Let me tell you—I went to an immersive play that turned into a real-life orgy
“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They are published every week. Last time, Theater Editor and Critic Adam Feldman argued that Broadway in April is too damn crowded.
Club Shortbus: An Immersive Xperience ends with a bang.
And by bang, yes, I mean sex. The act of sex, not the acting of it. The bang in Club Shortbus is not stage sex—though there’s some of that, too—but actual, bodily, skin-on-skin sex, in pairs and in groups, in corners and in full view. The first part of the evening is a play with songs, acted in the round with interludes of cabaret, burlesque and live erotic performance; and when that’s over, audience members are invited to stick around, get undressed and get it on. It’s a pop-up theater event cum sex party, both puns intended.
This approach, though unorthodox by the standards of both theater and orgies, is appropriate to the show’s source: Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006 cult film Shortbus—an exploration of sexual honesty that memorably includes hard-core sex scenes. The movie’s multiple characters converge at a polymorphously perverse club called Shortbus, where they are free to leave their hang-ups at the door.
It was through a post on Mitchell’s Instagram account a few weeks ago that I first learned of the monthly live production Club Shortbus, which was to make its debut on February 14. My curiosity was piqued. How could this project—adapted and directed by the transfem performance artist known as Fempath, who describes the Xperience not as a play but as a “play party with theatrical elements”—translate Mitchell’s sex-positive filmic vision to the flesh? The “ForePlay,” titled Welcome to Shortbus: Sofia, would be performed twice: by itself at 7pm, and then in a 10pm version that led to a postshow “PlayParty” described as a “no-limits” “choose-your-own-adventure social” with “dark room access” and “more art, more cabaret, more sex, and more fun.”
I chose the latter. Only in New York, right?
And so it was that at 10pm, single on Valentine’s Day, I found myself in a crowd of people in a spacious fifth-floor loft in Chinatown, the home base of Hit Me Up, a “curated community for poly and kink.” I demurely checked my coat—others would check considerably more—with Deejay Gray, one of the event’s four producers. (The others are Fempath, Mitchell and gay-porn vet Kyle Ferris.) I had arranged to meet up with my friends Lance and Sam, but I was early; happily, I ran into two other friends, Pete and Imani, and we found seats together in the front row of the central playing space. By the time we were warned that this was in the ominously named “splash zone,” it felt too late to move. But more on that in a moment.
The stage area was a circle delineated by luminescent wire, with the audience on three sides and a three-man band on the fourth. The room, lit from above in purple and pink, was decorated by Dusty Childers in a festively cozy style: black fabric festooned on overhead pipes, chairs and sofas draped in sheets and knitted throws, a cheeky life-size rendition of John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X with holes cut out at the face and crotch. The crowd seemed to lean toward youngish cis gay men, but it was by no means monolithic. There were straight and bi people in the mix, cishets and transfolk. There were sprinklings of fairies and sulkings of goths. On one couch, an elderly man canoodled with a genderqueer blond youth; across the stage, a fellow in nothing but a jockstrap and a yarmulke lounged near a guy in a full puppy mask, complete with wagging tongue.
It was, in other words, a scene. And that’s before the performance began.
The line at the coat check was slow to advance—it was understaffed, I later learned, because of last-minute Covid call-outs—so the Club Shortbus performance began late. Fempath’s partner, the witty queer writer and raconteur Justin Elzabeth Sayre, vamped with the audience to fill the time; later, in sparkly high heels and a flowing garment of motley fabrics, Sayre stepped into the party-host role played by Justin Vivian Bond in the movie, and also served as the show’s narrator and compère. Once the crowd had settled in, the show could start in earnest. Sayre kicked things off with a thorough introduction, laying out ground rules for attendees to follow as spectators of the ForePlay (“respect the circle”) and participants in the PlayParty (“do not touch without asking, and accept and give refusals gracefully”).
When the ForePlay began, it soon became clear that it would be telling only half of the film’s story: the plot involving Sofia (Malea Kimberly), a sex therapist who has yet to achieve orgasm herself, and Severin (Alex Miyashiro), the professional dominatrix she befriends. The two main actors, with help from Sayre, performed the dialogue along with three songs that Scott Matthew wrote and sang in the movie; audience members were recruited to fill out a scene in which Sofia gets advice from a group of lesbians, and the role of Sofia’s husband was comically assigned to an inflatable male sex doll.
