Review
Standards of Decency 3: 300 Vaginas Before Breakfast
Directed by Kyle Ancowitz, Robert Buckwalter, Gary Shrader and Stephen Speights.
Produced by Blue Coyote
BOTTOM LINE: A broad, thought-provoking and enjoyable look at the effect of pornography on our lives and relationships.
These days, anyone who claims they have never seen internet porn is probably lying. Blue Coyote’s Standards of Decency 3: 300 Vaginas Before Breakfast attempts to explore what such ubiquitous sexual exposure does to our relationships with sex, with media, and with each other. Borrowing and slightly modifying a John Mayer quote for its title, these nine short plays explore our connection to being touched, voyeurism, loss of innocence, and knowing too much about your partner’s habits and history. Though a little compact and frequently exaggerated to great effect, these are all things that we’ve experienced in one form or another. For a show with a pretty big “number,” it’s relatable.
Far from a scathing denouncement of porn or its viewers, the plays are largely warm-hearted and lovingly poke fun at our habit of looking at naked people doing stuff. Some of my favorites included Bits by Bruce Goldstone, where a cluster of bits — as in a computer’s processor — are so bowled over by their owner’s viewing habits that they are bored stiff of showing him stiffies, and The Metaphor by Matthew Freeman, in which a female priest gleefully suggests we think of porn as an enhancement to our real-life sex lives rather than a replacement for it. The nerds in the audience (myself wholly included) will enjoy the highbrow/lowbrow Plato’s Retreat by David Foley, based on the allegory of the cave — no, it’s not nearly as vaginal as you might suppose — where pornographic shadows on the wall are easier to take pleasure in than the blinding glare of a pair of real breasts.
Held together without the arc of a plot or journey of a single character, Standards of Decency’s thematic harmony provokes thought and reflection rather than simply being entertaining or titillating for an evening. It paints us a picture of our relationships to sex, both in our digital lives and in the day to day minutia of the real world. Perhaps the most engaging for a woman in New York, like me, was any one by Jordan Seavy, an exploration of how you are accidentally touched a million times in a day in this city and never feel like you made a connection. Standards of Decency offers a lot of laughs (“I love being a vagina!” cries one ecstatic porn-generating computer bit), some tough moments (“What kind of perverted little 13 year old watches a porn version of Wuthering Heights?” moans a distraught mother), a few gasps (“I can stream you on the internet,” threatens the night watchman who sees the most private moments on his screen) and a few small victories for our pervy compatriots (“Let’s make tonight about us. Let’s choose to lose tomorrow and win another day,” says the porn auteur to his deadline-oriented ladyfriend and co-auteur). So if you don’t walk out thinking you saw a scene about yourself, your boyfriend, your mom, or someone you know, you’re lying as much as the guy who’s never seen porn.
(Standards of Decency 3: 300 Vaginas Before Breakfast plays at the Access Theater, 380 Broadway, two blocks below Canal, just north of White Street, through Saturday, June 18. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 PM. Tickets are $25 and are available by calling SmartTix at 212.868.4444 or online at smarttix.com. For more show info, visit bluecoyote.org.)