Is “Dirty Books” itself obscene? Not at all, if we go by the Supreme Court’s three-pronged test. The theater company Bated Breath does enlist the audience to write erotica, but 1. The show begins with a history exhibition about book banning in the U.S. that certainly doesn’t lack serious political and educational value, 2. The exhibition is followed by a plot that is so bland one might wish for a little patent offensiveness, or even 3. prurience, but none exists. Besides, the enlistment is half-hearted and the effect not all that erotic.
Bated Breath, which moved from Connecticut to New York in 2017, has a track record of sexy, edgy site-specific and immersive theater; I was especially impressed by “Voyeur,” one of the only shows I saw in person during the height of the pandemic. Mara Lieberman, the artistic director of Bated Breath, clearly wrote and directed “Dirty Books” with the same impulse to engage the audience in unusual spaces and in unusual ways. But the execution worked better in their previous productions.
The show takes place in the company’s new home, which it calls a “white box performance space,” on the third floor of a nondescript building on West 14th Street, that we are meant to view as a gallery. Among the props and decorations: hanging pieces of paper attached by clothespin, a pile of banned books, several viewmasters with tame photographs of nude female couples from the 1930s and, most prominently, a series of wall labels. The labels offer a fascinating if cursory timeline of obscenity in America. We learn, for example, that “Fanny Hill,” an erotic novel published in 1749, was banned in the United States for more than 200 years.
We are left on our own to explore until a woman who we come to know as the Warden (Marisa Moureau) becomes our guide through the exhibition, focusing on the story of Anthony Comstock; “In 1873, Congress gave him a badge, a gun, and control of the U.S. postal system. He called his private militia the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. For decades, he seized books, pamphlets, photographs- even birth control information. By his own count, he destroyed 160 tons of material….”
Just then, the Warden confronts a member of the audience for stealing something. The woman (Melina Rabin) turns out to be one of the five members of the cast; this was an awkward way of transitioning to the story of two couples in the 1960s who are involved in what used to be called smut. To be clear, the two husbands are trying to write about it; the two women wind up living it. The husbands (Sammy Rivas and Grayson Willenbacher) are struggling to finish an erotic scenario to meet their publisher’s deadline, but their wives (Rabin and Alexis Pratt), feeling neglected, eventually realize they are attracted to one another and live out the scenario that the husbands are imagining.
That scenario supposedly depends on audience participation. Here I must mention a part of the set that I left out before – an alcove with a typewriter – because I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, and I should have. In the alcove is a picture of Madame and her maid, and a prompt: “Write the first thing this woman would dare say to the other if no one was watching” We were supposed to type something in the time before the action began, which the characters would then use as part of their script.
I didn’t actually see anybody type anything, so maybe the actors used backup material. But there were other ways in which we are asked to participate. The warden, for example, asks audience members to supply the names of all the characters. At one point, one of the women asks individual members of the audience whether she should leave her husband. Some of this was fun; most of it seemed like a show of audience participation, rather than real involvement.
There is a stab at incorporating the serious history with the drama. There are a couple of scenes of the man going on trial. One of the women tells the other she did her PhD dissertation on Ida Craddock. As we learned earlier, she was a 19th century advocate for women’s rights whose writing on women’s sexuality led to her conviction and imprisonment for obscenity, which led to her suicide.
Leaning more toward this kind of actual history and away from the story of the two couples would have given “Dirty Books” more of the heft that the subject deserves, because this is not just history. Schools have been stepping up the banning of books: “Wicked” was one of the 10 most banned books in America in 2025, according to Pen America, which documented 6,870 instances of book bans in public schools affecting nearly 4,000 unique titles. The Comstpck Act of 1873, which called for fines and imprisonment “at hard labor” for anyone mailing anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious” is not only still in the books; anti-abortion activists are trying to use the statute to impose a “no-exceptions, nationwide abortion ban.”
Dirty Books
Bated Breath Theater through January 18
Running time: 100 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $69 – $99
Written and directed by Mara Lieberman
Jacob P.S Lemmenes (technical director), Yung-Hung Sung (set and lighting design), Seth Black (set and projections), Stephanie Lopez (costume design), Lauren DeLeon (intimacy coordinator), Delaney Jordan (stage manager), and Victoria Blas (assistant stage manager).
Cast: Marisa Moureau, Alexis Pratt, Melina Rabin, Sammy Rivas and Grayson Willenbacher with understudies Emily Cummings, Caroline DeFazio, Billie Eric Robinson and Camilo Zuqui.
