Broadway: home to classic dramas, lavish musical numbers, and... puppet sex scenes.

During the second act of Hand to God, the newly Tony-nominated play, a devilish (literally) sock puppet named Tyrone reveals that he's a virgin, and then proceeds to have raunchy sex with a lady sock puppet. The two teens whose hands are inside the puppets make uncomfortable, but meaningful conversation while the puppets, well, perform.

Though thematically not at all similar, Hand to God has drawn comparisons to a previous Broadway tenant, Avenue Q, now running Off-Broadway, because of the presence of puppet coitus. The circumstances are different: in Hand to God the sex distracts Tyrone, who has overtaken the hand and possibly soul of a meek teen named Jason, from wreaking more havoc on the church basement he has already defaced; in Avenue Q the romantic leads get together. However, there's a fundamental similarity in that two puppets that don't have genitals—or, let's face it, legs—get it on in a relatively graphic manner.

So how do you choreograph a puppet sex scene? Esquire asked Hand to God director Moritz von Steulpnagel and Avenue Q director Jason Moore to explain.

Experimentation is a must.

According to both von Stuelpnagel and Moore, getting this type of scene right requires a lot of time working with the actors and simulating various sex acts with puppets. "There was definitely a lot of me, calling out to the room, What does reverse cowgirl look like? No, that doesn't look as strong as doggy style. What does this position look like?" von Stuelpnagel says. Avenue Q's process involved a "long porn-inspired list of what are a bunch of positions and things that can happen in bed that look funny on the puppets," Moore says.

It's a blessing that puppets don't have genitals.

In Hand to God and Avenue Q, a human's arm is in place of where the puppets' lower extremities would be. "So what you're really doing is you're trying to offer up enough information so the audience can fill in the rest with their imagination," von Stuelpnagel says. For Moore's purposes, the vagueness of the puppets' privates is a "gift" because it means you don't have to be that graphic. On the other hand, no actual sex organs means that you can get away with a lot more—or at least let the audience think you are getting away with more. "When she's giving him the handjob she's like rubbing his arm; when she's giving him a blowjob it's more about sound effects and all that kind of stuff," von Stuelpnagel explains. "Because you're able to fill in the rest with your imagination, I think it makes it all the dirtier than if we were actually to show you everything." For what it's worth, the lack of genitals didn't stop the MPAA from going after the famous marionette sex scene in Team America: World Police.

Not everything works on puppets.

Von Stuelpnagel says the Hand to God crew figured out that some Kama Sutra positions didn't work because it just wasn't clear what the puppets were actually doing. Same goes for reverse cowgirl: "Suddenly all you see are elbows and arms you are no longer seeing actually the puppets' faces." As for what Moore and the Avenue Q folks learned from their puppet sex experience: "Eating someone's ass is a very hard puppet thing to do because the other person's arm is in the way. We did try it but it doesn't look right." Ultimately, Hand to God stuck with the familiar. "They go missionary to cowgirl to doggy, which I guess is a pretty classic progression of moves, with some oral to warm up," von Stuelpnagel says.

Be conscious of the humans involved.

"Much like actual sex limbs sometimes get in the way," von Stuelpnagel says. In Avenue Q, the actors have to put themselves in "crazy" and "super-uncomfortable" positions to make it look like the puppets are having sex. But, in a way, physical discomfort just adds to the reality of the situation. "We found that just like regular sex, sometimes transition from one to another is not as graceful as you might have expected it be in your mind or what have you," von Stuelpnagel says. "A lot of that awkwardness requires a certain amount of choreography to keep the level of fantasy. I think that same time of coordination is true in life, too." Even without visible puppeteers, puppet sex can reveal realities of human sex: As Trey Parker told Esquire regarding his puppet sex scene, "What's funny is how real it looks. You realize that's about how sloppy people really look when they're doin' it."

Know your audience.

Though von Stuelpnagel explains that for the most part the scene is well-choreographed, the actors are "adjusting in a number of ways to the audience, how they're reacting." Responses vary. When the show was running Off-Broadway, von Stuelpnagel heard tell of some audience members who were turned on—perhaps a little too much so—by the scene. "There were a few people who sort of revealed to us that they were doing things in the theater that we really didn't want to know that they were doing in the theater," he says.

Puppet sex can get deep, man.

Conversations about puppet sex veer very easily into psychology. "When you read the books about puppets and their place in history and their place in psychology and their place in child development, it really is amazing how across centuries and centuries puppets or representations of the human form, effigies, drawings, have become part of how we identify as being human," Moore says. "In this particular case all that heady shit gets put into it's funny to watch a version of yourself having slightly ugly, unabashed sex." Von Stuelpnagel's theory of why puppet sex is so effective: "That's why I think all these things are so exciting, they at once acknowledge the awkwardness of sex, but at the same time their complete lack of self-consciousness make them feel all powerful or liberated in some perverse, twisted way."

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