by Dr. Susan Block.

Masked, quarantined and looking for fun, we help a troubled cuckold handle his mixed feelings, then immerse ourselves in the sapiosexual, roleplay-ful pleasures of kink-positive “immersive theater.”

It’s my 8^th Bedside Chat of the Coronapocalypse, inspired by FDR’s Fireside Chats.

What a pleasure and a privilege it is in these tough times to stretch out on my bed (well, my couch, which roleplays the part of the “bed”) and chat with various fascinating folks—from the puzzled cuckold (by phone) to a Harvard director and a Dartmouth gamer (on Zoom)—about life, art, acting and orgies.

Life is good in Bonoboville, even in quarantine.

Physically confined, mysteriously masked and psychologically bewildering, yes, but good.

Maskless Trumpus Rumpus

So many people are hurting, grieving, lonely, scared and confused in the Coronapocalypse.

Then there are raging muttonheads, spouting off online and in the streets, rallying and flaunting their ammosexual arsenals, assault rifles swinging, sneers on unmasked faces, spewing mental illness along with infected saliva.

Meanwhile, our Presidunce’s version of FDR’s heartwarming “Chats” by the fire is to fan the fires of hate, bigotry and bleach-pushing misinformation at grimly goofy “press conferences,” where he reveals nothing but his own small-penis syndrome anxieties by yelling at female reporters.

His only big thing is the Death Count, and it’s rising…

America is number one—in deaths!

One of the news stories this past week was that the Trumpus toured a mask factory without a mask on.

But why is that even news?

How could anyone think that a douchebag like Drumpf, who refused to wear a condom when cheating on his wife with a sex worker (love ya, Stormy!), would wear a face mask in the midst of an airborne pandemic?

This Presidunce doesn’t *do* protection.

If, say, Melania or Barron were attacked, you can be sure this cowardly chicken-hawk would run the other way.

Feeling unprotected (and literally being unprotected), many Americans are lost… or just losing it.

The Erotic Theater of the Mind

But hey, Mother Earth is blooming as her most toxic children hide inside, and it’s still the Merry Masturbation Month of May!

Whether it’s erotic, exotic or PG enough for Disney, your fantasy is your own self-contained little universe in which you make all the rules.  Anything is possible; nothing is forbidden.

Indeed, it’s mid-Masturbation Month, the center of the self-love storm.

Whatever your politics or religious beliefs, the best and safest sex in isolation is masturbation.

But jacking or jilling is more thrilling when you fantasize, tuning in to the Erotic Theater of the Mind.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage.”

For adults, as well as children, fantasy is often a lot more fun than reality, especially in quarantine where reality is pretty constricted.  Whether it’s erotic, exotic or PG enough for Disney, your fantasy is your own self-contained little universe, in which you make all the rules.  Anything is possible; nothing is forbidden.

Radio people call it the “Theater of the Mind.”

When it involves sex, I call it the Erotic Theater of the Mind.

The Immersive Theater Experience

It’s “immersive theater” in that you immerse yourself in your own “play,” fetish or fantasy, with or without a partner.

Photos 1,2,4: Harry Sapien.  Photo 3: Sunshine McWane.

The term “immersive theater” is used to describe productions in which the audience is “immersed” within the performance itself, often playing roles, conversing with the actors, stepping into the scene, and breaking the so-called “fourth wall”—the theatrical tradition in which an invisible, imagined barrier separates the actors from the audience.

Of course, audiences have been immersing themselves in theatrical performances since the first human performances which were probably fertility dances.

But the term has grown in popularity over the past few decades. I’ve been involved in the scene off and on since I played Columbine and Arlecchino with New England Commedia, a troupe of fellow Yale grads who put on politically-charged Commedia dell’Arte-style plays in parks and theaters where we’d often bring spectators onstage as well as go into the audience to perform our lazzi (comedic scenes). I also participated in the production of Tamara which used the grand old American Legion Post mansion to stage its award-winning immersive theater experiences.

In various ways, my immersive theater background helps me to help my sex therapy clients navigate their way through their fantasies in the Erotic Theater of the Mind.

Intramersive Media

So I’m very happy to welcome special guests Carly Dwyer and Sharang Biswas of Intramersive Media, an immersive theater company based in Salem, Massachusetts, to my eighth Bedside Chat of the Coronapocalypse.

Carly is the director of Intramersive which, since she founded it in 2017, has mounted various immersive theater productions in a big old mansion as well as other venues.

Her background is in traditional theater, theater education and LARP (Live-Action Role-Play).

