Cultural obsolescence: When does it happen? Check your watch. It just did.
Sure, the shelf life of a piece of entertainment hinges on how swiftly the pop-art pendulum swings—and it swings like a sonofabitch in this media-mad hamster wheel of a nation, frenzied with sexual and psychological exhibitionism.
But can a 30-year-old play from the pre-AIDS, condom-free '70s still impart contemporary, even evergreen, ideas about modern mores? Namely, that a painful emptiness underscores all that libertine rutting ushered into our lives when the boomers came to cultural power? That boundless humping and grinding may have rendered us sexually sophisticated, but not emotionally richer? That a restless crotch doesn't beget a happy heart?
The word "Duh" leaps to mind.
All now obvious, three decades after a country got off without guilt. All still worth absorbing in a country screwing more selectively. All entertainingly sermonized when the preacher is David Mamet, whose clearly-aged Sexual Perversity in Chicago gets a well-staged translation at Community College of Southern Nevada. This is a curiously relevant relic that archly examines mating rituals of the '70s—the sexual revolution blossoming from its late-'60s seedlings.
In today's porn-saturated/Sex and the City/"If you suffer from erectile dysfunction, ask your doctor about ..." era, a female character in Perversity ruminating on the gustatory merits of male ejaculate isn't a sexual shocker. (Kim Cattrall must have opined on it a dozen times, easy.) Even glancing backward, Perversity's tits talk, c--k gossip, come quips and p---y palaver were beaten to the stage by cutie nudie musicals such as Oh! Calcutta! and Hair, and opened the same year (1974) as Let My People Come.
But with coarse poetry, Mamet tells timeless truths about our gender jihads. If the culture surpassed him in pure graphic detail and body-parts-on-parade saturation, it can't eclipse his vulgarity-powered, emotionally resonant observations of the human animal's core instincts. He simply does it better than most, even if Exhibit A now feels faintly like a museum piece under glass.
The nudity-free Perversity (which was softened from Mamet's raw, roaring dialogue into the 1986 Brat Pack flick, About Last Night) is a series of scenes, monologues and dialogues tracing the relationship arc of Danny and Deborah (Shane Cullum and Lori Kay), with perspectives from Danny's loutish, horndog friend, Bernie (T.J. Larsen) and Deborah's man-leery gal pal, Joan (Sarah Welborn). Mamet begins with a bang of an "I Banged Her" story in which Bernie tells Danny of his sex romp that ends with a WWII battle soundtrack and a room in flames. Is it true? We don't know with Bernie, who covers himself in sexual braggadocio and has given up on women once their feet hit the floor in the morning. And in Bernie's failed pickup of Joan—apparently soured on the male species after disasters of her own—we find two burned people, one hiding in sex, the other hiding from sex, and both oddly coaching their friends from the sidelines.
That happens after Danny, hungry for more than a Bernie-type score, meets Joan's roommate, Deborah, who at first tells him she's a lesbian, but then drops her guard enough for a romantic spark to ignite. Joan seems to hate Danny just on gender principle, but a swoony Deborah soon moves in with Danny, as Mamet steers them through their tentative get-to-know-you stage, their sexual and emotional euphoria as they find a groove as a couple, then the end: two confused people angry that they can't seem to talk to one another, and frustrated that they don't know why.
Finley Bolton's crisp direction paces Mamet's relentless writing, though the actors' dialogue occasionally loses its conversational tone, feeling more like swapped line readings breathless to catch up to the playwright. Her staging—buttressed by Joe Buttry's set of variously sized blocks serving as tables, desks, beds and bars, and Ann Sylvester's blackout lighting—works well. The guys even venture into the audience for a funny porn-watching scene.
The performances are uniformly good: Kay—cute, sexy and vulnerable as Deborah—and Cullum—with his average-guy affability—make us believe they bring the best intentions to their relationship, rendering its downturn more affecting. As the man-averse Joan, Welborn never overplays it to the point of cranky caricature.
And a loosey-goosey Larsen—feasting on Mamet after directing Test Market's Speed the Plow—goes balls-out as Bernie, giving free, funny rein to the male creature's baser impulses. To his mind, he's Mr. Charm. To women, he's Mr. Smarm.
As Perversity wraps up with a despondent Deborah moving back in with Joan and a dejected Danny rating tits and ass on a beach with Bernie, Mamet has suggested that mutual genitalia satisfaction doesn't solve everything—or anything—when two hearts can't come to a common understanding. A downbeat denouement, but Mamet's foul-mouthed wit and eye and ear for behavioral detail lend it humanity.
He may be a vulgarian, but he's an honest, soulful vulgarian.