Contributor Jim Gladstone discovers Cock at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center.
Following the customary pre-show exhortations to take note of emergency exits and switch off cellular phones, the house manager at the New Conservatory Theater gets a quick titter from the audience when she smiles and intones, “And now, enjoy Cock.”
That almost obligatory joke provides the last cheap laugh in the West Coast premiere of British playwright Mike Bartlett’s provocatively titled 90-minute one act, running through October 12.
Todd Pivetti, Stephen McFarland. Photo by Lois Tema via The Broadway Blog.
The smart, staccato production, directed by Stephen Rupsch, helps compensate for some missing nuances in Bartlett’s dark comic script—absences that will likely inspire lively post-theater debate among San Francisco audiences.
John, the central character, is the subject of a sexual and emotional battle between the long term boyfriend, identified only as M, who he dumps in the opening minutes and the new girlfriend, F, who he quickly takes up with in the breakup’s wake.
Though he’s the only character with a name, John is written as a bit of a cipher, and played as a whining maw of neediness by Stephen McFarland. Both M and W seem primarily attracted to John’s people-pleasing malleability; the very quality that ends up making all of their relationships untenable.
Todd Pivetti’s M has a critical, teasing confidence that—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—bruises John. When their relationship reaches its crisis point, though, he reveals unexpected tenderness, loyalty, and, frankly, his own neediness (For his face-to-face meeting with F, M invites his father along as wingman).
Meanwhile, though it’s easy to imagine the charismatic, charming Radhika Rao’s W as a temptation to John with her constant reassurances that he’s 100 percent perfect, it’s much harder to imagine a contemporary urban woman who would actually behave as she does.
W’s apparently unquestioning belief that M can switch off his homosexuality and have an entirely satisfying straight relationship with her stretches credibility. So, too, does the lack of any discussion of bisexuality in the script.
The play’s rapid-fire scenes alternate terse verbal tangoes between John and M and John and F, until all three—plus Daddy, come together in the evening’s penultimate face-off. They’re set in a central, sawdust-covered playing area, surrounded on all four-sides by audience seating covered in burlap sackcloth over which hovers a wooden, wagon-wheel-styled chandelier.
This scenic design, by Devin Kasper, is more appropriate to the play than the hit off-Broadway’s production, which evoked a Greek amphitheater. Like the fairground cockfight this set evokes, Bartlett’s play is a smart entertainment with a bit of a trumped up carny quality to the battle. It’s by no means a classic, but a rousing attraction nonetheless.
Cock
New Conservatory Theatre Center
25 Van Ness Avenue at Market Street, San Francisco
Through October 12
Todd Pivetti, Stephen McFarland, Radhika Rao. Photo by Lois Tema via The Broadway Blog.