The Rocky Horror Show

Playhouse on the Green, 177 State St., Bridgeport. 8 p.m. with midnight showings through Nov. 8 (see Web site for dates). $32. (203) 366-4647, www.playhouseonthegreen.org.

A young actress auditions for a musical. She gets a callback and runs through a few numbers again, trotting nervously across the bare stage for a poker-faced director. A few days later, the director calls and tells her that she's got the part!

Oh, and there's this another thing. There's a cast member who sort of...carved out his own part. His, um, character wasn't in the original script. He's paying to be in the show. In fact, if it weren't for him, the theater couldn't do it at all. He'll be at performances but isn't coming to rehearsals. The part he's written for himself is kind of crass.

To prepare the cast for their absent costar, the director screams "Slut!" and "You blew it, bitch!" at them during rehearsals. The young actress is a little startled. The director warns that he may say these words, which he's inserted into the script, or he may use a different script entirely or no script at all; it's really his call. Be prepared for anything, the director says, but stay in character.

For the cast of Playhouse on the Green's Rocky Horror Show—and for casts of the play across the globe—that crude, mindless, unpredictable costar is you: you, the audience.

Yes, you. You took Richard O'Brien's campy little sci-fi homage outfitted as a fetish burlesque from a 63-seat London experimental venue down to the main theater district and then to the Yankee Gomorrah of Los Angeles and then to, even worse, Hollywood. You kept the flop of a film version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, alive, and made Dr. Frank N. Furter, "The Time Warp" and the singing lips part of your culture, but on your terms. You screamed your own lines at the screen, called the main characters "asshole" and "slut," and reworked the song lyrics in the crudest possible ways. You demanded movie houses stay past midnight and the rice you threw and the water you sprayed. Now, no theater in the world can put on this perfectly good play without having to factor in your tantrums.

The cast of Playhouse on the Green's production has mixed feelings about the heavy dose of audience participation that comes with a Rocky production. They'll provide a script with designated "callbacks" for their unruly cast members (the audience) in a goody bag that includes the usual props—rice, newspapers, plastic gloves.

But the outbursts that accompany any screening or staging of Rocky Horror, weren't written by Richard O'Brien; he only provided the b-movie in-jokes, the rock and roll songs and the story of two small-town kids who get stranded at Dr. Frank N. Furter's castle the night he unveils his creation, known as "Rocky Horror." The callbacks—the lines shouted at the screen or stage—were invented by fans over a span of 30 years, and a new ones can be shouted whenever someone, anyone in the crowd thinks of one.

"There is a lot of unbelievable stuff in here," says Nigel Rees, who plays the narrator, a stuffed-shirt criminologist, as he holds up a callback script found on the Internet. "When I say, 'There were dark storm clouds,' the audience is supposed to say, 'Describe your balls!' and then I have to read, 'heavy, black and pendulous.'"

There's a newer callback for that line that goes "Describe Oprah Winfrey's tits!" Heavy, black and pendulous.

"I don't mind some of the callbacks, the ones that are funny," says director Steven Smeltzer. "Some of them are just mean, though. I don't want someone to scream, 'Where's your fucking neck?' if my narrator has a neck."

To prepare the cast, Smeltzer and stage director Patti Rice let them have it. During rehersals, they screamed the most vulgar catcalls that Rocky Horror fans have let loose in midnight theaters since 1975.

"They were trying to see if we could take it," says Shannon Courtney, of Ridgefield, who plays Columbia, a tap-dancing groupie of Dr. Frank. "I honestly got a little frigid, but it helped us prepare for anything."

Jessica Ferraday, of Milford, grimaces a tad when the subject of the callbacks comes up. Ferraday plays straight-laced, fish-out-of-water heroine Janet. She will be called a slut by a mob of strangers.

Still, she's game. "While I was doing this show, I was going to the city to audition for Bye Bye Birdie. This is something different. It feels like a rock concert."

Across the entire cast, there's a certain deference to the Rocky Horror phenomenon. When they came out in costume for the first time, they were bursting with pride. Columbia, Magenta, Riff Raft, Brad, Janet, Frank. They're pillars of a pop culture institution as strong as Lord of the Rings or James Bond or Seinfeld.

"I've wanted to be Brad my entire life. I'd use 'Dammit Janet' as a song for auditions," says Brian Michael Riley. He was getting art framed in Westport when he was told of the auditions and rushed down to the Playhouse, young son in tow.

"I see this play as part of the Spring Awakening, as part of the same trend as Hair," says Smeltzer. "If I had to say Rocky Horror is about one thing I'd say it's about sexual liberation." The one line to remember is "Don't dream it; be it," the director says, sung in a song of the same name and taken by Richard O'Brien from a Frederick's of Hollywood ad.

For those of you haven't seen the play or the film, another simple synopsis is this: A young couple is stranded on the road, finds a strange castle, and everyone in it gets laid by everyone else.

"There's male-on-female, female-on-female, male-on-male, brother-on-sister," recounts Smeltzer. "It broke all the rules."

Jim Nassaf, of Fairfield, plays Dr. Frank N. Furter, the central villain (or maybe anti-hero...or anti-heroine) of the play. A "sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania," Frank leads every character down a path of decadence: good-natured kids Brad and Janet, of course, but also Columbia, her biker boyfriend Eddie, his own creation Rocky Horror. By the end of the play, he's had them all (and many of them have had each other). Only his servants Riff Raft and Magenta, an incestuous brother-sister pair, are immune to Frank's seduction. Nassaf, who was in a children's theater production before this, wasn't.

"I auditioned for Brad but started reading for Frank," he says. "They told me to keep reading. He had such flavor to him."

Unbound by any scientific ethics, sexual taboos or discernible moral code, Nassaf says Frank is "essentially Freud's Id," says Nassaf. "He does want he wants and doesn't ask for anybody's permission."

Smeltzer is tight-lipped on how the play will show all of the mad sex; the film got away with a lot of inferences, shadows and cheekiness. The cast lets it be known that the audience will be tantalized.

"There's one point where I'm basically masturbating on stage," says Courtney, who plays Columbia. "Brad is basically my [stripper] pole."

Even innocent little Janet gets exposed (somewhat literally). "It's a very different Janet that we see in Denton," her hometown, says Ferraday, "than we see in the floor show...One of the most exciting things for me is to take the audience on that journey every night."

And this is how Rocky Horror turns the tables on its yelping, cat-calling crowds. If you are there to make the cast uncomfortable, they are there to do the same to you.

"If you watch TV in Europe, there is a lot more sex and a lot less violence," says Ferraday. "We're not comfortable with sex and nudity. We're a lot like Janet. Throughout the play, you can tell she wants something and that's how she gets into trouble."

"I was in Europe during the whole Clinton impeachment scandal," adds Smeltzer. "They did not understand what the big deal was...I remember being in Hair at the time, going from my boxers to a Speedo to nothing [in rehearsals] to make myself comfortable. Meanwhile, most of my cast mates went to the beach naked."

Even in 2008, 40 years after the sexual revolution, 39 years after Stonewall, 33 years after the Rocky Horror Picture Show was released, the tale of a flamboyant, ever-seductive transvestite who brings out the asshole and slut lurking in everyone, still has the power to shock.

"This is why it's a Halloween show," says Nassaf. "Americans won't be scared by ghosts or zombies or poltergeists. What will scare them is a six-foot-tall man in heals and fishnets and a corset who isn't ashamed of himself."

edior@fairfieldweekly.com