Adam Davenport To Play Iconic Adult Film Star In Ronnie Larsen's SHOOTING PORN

Adam Davenport takes on the lead role in Ronnie Larsen's "Shooting Porn," opening this weekend at Empire Stage in Fort Lauderdale before a prospective multiple city tour.

The play examines two directors and three actors working in the world of the gay adult film industry in the '90s. Davenport originates the role of Lucas Lovett, inspired by adult film star Glenn Marsh ("Blue Blake"), who was found dead in his London apartment in October 2015. Before becoming a porn actor, "Blake" was a marine and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.

But playwright Ronnie Larsen has a conundrum: audiences may initially confuse his new play, "Shooting Porn! Live on Stage!," with his Off-Broadway hit, "Making Porn." Unlike "Making Porn," the fictional account of a gay-for-pay porn star's experiences that ran for five hundred performances Off-Broadway at The Actors' Playhouse in Greenwich Village and has subsequently been produced hundreds of times around the world, "Shooting Porn" is the staged version of a documentary film about the porn industry Larsen produced and directed two decades ago that now has a cult following. (Most recently, a review of last year's King Cobra, Justin Kelly's drama with James Franco about the murder of gay porn producer Bryan Kocis, makes reference to Larsen's film.)

Larsen made the documentary after being approached by real-life porn actors who were in the audiences of "Making Porn" in Los Angeles. "When Making Porn was playing, I met a bunch of porn stars so I decided to make a documentary about their lives and the process of shooting porn movies," says Larsen on the inception of Shooting Porn. "The movie was NOT a film adaptation of my play, Making Porn, it was an actual documentary." The documentary of Shooting Porn was an instant success, earning screenings on the gay and lesbian film festival circuit and eventually was commercially distributed.

"This was before reality television," Larsen explains. "It was explicit, even graphic, and very honest. The closest comparison might be the 'Real Sex' series that used to air on HBO. I'm not going to say I was a pioneer, but 10 to 15 years ago, the porn industry had not been exposed like it has now."

That's when the playwright got the idea to turn the documentary into a stage show: "After the movie came out I wanted to see if I could actually stage the movie and then turned it into a play. To the best of my knowledge no one had ever made a documentary and then turned it in to a stage play, so in a sense the whole thing was just a big experiment for me."

The production uniquely employs a live camera filming actors onstage which is then projected onto a large video screen, not unlike Ivo Van Hove's imaginative staging of the John Cassavetes film Opening Night "It's really cool, all the action takes place on the stage, but there are cameras and monitors, also, so it feels like the audience is really there at the filming of a porn movie," Larsen explains, also pointing out the sex scenes in his play are simulated, even if the on-stage nudity is not.

Larsen recruited three New York actors for the production: Davenport, Terry Lee Hicks III and Jonathon Horton. The cast is also comprised of David Gordon, Kyle Garcia and Larsen, who portrays famed porn producer/drag personality, Chi Chi LaRue. "This project is different than anything else I've ever done," says Hicks, whose credits include He Said/She Said and The Berenstain Bears Live! "We're challenging the audience to explore some taboo subjects and talk about things that we, as a society, don't talk about openly. But before we are able to challenge the audience, we have to challenge ourselves."

Davenport spoke further on the necessity to bring empathy to the material. "As actors our job is to enter the lives of others who are different from us, and then let you as the audience feel and perhaps understand that experience through the power of the actor's interpretation. There are many men in the world who are closeted and unable to express their sexuality openly but they watch porn privately and have made a connection to it and that connection may be all those men ever have to their true sexuality."

This production is not the first time Davenport has thesped nude onstage; he previously appeared as such in Colette Roberts' avant garde choral play Icons/Idols at the New Ohio Theatre. "I have no problem with nudity if it serves the storytelling," says Davenport. "I don't think there's any stigma really: Sally Kirkland may have caused a stir when she was naked onstage in Terrence McNally's Sweet Eros, but she went on to become an Academy Award nominated actress. When I told Sally I was doing this play she just told me to make sure I look good up there."

Ronnie Larsen's "Shooting Porn! Live on Stage!" will be performed Feb. 9 - March 12 at Empire Stage, 1140 N. Flagler Dr. in Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $35 - 50 and can be purchased online.

Photo Credit: Andy Foord