Playwright Bruce Norris, who
most effectively skewered issues of racial politics in his Pulitzer Prize and
Tony Award winning play Clybourne Park a couple of years back, has turned his
eye toward a new target—that of gender politics—in Domesticated, now on view at
the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.
Domesticated gives us Norris’s
take on the war between the sexes in a way that places the play in a most
interesting juxtaposition to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, currently in revival on
Broadway (link to review here).
Both deal with infidelity. But
whereas Pinter’s approach is to peel back the characteristically British layers
of reserve and repression to reveal the pain beneath the surface, Norris opts
for the American in-your-face route, where emotions and opinions are out there
for everyone to inhale like so much second-hand smoke.
Mr. Norris has drawn his
inspiration from the sexual shenanigans of real-life public figures like Bill
Clinton, Anthony Weiner, and Eliot Spitzer. In doing so, he has run the risk of
offering up an evening’s entertainment that could be viewed as little more than
an all-too-easy comedy skit. The truth is, there is a good bit of that (how
could there not be, given the target?), but Domesticated is also a provocative
work about the inability of men and women to ever understand one another.
As the play opens, we find
ourselves listening to a dry presentation by a teenage girl, Cassidy (Misha
Seo), who is showing slides of various representations of sexual dimorphism
within the animal kingdom. She will
continue to do this at several points during the play, providing more and more
unusual examples that serve to make sly reference to her “men are from Mars;
women are from Venus” adoptive parents, the clueless and self-justifying Bill
(Jeff Goldblum) and the hell-hath-no-fury Judy (Laurie Metcalf).
The very first scene
following the brief slide show is one that will be quite familiar to pretty
much anyone who owns a television set.
Bill, a physician-turned-politician, is holding one of those
confessional press conferences with his loyal wife at his side. It seems that a prostitute with whom he was
having an assignation lies in a coma brought on by a head injury she sustained
while she and Bill were together—and covering it up is not an option.
Judy’s silent show of
support quickly dissipates when the pair are alone and more details of his
escapades emerge, including the fact that he has been a long-time customer of
the sex-for-hire industry. Bill, who is
inordinately gifted at finding ways to make a bad situation worse, rationalizes
that he has lied about everything out of respect for Judy. Later, when he is forced to step down from
office and cannot find work as a physician (he is, ironically, a gynecologist, unlikely
to engender much trust from any would-be patients) Judy suggests he can always
find work as a pimp—a bitter but very funny line when delivered with Ms. Metcalf’s
perfect timing.
Throughout all of these
travails, Bill is not only castigated by his wife, but also by the couple’s
other daughter, Casey (Emily Meade), an avowed women’s rights advocate with a
teenager’s unerring capacity for holding her parents accountable to an
unreachable level of perfection. Between
Judy and Casey, Bill does not get to utter another word until the end of the
first act, when he declares he is leaving because he is “not happy.” (Mr. Goldblum does a stellar job of
expressing himself through pained facial expressions during the long period of
his character’s enforced silence).
If Judy has her say in first
half of the play, Act II belongs to Bill, who seems to have taken as his role
model the totally clueless idiot played by Larry David in the long-running HBO
comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. Bill tries
to make a life for himself, even managing to talk his way into a low-paying job
at a medical clinic. But he spends much
of the time shooting off his mouth, and subsequently shooting himself in the
foot as well, as a self-appointed guardian of men in their never-ending battle
with “women!”
This is not a play that ends
with any great breakthrough or epiphanies.
In the end, Bill and Judy share a ceasefire, which may as good as it
will ever get.
In the capable hands of Ms.
Metcalf and Mr. Goldblum, as well as the rest of the excellent cast and
director Anna D. Shapiro, Domesticated is a strong follow-up to Clybourne Park,
in which cluelessness, misunderstanding, and miscommunication also served to
trip up the best efforts of the characters to get along. Perhaps this is Mr. Norris’s great strength
as a playwright, the ability to help us to see how difficult it is for any of
us to empathize with those who are dissimilar—in terms of race, gender,
socio-economic status, or any other cultural indicator.
Wonder what he could do with
the red/blue political divide that has ensnared this nation in recent
years.
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