Weber's "Filthy, Dirty, Twisted Lust" on stage
And you don't even need to bring singles
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
"Filthy, Dirty, Twisted Lust" by Steven Weber

Steven Weber

Stripped of locations, costumes, effects and music - and of the restraints we place on our sexual appetites - Steven Weber's "Filthy, Dirty Twisted Lust" will be featured during the Nantucket Film Festival's Staged Reading, which allows local actors to read with festival luminaries in a surprise cast.

"It's just basically a ridiculous title, pointing to people's overblown and many times ridiculous fears when it comes to what can be viewed as mostly normal sexual drives that people have and the trouble that can get them into," said Weber, who recently wrapped the '06-'07 television season, during which he played recurring characters on "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and "Law and Order: SVU."

The story's protagonist is a former golden boy turned Mametian everyman - "a guy who was a successful jock in high school who ends up marrying his sweetheart, a cheerleader - the archetypal fun blonde at the top of the pyramid - after he winds up impregnating her and is forced into the marriage by the girl's father, a very powerful and vindictive industrialist who feels that this man has sullied his daughter," Weber explained.

For the next 20 years, the young husband is made to atone for his sexual impropriety, belittled by his father-inlaw into a state of learned helplessness until one final revelation leads to a state of humiliation and healing as "things become more twisted."

In short, it's the story of a man who breaks out of Foucault's panopticon.

"The story talks about the sliding definition of perversion or what immorality is," Weber said. "People are living in constant states of self-imposed punishment. To me, it was my attempt to make a Coen-brothers type movie on a subject that hasn't been spoken about very often."

Speaking what hasn't been spoken, on figurative and literal levels, is what the staged reading event is all about for Weber.

"In many ways, that's what the film festival is good for," Weber said. "It airs things in its raw form. And this is the first step in developing the script, having it read by competent actors and gauging the audience's response, so I can see if it's as bad as several people who've read it say it is."

No, Weber isn't joking.

"People are split between really liking it or really hating it," he said. "It's a subjective world out there. There are moments in the script that are crude, funny and violent … and some people are offended by that combination.

Either way, I'll be pleased." I
When: Sat., June 16, 2 p.m.
Where: Unitarian Church,
11 Orange St.
Cost: $25; For tickets, go to
www.nantucketfilmfestival.org, or
go to the American Legion Hall at
21 Washington St. during
business hours.