March 23--Such is the misogyny, cruelty and self-involvement of the three characters in "The Bachelors," a new play by Caroline V. McGraw about men behaving very, very badly, that they make playwright Neil LaBute's famously nasty dudes seem welcome at a gathering of feminists in support of Elizabeth Warren.
I don't doubt that McGraw, whose new play is enjoying a Chicago premiere from the Cole Theatre, intends this trio as an exaggerated observance of how low men can sink, and thus a cautionary tale for any woman who might cross paths with them. But the inherent existential problem with this 80-minute sensation-shocker -- be warned that you are in an intimate theater -- is that you are being asked to spend part of your evening with them and maybe even empathize with their lost souls a little. And, most assuredly, they are written to be absolutely not worth your time.
And thus neither is this show.
Kevlar (Nicholas Bailey), Henry (Boyd Harris) and Laurie (Shane Kenyon) are, variously, drunks, objectifiers, gropers, manipulators, abductors, drug pushers and rapists. Although their natural habitat, designed by Grant Sabin, is frat house-like, at least in the number of empty beer cans in plain view, they're actually three bachelors in their 30s -- one a scientist in a lab, one a business guy who goes to Vegas and one a, well, it's never quite clear what he does for a living. All conspire to undermine women at every turn.
There are such arrested males. But both the script -- and Erica Weiss' out-of-control, faux-method-y production -- have chronic issues with believability. Take, for example, the amount of drinking that goes on. Bailey's Kevlar starts out smashed out of his head -- we hear tell of the vast quantities of disparate alcohols that have contributed to his sorry state, a state so grim he is seriously unable to locate his own penis in the bathroom. (It happens, I guess.) Then we watch him down pretty much a whole bottle of whiskey. If this show were even remotely interested in veracity, he would either be at the hospital by now or, more likely, stone-cold dead.
Let's assume that McGraw -- who embraces risk and who can write potent dialogue -- is not that interested in realism here. Her metaphors are similarly problematic -- I found one of them offensive, actually, and I'm not easily offended. At the top of the show, Kevlar spins a tale about his misery due to discovering his girlfriend has ovarian cancer. She wants to see other people, he snivels, before she dies, an eventuality he quite vividly describes.
This may well be a crock, and that girlfriend is not a character in the show, so she has no agency. And that cancer metaphor just hangs out there, part of some darkly comic conceit with which it has only a tangential relationship. It is, at the very least, sufficiently uncomfortable to pull you out of the show and into the morality of cheap and easy shock for its own sake, devoid of the actual consequences of life. Even though "The Bachelors" really very much wants to engage with life.
You can see by now that this whole enterprise rubbed me the wrong way. You're only in there for 80 minutes but, at the end, you still feel like you need a shower without having enjoyed getting all dirty with these scumbags or learned any compensatory life lessons before your scrub.
Kenyon, who fleshes out his man more than the others, takes advantage of his better-written character. And there is, for sure, a genuinely impressive knock-down, hand-to-hand, we're-really-going-there fight between Kenyon's Laurie and Harris' Henry. Although doubtless directed with safety by the fight choreographer, David Woolley, I was fearing for the actors' bodies -- which, again, pulls you out of the show. And that is not a bad thing, especially if it takes you right out the door.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
1 STAR
When: Through April 10
Where: Greenhouse Upstairs Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Tickets: $25 at www.coletheater.org
