There’s a time for explicitness, and the 1960s was an essential liberation: the performing arts needed it as much as society.
But–
Rather than become voyeurs, can we spectators sometimes use our imagination? Let our brains, our senses, as well as our eyes do some work?
It’s very effective, dramatically speaking.
For example:
London 1926
Tallulah played Pauline Lord’s role in Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. Glenn Anders played the role he’d originated on Broadway.
At the end of the second act they finally cannot resist their mutual attraction.
“Joe doesn’t know,” Anders recalled about his stage character, “it doesn’t dawn on him that the scene is getting hotter. But the audience knows; they can feel it.” [They’re doing their work.]
From time to time Anders laid a reassuring arm on Tallulah’s, until finally she bristled: “Leave me alone, can’t you?” and Joe instantly understood what her agitation was all about.
When Anders put his arm on Tallulah’s, an erotic shiver went through her, and “the entire audience shivered, too,” Cathleen Nesbitt recalls in her 1977 memoirs.
Tallulah bolted out into the garden and Anders ran after her. A man sitting behind Nesbitt said to his friend, “That curtain went down just in time, or we would have seen something!”