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When the LA wildfires burned last year, playwright Dave Harris watched as everyone’s “crisis personalities” emerged. “Mine,” he recalls, “was that I was incredibly horny.” During that period, when the power was out and he could see flames in two directions, he busied himself with three activities: “Having a lot of sex with my girlfriend, cooking all the food in our fridge, and finishing this play.”
Set in a failing strip club where nothing is off limits, Tender is as preoccupied with sex as its creator is. “I have always been obsessed with sex,” Harris says, “since before I knew what it was. The four places I feel the most myself are writing, sex, cooking and dancing.” His character descriptions dictate that all four performers for this show need to be astonishingly good looking: young hot, dad hot, arrogant hot, and inaccessibly beautiful. “We’re really just trying to gird everyone’s loins,” Harris laughs.
Putting masculinity in the hot seat, Tender is concerned with what turns us on – and how bad we are at talking about it. “A lot of my male friends don’t have any language for their own pleasure,” Harris explains. “In this play, there’s a desire to explore how infinite pleasure can be, and how stifled a lot of people are in their understanding of it.”
Reuniting with Matthew Xia, who directed his boundary-breaking satire Tambo & Bones, Harris wanted to unpack this inability to open up about sex that particularly affects straight men. “The play presents the idea that masculinity is performed,” says actor Dex Lee, who plays one of strippers at the show’s Dancing Bears Club, “rather than something that’s fixed.”
Sent in to turn the Bears’ luck around, Jessie Mei Li’s character B, the club owner’s daughter, challenges their rigid ideas about sex and power, leading to a very different kind of performance on stage. “Patriarchy traps men in this idea of how they have to behave,” Li says, recognising these attitudes from her time working in a school. “Young men are looking for something to follow. A cutout they can fit into.” As well as its unpacking of attitudes towards sex, Tender also asks questions of parents and children, and the ever-present possibility for change. “It’s shocking and explicit,” considers Lee, “but what’s most hard-hitting is when we pull back the curtain and see the more vulnerable sides of the characters.”
Week one of rehearsals included watching a lot of interviews with male strippers and sex workers to glean a deeper understanding of the worlds their characters work in. “I feel like we can all relate, in an acting space,” says Lee, “to the need for external validation. The idea that the audience coming to watch fills a need for them.” Rehearsals then progressed into the physical, with Lee and fellow Dancing Bear Kwami Odoom cheering each other on in their demanding, athletic performances. Both have been doing pole classes in preparation. “It’s tough!” says Lee. “You have to make it look so easy.” The night before we talk, the whole team went to see Magic Mike Live, the West End production of Channing Tatum’s hip-thrusting stripper movie. “I was so impressed,” says Li. Was it full of hen dos? “Oh,” she says, “the girlies were out and screaming.”
Safeguards are in place to make sure everyone is comfortable throughout the process. “They’ve made it into a very safe space,” Li confirms. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about consent. If I don’t feel like doing something one day, we won’t do it, and that’s cool with everyone.” It’s not just the actors who have a say in their levels of intimacy. As audiences walk into Tender, they will be handed paddles which they can use to indicate whether or not they’re OK to take part in the show’s more interactive scenes. “Theatre is the fakest of all art forms,” says Harris, “so I’m always looking for spaces where it can feel like there’s no separation between audience, actor and character.” Setting the show in the strip club allows the audience to feel personally involved.
While any kind of interaction can make some audiences start to sweat, Harris seems to delight in a little chaos. Grinning, he recalls an early workshop for another of his plays in which “this older Black director stood up and he was like, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, I spit on this play,’ and spat on the ground.” When people came up to Harris asking if he was OK, he was thrilled, saying “I’m so excited. I think this play is going to be really good.’” Reflecting now on the nonsense pushback against Tambo & Bones having a “Black Out” night for Black audiences, he has a similarly chilled-out response. “People were showing their asses,” he shrugs, “and their internalised fears.”
Friends have told Harris of their strong reactions to the play’s work-in-progress performances: the ones who went home to rock their partners’ worlds; the ones who had big fights on the journey home; the ones who felt something had been unlocked in them. Harris relishes this mixed reaction. “I feel like audience members are going to come out and feel vulnerable, turned on, and also want to call their parents.”
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Tender is at Soho theatre, London, until 6 June
