Still crazy after all these years

ACT brings David Mamet's Sexual Perversity into the 21st century

By Robert Avila

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Bernie (Gareth Saxe) and Danny (David Jenkins) are guys' guys, circa 1976: scanning the pavement and the beachfront for signs of the opposite sex, instantly rating body parts, bestowing praise or scorn accordingly and without mercy. Of course, if it weren't for the flared pants and chest hair, a garish moustache, a reference to the ERA, and one or two other trace references, you might not notice it's 1976 (or Chicago) at all. Which is to say that, as an investigation of the morbid convolutions of American heterosexual romance, David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago has hardly aged.

The playwright's first commercial production, and a major theatrical success when it premiered off-Broadway in 1976, Sexual Perversity concerns the romantic hang-ups and letdowns of four Chicago twentysomethings, office mates Bernie and Danny, and roommates Joan (Elizabeth Kapplow) and Deborah (Marjan Neshat). While it can hardly be expected to have the same impact of then-twentysomething Mamet's bold debut, American Conservatory Theater's slick and well-cast production all in all proves a worthy and enjoyable revival.

Thanks partly to Mamet's rich linguistic palette and his capacity to coldly (and hilariously) deploy it in the service of brutal portraiture, Sexual Perversity even retains a degree of shock value in its verbal and thematic (never graphic) explicitness, on ground long colonized by similarly frank investigations of heterosexual desire and romance in late-20th-century America (from Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge, for instance, to Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men).

Young and naive Danny puts supreme confidence in a regrettable role model, his pal Bernie – a mammoth bullshitter (in the vein of so many Mamet characters to come) and a comically unselfconscious misogynist. But if everything Bernie says is clearly, on the face of it, a load of (often hysterical) hooey, that makes him only the most obvious case among a set of characters who never quite mean what they say, or know exactly what they mean when they say it. So deep is this trouble that the play finally illustrates more than the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of communication and understanding between the sexes, as Deborah's allegiance slips from roommate Joan to new boyfriend Danny, and Bernie builds a jealous obsession with Deborah and Danny's new relationship.

Because the funny dialogue is captivating, you might miss the fact that the words often mean nothing – or, rather, refer to things (shampoo bottles, Korea, cookies, etc.) other than what anyone actually wants or needs at a given moment. Beyond the malapropisms, the slips of the tongue, or the moments of hyperinarticulateness, Sexual Perversity depicts a bleak world of empty souls, albeit with luminous satirical energy.

Director Peter Riegert (who originated the role of Danny off-Broadway) draws four strong performances from his ensemble cast, while scenic designer Kent Dorsey's raked stage sets several tiered platforms into a minimalist, metallic frame to elegantly accommodate the play's multiple and rapid scene changes. The quick succession of scenes (some consisting of a mere line or two) lends the play something like a comic-strip aspect. Bridged by taut passages of Chicago-style electric blues, this disjointed and somewhat uneven series can grow a little wearisome. Still, the play retains charm and power. The inspired humor in some lines clearly has no half-life. And the germ of themes Mamet would elaborate on (including in his next effort, American Buffalo, which ACT staged brilliantly a few seasons back) appears here in an already sophisticated form. So does his masterfully honed dialogue, which makes such distinct but perspicacious music of the insistent rhythms, hobbled syntax, and queasy semantics of daily speech.

Here too begins Mamet's fascination with the whole problem of seduction in a world whose principal currency is desire, perpetually frustrated, with its sights on some heroic self-image half grasped, incompletely understood. Seduction here entails not the failed attempt to explain one's self to the other, but playing the game for its own sake. It's a necessarily open-ended process – since nothing kills desire as fast as getting what you want.

SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO Through Feb. 5, Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. Also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m. (no matinee Jan. 25) Sun., 2 p.m. (also Jan. 29, 7 p.m.) Geary Theater 415 Geary, SF $12-$66 (415) 749-2228 www.act-sf.org