Sexual Perversity in Chicago: Skimming the Mucky Surface

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Sexual Perversity in Chicago: Skimming the Mucky Surface

Hyde Park Theatre,

through June 24

Running Time: 1 hr, 10 min

The skeeze pantheon is a sphere to which David Mamet is no stranger. A master of the cynical, reprehensible pettiness and sleaze that lurks in each of us, Mamet is a patron saint of dysfunction, and nowhere more so than in his raunchy, depressing 1976 play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the last play on earth to which you'd want to take a first date.

A four-character ode to the battle of the sexes and the unexamined life, Sexual Perversity documents a series of interactions between Bernard and Danny, sex-obsessed co-workers completely out of touch with their feelings, and Deborah and Joan, frustrated roommates quick to anger. (People who take Mamet to be a misogynist should notice how baseness here transcends gender lines.) Everyone is perpetually pissed -- as in pissed-off or piss-drunk -- so the fact that one is struck with a profound desire to take a shower upon exiting this show is no slander on the new troupe, Flood Theatre Project, which is producing it.

Flood Theatre is, however, accountable on several other scores. No one in the play is supposed to be sympathetic, and no one is. Still, the characters should have a little depth in their ickiness, and the cast, recent UT grads in their early 20s, is (understandably) not quite weathered enough to pull off the degree of dangerous, pathetic squalor required. The wide variety of slurs bandied about come off as posturing rather than legitimate threats. Bradley Goertz does nevertheless succeed in making Bernie loud and disgusting. Ryan King adds some nuance to Danny's burgeoning (and abruptly arrested) sensitivity. Robin Le Mon is convincingly bitter as Joan. Kristin Chiles is appropriately cranky as Deborah.

But why do this play at all? Written in 1976, Sexual Perversity acts its age. Dense with four-letter words and relationship-phobic lines like "Everything's fine until you want to get closer," this is no product of the post-PC era, and director Matthew Zamias' update strategies fall short of making the play viable as a commentary on modern-anything. Giving Bernie, the schmucky loudmouth, a cell phone was a good idea, but the other attempts at contemporizing consist of weak lines like this one tacked on to a rant about equal rights: "We got little boys swimming in from Cuba ..." Flood wants to bring "no-frills hardcore American realism to the stage," but this kind of reality -- skanky Seventies reality -- is a sewer off of which this fresh-faced troupe but skims the mucky surface.