My Year of Porn
nytheatre.com review by Michael Criscuolo
June 4, 2005
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a porn star, then My Year of Porn, Cole Kazdin’s charming new one-person show, ought to be right up your alley. Kazdin’s observations about the porn industry are funny, poignant, and eye-opening—so much so that you may never think about ex-Marines or French non-dairy creamer the same way again.
My Year of Porn chronicles Kazdin’s twelve-month tour of duty on a film crew making a documentary about the porn industry. Among the cast of misfits they encounter are porn starlet Sinammon Summers (who enthusiastically confesses that she is a Green Bay Packers fan); porn director Gordon “Monty” Monty, who relentlessly teases Cole about joining the on-screen action; and a set production assistant who looks notoriously like Jeffrey Dahmer. Then there’s the porn crew, none of whom is eager to appear in the documentary lest their “day-job” employers—Disney, Vogue, The West Wing—find out what they do on the side. But, for all the stigma still attached to it, there are glaring indications that the adult movie industry has gone mainstream: at an annual porn convention in Las Vegas, Cole notices that hundreds of people are lined up to get in six hours before the event starts. “Even the Mormons have a booth at the convention,” she dryly points out.
But, what starts out as a potentially titillating adventure soon becomes routine, then grueling, for Kazdin and her crew. Daily exposure to hardcore sex makes her feel numb. She begins avoiding words like “dirty” and “hard” in her everyday life. In a particularly funny moment, Cole is shocked to discover that she has become so deeply involved in her subject that every sentence out of her yoga teacher’s mouth sounds suggestive. Add to that the number of porn stars who long to get out of the business but can’t seem to (they constantly point out the differences between their small, insulated world and “the real world”), and before long Cole comes to the conclusion that, without love and intimacy, raunchy sex is not all its cracked up to be.
Kazdin is a likable performer who doesn’t take herself, or her material, too seriously. She has an easygoing, endearing demeanor, and realizes the ridiculousness of her subject—which is the point of My Year of Porn: how silly the adult movie business is. What may be arousing on-screen is downright hilarious when seen in person (as when Cole witnesses an actress, in the middle of a sex scene, improvise, “Oh yeah! I can feel it in my cervix!” Cut!). Kazdin plays all the characters, and does a good job of portraying them in a broad, humorous manner without making them stereotypes. Her character transitions are occasionally confusing (she’s playing who now?), and director Ivanna Cullinan sometimes lets her down with clumsy scene transitions, but, overall, My Year of Porn is entertaining and well done.