Fempath later told me that a second iteration of Club Shortbus, to be presented this spring, will focus on the film’s other main story, about a gay couple on the rocks. Including both stories would have made the show too long—it already runs about 100 minutes—and the focus on one plot at a time has the benefit of letting the storytelling go deeper. “John was really generous and gave me the original shooting script, so there’s a lot more that I was able to pull from,” she said. “I felt like I wanted to give some characters more time than they got onscreen.”
In addition to the main story, which is told more or less conventionally, Club Shortbus includes five interstitial slots for other kinds of performance. The performers in these sections will change from show to show, but on Valentine’s Day, they included two drag performers—one comedic (CuntyHam) and the other dramatic (Julie J)—and burlesque queen Darlinda Just Darlinda, who worked her formidable derrière in a backless dress. Where the show really departed from theater and cabaret norms, though, was in the other two acts, both very explicit: a live sex show by porn actors Jonah Wheeler and Benny Blazin, and a solo scene by Lola Jean.
Wheeler and Blazin are this show’s version of the beautiful couple whom Sofia admires from afar in the film. They wore little more than welcoming smiles when they arrived on stage. After a few minutes of oral sex and rimming, Wheeler masturbated as Blazin tweaked his chest from behind. At this point, I grew a bit concerned—not just that I was in the splash zone, and seated directly in front of the action, but that my presence might distract Wheeler from the task at hand. (We’ve been friends in real life for more than a decade, since well before his porn career.) I needn’t have worried: He’s a professional as well as an exhibitionist, and when he reached his orgasm, the audience applauded as though at the end of a musical number.
I was not splashed. But the question arose again at the climax of the show. Lola Jean, who had appeared throughout the night as Sofia’s sexual alter ego, took center stage on a sheet that had been laid out on the floor. To represent Sofia’s first orgasm, she played with herself vigorously until reaching a dramatic finale: As it turns out, she’s what’s known as a squirter, and a massive one at that. Luckily for me, she too is a pro, and she directed her fluid into a vertical geyser that left me impressed but bone dry.
The show was over. The ForePlay was done, and it was time for the PlayParty to begin. The audience rose and milled about, and I was curious to see what would happen next. How many people would stay? And how far would they go?
I reconnected with Lance and Sam; they had spent the show on a distant sofa, being cuddled by an affectionate shirtless stranger, but they weren’t game to stay on. Neither was Pete, last seen chatting up a cute guy in the long line for the bathroom. As the departing spectators collected their coats, many of those who stayed—roughly half of the crowd—slipped into new attire. A male-female couple from the front row stripped down to skimpy red undergarments, as befitted a Valentine’s celebration. Some of the men sported harnesses and other leather accouterments; there was at least one guy on a leash.
Chatting with Imani during this intermission between acts, I wondered about the transition from one part of the night to the next. The show had been very sex-positive, but not very sexy per se. Sexual moments that are private and intimate in Mitchell’s film inevitably become very public in the live version, and more self-conscious. To finesse this distinction, Fempath has conceived of the show as having a bit of a meta twist, à la Marat/Sade. “I approached the project like, ‘If the characters at Club Shortbus were telling the story of Shortbus, what would that look like?’” she explained. “It would be bigger and campier and broader, and it would acknowledge the people in the room.”
The exposure of private moments, Fempath said, can create an interesting tension: “In what I call the sad masturbation scene, when Sofia’s striking out yet again, it is uncomfortable to watch. And that’s even more pressing when it’s surrounded by a room full of people watching in silence.” But ultimately, she was confident that the audience could take the show in stride—as they did on Fire Island last summer, when the powerhouse singer Amber Martin performed her show Bette, Bathhouse and Beyond, a recreation of Bette Midler’s career-making performances at the Continental Baths in the early 1970s. “That was a big learning opportunity for me: Amber could sing a tragic six-minute ballad, and then people had no problem going back to [hooking up],” she recalled. “The show is a piece of art about celebrating every shade of expression, sexual or otherwise, and not necessarily trying to get people in the mood. We just dimmed the lights and it took very little effort for the PlayParty to begin.”
Very little effort indeed. The hardcore group action began almost instantly and, unsurprisingly, it started with the gays. About 15 minutes after the end of the show, I poked my head into the small, darkened space dubbed the Sex-Not-Bombs Room. A dozen men or so were already going at it, and the smell of sweat was already overwhelming. At the center of the action was Jonah Wheeler, an inviting grin still on his adorkable mustached face.
