gowanus Canal that had become a home to squatters and underground raves before it was converted into an arts venue. Pulling the strings behind the scenes of “Good Sex” are Dead Center’s artistic directors — Kidd and Bush Moukarzel — who delight in an unconventional theatrical hook. In one of their earlier plays, about Sigmund Freud, an audience member was brought onstage at each performance to offer up a dream for interpretation. The play was conceived in 2019, when intimacy coordinators were being increasingly enlisted as a response to complaints of entrenched sexual misconduct in entertainment. In the years since, the job has become an industry standard. While rehearsing the play, they hired new pairs of actors — mostly fresh out of drama school — to come in every few days. The show premiered at Dublin Theater Festival in 2022, as the performing arts were reawakening from the pandemic. “In the early stages of the play, I was realizing what a big ask we were making of the actors,” said Emilie Pine, a writer and theater professor who collaborated on the script. “They were working in a way that they’ve never worked before.” The conceit of the show may make it unusually predisposed to onstage blunders. During the European performances, actors have knocked props over, cursed over a flubbed line and broken character. But to Kidd, it’s impossible for the actors to make mistakes in a show that they didn’t rehearse — something he hopes they find freeing. Both Moayed and Gugino had taken the roles somewhat on a whim, and were not particularly concerned by the unknowns. “When you’ve been in rat-infested theaters and performed with nine people in the company and two people in the audience, nothing is that surprising anymore,” said Moayed, whose early acting career has since blossomed into one of Tony nominations (most recently for the 2023 production of “A Doll’s House”) and hit television shows (“Succession,” “Nobody Wants This”). Gugino, a veteran stage and screen actor who appeared in recent years on television in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Girls on the Bus,” said she had been cast within the last couple of weeks, after she had been told that another actor had gotten cold feet. On Wednesday afternoon, the two arrived at the theater, where they met each other for the first time. After a brief sound check, the show began. Two actors that tour with the show (Alexandra Conlon and Barry McKiernan) were positioned in a plexiglass soundproof booth onstage, speaking into microphones that fed into the earpieces. It was up to Moayed and Gugino to go beyond bland recitation and find emotional depth on the fly. “A lot of it was really easy because I just looked into Carla’s eyes,” Moayed said after the performance. He said he told himself: “I’m just going to respond to whatever you give me right now, and there’s not going to be a wrong answer.” There were a few hiccups. Toward the beginning, both actors said a stage direction aloud, while still getting used to the voices in their ear. Later on, an oral sex scene ended with giggles that were not in the script. But they mostly kept up with the barrage of directions: They were told to dance, to pour glasses of wine, to get under the covers, to hug awkwardly, to stare lovingly.