Photos: Harry Sapien

She’s also the mother of an eight-year-old who interrupts us at one point (though is never on camera) and active in her community of Salem, Massachusetts, home of the Salem Witch Trials.

Is Carly a witch?

Yes, she confesses, but nothing too exotic; just a “Celtic traditionalist,” which is as uncontroversial as being vegan in the 21^st century.

Though it probably would have earned her a hanging back in 1692.

She also happens to be a Harvard grad, which I try not to hold against her.

Though the Ely Exhibitionist in me can’t help but show her my “For God, For Country And For Yale” blue, needlepoint pillow and notorious Yale University thong.

Carly naturally counters with her Harvard crimson hair and lips.

Seriously though, between grads like Carly and Obama, Harvard’s got it all over Yale, whose awful grads include the Bush Crime Family and fellow Skull & Bonehead Steve Mnuchin.

Carly regales us with tales of immersive theater on terra firma as well as the virtual world.

Her partner in some of these projects is Sharang, an actor, writer, gamer, co-editor of Honey and Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games.

In tune with the theme, he’s sporting a leather harness around his chest on top his burgundy dress shirt, nicely framing his black tie.

“It’s my bondage business look,” he explains.

A graduate of Dartmouth, Sharang keeps the Ivy peace between Carly and me.

Being a game facilitator comes naturally to Sharang, and that’s essentially the role he assumes in the clip the two of them play from their current kink-positive, virtual immersive theater production, Pass the Sugar, Please by Clio Yun-Su Davis.

Sharang, whose name is Sanskrit, is also a sort of artist-in-residence with Intramersive. Though at this point, that “residence” is more or less online.

He had been all set to participate in an in-the-flesh immersive theater production with the Intramersive folks when suddenly (though we can’t say there weren’t warning signs), the Coronapocalypse fell upon us all like a ton of toxic bricks.

With no audience, how can you do any kind of theater, especially audience-participation theater?

Well, you find your audience online, and that is essentially what Intramersive is doing to survive the Coronapocalypse artistically, economically and, you could say, sexually.

Participating in a kinky immersive theater experience does enhance their own sex lives, Carly and Sharang confess.

Though this is theater, not porn or even softcore erotica, so the sex is more between the lines than in your face.

“The immersive theater experience helps participants better understand how to gain, give or deny consent in real life.”

In Pass the Sugar, Please, participants (each of whom pays $25 per ticket, and 75% of ticket sales go straight to the Intramersive actors) explore various types of sex and kink, but not in explicit terms.

Instead, they use metaphors, mostly the metaphor of food, specifically scones and fruit that you might find at an English-style tea party.

As Carly suggestively says on the clip, “Sometimes the challenge is not having the blueberry”

For lovers of Pass the Sugar, Please, the fun is in the tease.

You could call it a form of artistic, erotic edging.

When the topic turns to Masturbation Month, Carly tells the tale of the female Pass the Sugar, Please participant who created a bukkake scene with herself at the center, calling for all the waiters in the tea house to bring her cream—and more cream—for her scone.

It’s important to note that this is a consensual bukkake gangbang scene, portrayed as a rush of serving men dousing this woman’s scone with milky offerings, as consent is key to all Intramersive’s operations.

Indeed, the immersive theater experience helps participants better understand how to gain, give or deny consent in real life.

Sharang describes “The Echo of the Unsaid,” his own Honey and Hot Wax game in which “two ostensibly straight college boys explore unresolved sexual tension, and quite possibly, romantic attraction. You tell the story of sex by not talking about it, letting silence speak volumes.”

I could go on and on—we talk about a ton of stuff!—but you can listen above or watch below.

Immerse yourself!

We all agree that many different art and entertainment forms, as well as politics and religion, can be deeply immersive on and offline.

Moreover, each of us has stories to tell of how our immersive theater experiences can be healing, and physically and mentally therapeutic .

Erotic Theater Therapy

Immersive theater therapy is really nothing new, especially when it comes to sex therapy.

About a century ago, in 1919, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld founded an institute for erotic exploration in the liberal city of Weimar Berlin, housing an immense sex library (later burned by the Nazis), right after WWI and the awful parallel to the pandemic we’re now going through: The Influenza of 1918-19.

It was also at the start of the Roaring Twenties when everybody partied like bonobos (giving us hope that maybe we’ll have a artistic erotic renaissance of our own after we “get through” the Coronapocalypse).

