Naked boys vs. naked men. (notes from a blond).

Naked Boys Singing, the Cats of gay theater, is celebrating its 400th year off-Broadway. I'm proud to have had a hand in the show, although a hand was really not what I had hoped to put in. NBS, as the director is fond of calling it (this makes it sound more like an all-news network than an all-nude musical), was an act of desperation, put together by the leadership of a gay Hollywood theater company who found that audiences wouldn't go to see a gay show unless they knew there would be some gay or straight or alive and breathing flesh to look at. Serious multiethnic cries for understanding just didn't draw without a really big hanging garden of forbidden fruit.

So the show's creator and director, Robert Schrock, said, Let's meet the enemy head on, and I mean that literally. Naked Boys Singing--the title said it all. And the audiences fought each other to get in. Many years later naked boys are still unveiling themselves nightly on stages in cities around the world.

Among the many strange phenomena that have followed is the acceptance of NBS as a girls'-night-out, Chippendales sort of thing, although none of that kind of business occurs in the show. It's a bunch of gay guys in mostly gay situations, including a love affair and, in its first production at least, a song about endless testing in a hospital. The fact that NBS is basically a gay show hasn't seemed to hurt it with a straight audience.

A weird reversal of fortune has been happening at Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg's wonderful Broadway play about what happens when a baseball superstar comes out. It's not a gay play at all, being more about bigotry, civil rights, sports, ego, the team mentality, brain versus brawn, religion, and how big money corrupts moral people. Only two characters in it are homosexual, but almost all the dozen or so actors in the all-male cast spend a lot of time taking showers fully naked, as far downstage as you can get without asking the American Express gold-card ticket holders to scrub your back. Fastballs of important dialogue are hurled at the audience while nude dudes splash around, scratch themselves, and towel down. It's quite a day at the ballpark.

And that has been identified as one of the marketing problems facing the play, which has probably won this year's Tony by the time you read this Gay audiences, who would be expected to flock to a show full of hunks showing off their trunks, have flocked. Now it's time to attract the straight theatergoers who are more interested in everything else the play has to offer. And they are proving to be afraid to come.

The male nudity tums the straight men off and, as it is not emphasized for entertainment value (as in NBS), doesn't seem to be a magnet for women either. "Serves them right," a Broadway producer friend of mine opined. "It doesn't have anything to do with the show. It's a good play that would be selling out now if they hadn't pandered to the gay audience." But Take Me Out doesn't pander. NBS panders joyously, starting with the opening number, "Gratuitous Nudity." The nudity in TMO is far from gratuitous. It is essential. It puts the physical action of the play where the emotional action of the story really takes place--the showers.

What's the one thing we always hear about gays in the military or professional sports? Nobody wants to shower with them. While I've always thought this problem could be solved by putting in shower stalls--even at the Pentagon, where a toilet seat costs $50,000, it would be money well spent--there's a bigger principle at work here.

The primal fear straight men have about being around gay men is: What will happen when everybody is in their most vulnerable and potentially sexual place? The drama being played out onstage is in many instances being played out in the audience. It's genuine theater, not necessarily comfortable, but tough and engaging and worth the time and the money. It's a play Ralph Kramden and the boys at the Racoon Lodge need to see. They can skip Naked Boys Singing. I'll even forgo my buck-fifty royalty check.