Wheeler wasn’t hired to stay for the PlayParty; he joined it enthusiastically by choice. But he did enjoy its contiguity with the role he played in the show. “It’s like how a gogo boy is in a bar to be the bright, loud, vibrant thing that is always bigger than you, so you can be at half that level and feel comfortable,” Wheeler told me when I asked him about it later. “I can set the bar for how other people are going to participate. I have already done all these things in front of you, so if you go even halfway there, you’re not doing anything extreme. Somebody else did something more extreme publicly already.”
One amusing trend that emerged right away concerned the spaces to which participants were drawn. The Sex-Not-Bombs Room, spare in the extreme—just a mattress, some rugs and an empty water dispenser—was where the cis-gay dudes wound up. The fems and their partners, meanwhile, gravitated to the room next door, which featured a large bed, mood lighting and other trappings of romance. And the main floor area, Fempath said, “was really a free-for-all as the night went on.”
I witnessed only some of that free-for-all firsthand. I wasn’t feeling inclined to join the scene; I was fine with a front-row seat, and I lasted about 45 minutes. When Imani and I left the party, the lady in red was splayed in the bedroom, three large-bodied people were cuddling on the floor, and a man with a mullet was being gently whipped by a dominatrix just outside the Sex-Not-Bombs Room, where Wheeler was now getting railed. Drag legend Flotilla DeBarge was deejaying, and the mood was high. No one was calling upon the “crossing guards” who were there to help ensure that everything went not just sensually but consensually. The party, I learned, went on for almost two more hours, and featured additional burlesque interludes: Darlinda Just Darlinda covered herself with paint in an inflatable pool, and Glow Job did an act with bananas that I won’t describe here.
It all felt very much in the liberationist spirit of the club in the Shortbus movie—a “sort of Whitmanesque democracy…far removed from the male bondage of rank, hierarchy and competition that characterize much of the outside world,” as the queer theorist Dennis Altman once described pre-AIDS bathhouse culture. “A lot of parties thrive on specificity, with people who are into very specific things, and this was the opposite,” Fempath said. “We wanted as many different types of people and different sexualities as possible represented. What would a sexual space look like, how would it function, when it is so open? And it did exactly what we were hoping to do.” One participant, she heard through the grapevine, called the experience “life-altering,” and Wheeler told her that it was “the most diverse display of sexuality at a play party he’d ever seen.”
I missed some of that by leaving on the early side, including a personal milestone for Wheeler. “I had my first heterosexual interactions in the afterparty,” he told me. “It was very cool. I had a whole room of people sort of supporting me and coaching me through it.” This experience came after he intentionally moved from the Sex-Not-Bombs Room to the one next door. “I was like, cool, let’s culturally mix this a little bit. I’m gonna do my thing in front of all of you and experience you doing yours, and maybe we’ll find a way to blend.” Did the performance of Welcome to Shortbus facilitate such adventures? “I do think the ForePlay helped with that, because it put all these different things up against each other and held them in the same space,” said Fempath.
As I walked home that night, I thought about how Club Shortbus tried to explore not just the sexual possibilities of theater, but also the theatrical possibilities of sex. For Wheeler, that was much of the event’s appeal. “I think the performance creates a better sense of community. It helps us connect casually and intimately without making a big thing of it, and helps us take the walls down,” he said. “We’re doing this in public, in a large group space, because we’re doing it not just to each other but for each other. This is an experience that we want to be viewed, that we wanna share with each other, that we want to watch other people do. And there is a valid experience in that—there are ways of connecting and communicating across that.”
Shortbus is still a work in progress, with plenty of kinks to work out. But its commitment to working out kinks in public does seem rife with possibilities. Discussing it post facto with Fempath and Wheeler, I began to feel a bit disappointed that I had stopped short of fully participating in the experience. But had I? Mitchell’s movie is centrally concerned with voyeurism—as experienced both by its characters and by us, the viewers, in our open access to their sexuality. In the live version, that sense of voyeurism is essential to both the performance and the afterparty. As Benny Blazin’s character said in the ForePlay: “After all, voyeurism is a form of participation.”
Perhaps, for me, that was enough. They came. I saw. And for a few hours on Valentine’s Day, to a few dozen people in Chinatown, it may have felt like love was conquering all.
The date for the next performance of Shortbus: An Immersive Xperience has not yet been announced, but you can sign up for news about it here or follow it on Instagram or on X.
