SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO
Bernie’s near-breakdown is director Joe Jahraus’s most inspired choice in this production, because it demonstrates his keen understanding of the seriousness of the stakes in Mamet’s play. This is not a cute comedy about the singles scene, like the bastardized film version of the play, About Last Night . . . Rather it is a powerful and nearly debilitating indictment of what one character calls “the physical and mental mutilations we perpetrate on each other, day in, day out . . . trying to fit ourselves into a pattern we can neither understand . . . nor truly afford to investigate.” The pattern in question is our culture’s ideas about sex and sex roles and the violence inherent in those ideas, a pattern so insidious that it is nearly inescapable.
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This production ably explores Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and though it never fully gels, it does offer enough moments of insight and emotional complexity to make for a thought-provoking evening.
