Brisbane playwright Sven Swenson knows nudity is good way to get people into theatres, but there’s much more to his decision to put 13 naked men on stage in his new play.

In the opening scene of The Truth About Kookaburras, the action takes place in a football club dressing room where the first few minutes of dialogue are exchanged in the buff.

“I’m writing about the search for male identity in the 21st century,” Swenson says.  “I thought that the most compelling physical image of that was the nude male form.  To have 13 naked men on stage is overwhelming.”

“As a writer you go through those arguments with yourself of ‘That’s a big ask, will the audience accept it?’ ” Swenson says.  “I think male nudity is something we shy away from in contemporary art, and I wanted to harness the power of it on stage.  A couple of people have said, ‘Are you doing it for the titillation factor?’ but if I was going to do that, I’d have left it until the end.

“It’s also that we see them physically naked in the opening minutes of Act One, but emotionally naked later when they’re clothed,” he says.

The Truth About Kookaburras is the latest in a long list of plays by Swenson. Previous works include the inaugural winner of the Premier’s Drama Award, Road to the She-Devil’s Salon, as well as Heavenly Bodies and Beautiful Souls, Wiredancer’s Waltz and Dangerfield Park, a finalist in the Premier’s Drama Award last year.

“It took me a long time to get the courage to write it.  I knew it would need to be a frank, fly-on-the-wall approach if it wasn’t to be just a naff attempt.”

The play tells the story of a buck’s night at the Kookaburras’ football club.  A raucous party of booze, strippers and testosterone ensues, but by morning one player is dead and a long-buried secret revealed.  While partly inspired by true accounts of footballers behaving badly, Swenson mostly drew from his experiences as a security guard for a stripper while working as a young actor in Melbourne many years ago.

A murder mystery, the play ultimately examines the nature of masculinity in a post-feminist age where traits of traditional manhood can be met with disapproval.  Conversations with friends and strangers played an important role in the research process.

“One guy in his early 20s was saying it was so fantastic how far women have come, with the knowledge that we haven’t reached equality in so many ways.”

“But he was saying there are things that have been taken away from men, and asking what replaces them? We are no longer the breadwinner or protector, necessarily. Our identities have been wrapped up in that for thousands of years. In such a short space of time that’s changed, and probably for the greater good. But then what does it leave men with? Women have a trajectory that they’re still on in order to achieve and gain true equality, but men I think don’t know where to go any more. What is our trajectory?”

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We need more playwrights like Sven in America, especially here in Texas.