Review: Sexual Perversity in Chicago by Paladin Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs

Charles Stites fits so entirely and comfortably into the horrible male characters of David Mamet that one has to wonder if the man is, in fact, acting.

 

Mind you, he is a performer of great presence and élan vital, as anyone could see when he was onstage in City Theatre's Glengarry, Glen Ross by Mamet and in the title role of its Tartuffe by Molière.  It's just that for this new theatre grouping Stites chose Mamet's 1974 one-act, he directed it, and he portrays the central character Bernie Litko, an assertive, energetic total asshole who entirely dominates this series of blackout sketches.

 

The press photo captures pretty precisely the relationships among these four characters.  Bernie expostulates; the self-effacing Danny listens to Bernie as if he were Moses coming down from the Sears Tower with a long list of commandments on sexual relations; Deborah the illustrator is sweet and uncertain; and Joan the kindergarten teacher, with no male in her life, is the outsider, Deborah's coach and her neglected roommate.

 

 

Here's "Mamet-speak" galore, especially with Bernie's bristling vulgarity and snarling intimidation.  Bernie is an irremediable adolescent, full of self regard, mendacity and concupiscient greed for the bodies of women.  Written and first performed in the mid-1970's as women were moving painfully out of their assumed subservience in American life, Sexual Perversity in Chicago must have appealed especially to two large groups: those males who shared Bernie's view of women as "cunts" and those females whose very worst assumptions about men were personified by Bernie Litko. 

 

Mamet delights in the vulgarities.  Not just the four-letter words, although there are plenty of those, but also in crude jokes, descriptions of sexual encounters, and salivating descriptions of pornography. This is an extended aria in testosterone, framing the delicately developing relationship between Danny and Deborah and overwhelming it.  You know their breakup is complete when Danny labels her with that same four-letter word for female genitalia, even though his pale, disappointed use of it is no more than a whispered echo of his friend Bernie.

 

Mason  Stewart as Danny plays the straight man to Stites' Bernie, an impressive exercise in restraint by an actor who has previously demonstrated his own wild streak.  Briana McKeague as Deborah is attractive, vulnerable, and, eventually, petulant rather than destroyed by the impossibility of linking men and women.  Ironically, it's Breanna Stogner as leftout roommate Joan who is the the sexiest character onstage.  Convinced of her own undesirability, surrounded by immaturity both at work and at home, she has a baffled, unexploited sensuality.  Along with her squared-off build, dark hair and flashing eyes, she has a fetching little moue that appears under stress, twisting those eminently kissable lips.

 

Sexual Perversity in Chicago is a blast from the past, in the detonating sense of the word.  Stites and company implicitly ask the audience just how much things have changed in the 26 years since Mamet wrote it.  You'll have plenty of opportunities for appalled laughter.  The piece ends abruptly, following a scene in which the two guys, in sunglasses, are sitting in beach chairs, with Bernie commenting rabidly about the women around them and Danny trying to rise to his level of engagement.  Oh, God, it's as if they are arrested forever in the hell of a fourteen-year-old's hormones.  Perhaps it explains the survival of the species, but it says damn little for the culture or the civilization.

 

Comments by webmaster, TheatreAustin at Yahoo groups, May 14

Review by Veronica Prior at "Rants by Ronni, Scourge of the Internet," May 25

Review by Avimaan Syam for the Austin Chronicle, May 27

Review by Olin Meadows for AustinOnStage.com, May 29

 

Click to view program for Sexual Perversity in Chicago by Paladin Theatre Company

 

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Sexual Perversity in Chicago
by David Mamet
Paladin Theatre Company