‘Perversity’ can test one’s perseverance

A “misstep” is just about the mildest word I can think of to describe this production.

The word “painful” also comes to mind. A combination of elements have come together to make the Spokane Civic’s Studio Theatre production of “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” a difficult play to sit through – and it barely lasts an hour.

Those elements are, roughly in order of importance:

“ A hopelessly dated play. This early David Mamet work might have seemed excitingly transgressive in the mid-1970s, but now it just seems crude and sophomoric.

“ A fatal lack of comic energy. The only way to make this play sharp, pointed or even tolerable is to play it the way it was clearly written – as a wicked black comedy. This production, directed by Wes Deitrick, offers little in the way of satirical edge and not nearly enough laughs. It is a bad sign when the biggest laugh in the play comes when Danny burps into a toilet.

“ Non-stop R-rated dialogue, which might make even the cast of HBO’s “Deadwood” blush. Mamet is notorious for his obscene language, so that’s no surprise. What might come as a surprise is the, umm, vivid verbal sexual imagery (although everyone does stay clothed at all times).

“ Characters who are 100 percent devoid of likeable qualities. At first, I thought that Mamet was setting up a bad-guy, good-guy tension with his two male characters, Bernie and Danny. Bernie is, from the first scene, portrayed as a hostile Neanderthal when it comes to women. Danny seemed to be kinder and gentler – until he, too, reveals himself to be a hostile Neanderthal.

“ A lack of coherent meaning or message. In the few stretches of dialogue that go beyond crude male locker room banter, the two female characters deliver brief philosophical monologues. In one of those, Deborah talks about watching her mother cook and “sublimation.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

Don’t get me wrong. Deitrick and his four-person cast try hard, admirably hard, to make this into a searing Mamet satire. Damon Mentzer, in particular, is almost scary-good as a piggish, despicable spinner of tall bedroom tales, one of which ends with gasoline sloshed on the walls and a Bic flicked.

Paul D. Villabrille as Danny, Jolene Smith as Joan and Shayla Keating as Deborah are also good actors, yet they are all too … nice … to play such miserable characters. And more credit to them for that.

Because if I thought for even a minute that this play represents the way people relate to each other, then there is no hope for the human race.

And the only hope for making “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” into a great night of theater is to somehow nail the perfect serio-comic tone in which nasty becomes nasty-funny. It didn’t happen on opening night, and I wonder if it can happen at all in 2006.