Besides providing educational and medical services, the Hirschfeld Institute featured theatrical presentations on various sexual fetishes and orientations, attended by therapists, patients of the Institute and dramatic artists of the time, like Christopher Isherwood (who wrote I Am a Camera that later became Cabaret) and the great poet W.H. Auden, many of whom participated in these immersive erotic theater experiences.

Then there are such venerated theater therapy techniques as “psychodrama” based on Dr. Jacob L. Moreno’s “Theater of Spontaneity,” Dr. Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy, Jungian archetypal dramatization, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg’s system of “Nonviolent Communication,” and Michel Foucault’s concepts of Ars Erotica (“erotic art”) and Scientia Sexualis (“science of sexuality”).

Thousands of years earlier, Aristotle formulated his famous view of theater as not just a form of entertainment, but as a means to understand the problems of life.

Aristotle got his ideas from the ancient Greek tragedies and comedies—not to mention their grand athletic competitions—that were themselves based on classical mythology, filled with sex, love, romance, heroism, fantasy and desire.

Acting out these primeval myths in Spring Equinox Rites of Eleusis and other gatherings, early human societies experienced the ecstasy and sometimes agony of immersive theater therapy.

Yes, agony; these early immersive experiences were not for the faint of heart, as participants might be scarred or even sacrificed to the “gods.”

Photos: Harry Sapien

Though the “gods” of capitalism demand equally odious sacrifices from “essential workers” and their families in the Coronapocalypse, our online theater games are almost danger-free.

Tom Gets Cuckolded

Nothing in real-life is danger-free, as we learn for the umpteenth time in our chat with Tom, the self-described cuckold, who calls in to the show just before we interview the Intramersive folks.

Tom found me through my Sperm Wars video (or maybe it was the article) which offers an evolutionary biology explanation of why so many guys—including celebrities and politicians—are aroused by cuckolding, whether they *like* it or not.

Like many men, Tom finds himself turned on by the fantasy—as well as the reality—of his girlfriend having sex with another man.

But he’s also disturbed by it.

He doesn’t like “humiliation,” which accompanies most cuckold porn, even though couples who actually practice cuckolding and swinging in real life rarely include humiliation.

It all went down pretty spontaneously for Tom. He was partying with his girlfriend and another female plus two other males, when the two ladies started having sex together, which was fun and easy on the eyes. But then one of the guys got involved, then the other two got in the game, including him, and before anyone could say “orgy,” that’s what they were having.

For many guys, this would be a dream-cum-true. And it was for Tom… until after he climaxed, at which point, he (like so many guys) started to feel bad, guilty, ashamed and confused.

Most of his confused feelings stem from seeing his girlfriend have sex with one of the guys, which turns him on (yes, it still does!), thanks to the Sperm Wars effect. But it also bothers him, thanks to society denigrating men who “let” their wives or lovers have sex with other guys.

Since we don’t have much time, I just give him some basic tips (listen above or watch below to find out what they are), and suggest he join Bonoboville to find like-minded folk with whom to explore these things.

Photos 1-2: Sunshine McWane.  Photo 3: Selfie.

Of course, he can also call the Therapists Without Borders of the Institute. Having practiced it for over two decades, cuckold therapy is one of our specialties, whether you’re looking for serious sex therapy or just fun fantasy roleplay.

Speaking of playing, bonobos are the masters and mistresses of primate play. We can learn a lot from the Bonobo Way about the individual and societal benefits of play.

Sadly, like many mammals, bonobos can catch COVID-19 too. Every human life is important, but we also need to save the highly endangered bonobos, and a portion of all Bonobo Way sales goes to that goal.

Immersive Love

As we wind up the show, we readjust our masks and assemble in the dining area for some of Ana’s delicious pasta and champagne.

We look like we’re participating in some ancient immersive theater ritual for which the performers would often wear masks.

Masks are a common theatrical prop used to convey character, comedy, tragedy or fear.

In the immersive theater of American politics, masks have come to symbolize all sorts of things, from civic responsibility (for most people, including scientists) to “weakness” —for those who, like the Trumpus, are infected with toxic masculinity.

It’s true that masks are not terribly comfortable and they hide our beautiful mouths, cheeks and noses, making it difficult to converse since a large amount of communication (especially if you’re a little hard of hearing) involves face-reading.

But that’s a small price to pay if these masks protect us, our loved ones and other fellow humans from a deadly virus.

Personally, I take pleasure in the theatrical nature of wearing a mask.

It really brings out the roleplayer in me.

Photos: Selfie

Though I must confess it feels so good to take off the mask (and other things) and immerse myself in my beloved Capt’n Max’s arms.

May 16, 2020 Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For speaking engagements, call 213-291-9497.