Onstage nudity can be a stunt—for better or worse—or a crucial storytelling device. Until last weekend, you could catch the famous group nude scene in "Hair," in Central Park (don’t worry if you missed it, it’s coming to Broadway next year), and, next week, Daniel Radcliffe will bare all when "Equus" opens on Broadway. But there seems something appropriately pure about the Cell Theatre’s production, beginning tonight, of “Leaves of Grass: A Nude Choral Reading of Whitman’s Iconic Song of Myself, featuring a multicultural cast of twenty. The director, Jeremy Bloom, has said that the production "celebrates the bare human form as an intersection of nature and industry." Perhaps these lines from the poem tipped him off:

The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;

It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;

I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

"Leaves of Grass" plays through September 20th, at the Cell (338 W. 23rd St.).