THE PORNOGRAPHIC MAN
And even if I did, I still wouldn’t have gotten much out of the Organic Greenhouse’s production of Jim Marcus’s The Pornographic Man, which raises these and other questions about human–well, male nature. But it’s all done in a most dull and pretentious way. We could go on and on debating the philosophical underpinnings of this misguided work, discussing whether the play exposes or exemplifies misogyny, arguing over whether it objectifies women or decries their objectification, but I think we’d be wasting our time. The questionable philosophy in Marcus’s play is not the root of its problem; the problem is it’s bad theater.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Fuck you.”
There might be something instructive in some of this if it were said well. Alas, it is not. Some of these ideas come up in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, to name a couple of possible influences; but Marcus’s play is much more amateurish. Perhaps he can defend the two-dimensionality of the female characters’ lines by saying that they’re computer generated, but are we to believe that John and Zeke’s boring, hackneyed dialogue came out of a computer too? The fuzzy plotting can’t be defended on these grounds; surely a computer play-writing program would have drawn the lines between reality, fantasy, and flashback more clearly. A computer-generated audience might find this play valuable, but most genuine members of the human race will find The Pornographic Man gross and offensive or dull and inane.
