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by Bruce Norris, directed by Philip Riccio

The Company Theatre & Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

November 19-December 19, 2015

Bill: “Restriction, reproduction, real estate”

American playwright Bruce Norris is best known for his comedy Clybourne Park, presented by Studio 180 and Canadian Stage in 2012, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2011.  His more recent play Domesticated from 2013, now receiving its Canadian premiere from the Company Theatre and Canadian Stage, will not enhance his reputation.  The play is an overlong, only fitfully funny satire nominally concerning what happens when a male public figure is caught in a sex scandal.  What, in fact, it is about is the decline of the importance of the male in general, and many other playwrights like August Strindberg and David Mamet have dealt with this topic before both more succinctly and with greater acumen.

Readers may recall a period in the late Noughties when it seemed that every few months a male politician of some sort – US Senator David Vitter in 2007, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford in 2009, US Congressman Anthony Wiener in 2011, among many others –  held a press conference, skirt-suited wife at his side, confessing to adultery.  The question that always arose was, “What is his wife thinking?”

At first it seems as if Domesticated was written to answer that question.  Bill (Paul Gross), a politician of some sort, holds a press conference with a mute, apparently supportive wife Judy (Martha Burns) at his side while he confesses that the story of his seeing a prostitute is true and that he will resign his office effective immediately.  At the first family dinner after the conference, we see that Judy is furious at Bill’s stupidity.  As Bill weeps into his napkin, his elder daughter Casey (Kelly McNamee), a budding feminist rants at him and his younger adopted daughter Cassidy (Abigail Pew) is silent and refuses to eat. 

Bill’s lawyer is Bobbie (Tori Higginson), Judy’s best friend, who outlines the case first to Bill, then to both Bill and Judy.  The situation is actually much worse than we first thought.  Bill had just finished paying the prostitute Becky (Vanessa Smythe), who was dressed in a schoolgirl uniform, when in a struggle over a spanking paddle, Becky somehow fell (or was pushed), hit her head on a bedside table and is now in a coma.  Judy is willing to believe that Bill could have made a one-time mistake, though the uniform and paddle are disturbing details, and she is certain that what happened in the hotel room must have been an accident.  Her last shred of support for him snaps when she learns that Becky was just the latest in a series of prostitutes Bill had used over the last ten years. 

Not only must Bill give up politics, but he must give up any hopes of returning to his profession as a gynaecologist full time.  Through the second half of the play we watch his decline into insignificance.

Structurally, the play has three interesting features.  First, Norris has made Bill the only male character in a dramatis personae of 27 female roles, including on transgender character (Salvatore Antonio) who insists she is female.  Second, he makes Bill primarily silent in Act 1 and Judy primarily silent in Act 2.  In Act 1, by far the more successful of the two, Bill says nothing between his confession at the beginning and a few remarks he makes at the very end.  In between he is constantly interrupted, lectured or browbeaten by the various women he encounters.  In Act 2, however, Bill is the primary speaker and we discover through his own behaviour and rants what a thoroughly despicable misogynist he is.  He sees that women are taking over and since they will soon be able to clone their eggs as sperm will have no need of men at all in the future.

Third, the entire play is framed as a lecture.  Cassidy, who never speaks otherwise, is giving what seems to be an illustrated school lecture on sexual dimorphism.  The lecture begins describing marked dimorphism where the male dominates, as in the ring-necked pheasant, where the male is larger, stronger and more colourful than the female or in antelopes, where males have elaborate horns and command harems of females.  Sometimes her announcement of an “example” will lead to a slide – sometimes it will lead to the next scene in the play, with Norris obviously suggesting we compare the two.  In Act 1, Cassidy’s examples deal with birds and mammals with the implication that monogamy is not a natural condition.  In Act 2, however, she begins with the spotted hyena in which the females are larger and stronger than the males and dominate them.  Her subsequent examples show species where males are more and more insignificant moving from seahorses, where the males receive the females’ eggs and hatch them, down to the anglerfish where the male is minute in comparison with the female and latches onto the female like a parasite, his body fusing down to the blood-vessel level with hers.

The satire in Domesticated is not at all clear.  When we finally hear Bill speak in Act 2 we learn what a jerk he is.  His view is that humans were meant to by polygamous and that females invented marriage because it provides them with the “three Rs” – “Restriction (of male lives), reproduction, real estate”.  Even if Bill’s statement is true, we still have to wonder why Norris has made virtually all of the 27 females surrounding him unethical, exploitative, hypocritical or delusional.  Bill’s mother (Nicole Lipman) believes Bill is still a good boy despite all the evidence.  Becky’s mother Jackie (Sarah Dodd) exploits her daughter’s plight by exhibiting her on talk shows with an Oprah-like host (Akosua Amo-Adem) who is more interested in pushing her own agenda than in listening to the mother’s story.  Even Judy is not untainted.  Bill fell for her after he saw her having sex with her Ethics professor in a car.

If women are taking over from men, Norris seems determined that we see that women are not superior.  This crypto-misogynist attitude is reinforced by Cassidy’s slide-show.  The ordering of her examples goes from males as dominant to males as insignificant, but the the overall scheme of the animals shown goes from structurally more complex creatures like bird and mammals to structurally more primitive creatures like seahorses and anglerfish.  Since Norris’s plot follows in line with Cassidy’s examples, Norris would seem to suggest that the increasing dominance of women over men in the world is a case of devolution to a lower states rather than evolution to a higher one. 

The implications of the play’s imagery and structure leave a bitter taste, especially in Act 2, where the unpleasantness of the context squelches any potential laughter.  Then, just to throw us for a loop, Norris concludes with an unexplained ending.  The second-last scene between Bill and Judy shows them farther apart than at any other point in the play.  yet, in their last scene, they for totally unknown reasons can amicably tolerate each other’s company once again.  There’s no answer except the final clichéd words, “Life is sad”. 

It really is not worth sitting for two hours and forty minutes to arrive at this point.  The ultimate study in male paranoia about the power of women over men is still August Strindberg’s disturbing drama The Father from 1887.  As for a modern parable about the decline of the American male, one need look no further than David Mamet’s Edmond from 1982, which accomplishes everything Norris does but in only 75 tense minutes.

The chief pleasure of the play is the performances of the actors.  Real-life husband and wife Paul Gross and Martha Burns have not acted on stage together for 30 years.  That is a great pity since they make a wonderful team.  Burns’s portrait of Judy is quite complex.  Initially, she shows how the wronged woman is inclined to forgive what she thinks is a one-time-only lapse in her husband.  But as more information comes out and as time goes on, Burns has Judy’s attitude harden toward Bill to the point of loathing.  When Judy refuses funds for her destitute husband to have a necessary operation, we can’t view her lack of compassion as a virtue.  Burns is not afraid to take us in this trajectory of empathy to alienation from her character.

In a reverse of the “What is she thinking?” question of the opening press conference, Norris gives Bill so much silence in Act 1 that we ask, “What is he thinking?”  Gross has Bill meekly sit by saying nothing, crushingly aware that he has become a persona non grata without the power to stand up to all the times women interrupt or tell him what he’s thinking.  At first this meekness suggests that Bill is chastened, but gradually Gross signals in his silence that rage is brewing beneath his placid façade.  In Act 2, where Norris allows Bill to ramble on freely, Gross shows how Bill’s fundamental misogyny taints everything he does. 

Although director Philip Riccio doesn’t not overcome the play’s overall vagueness, the production is still filled with excellent performances.  Tori Higginson believably contrasts Bobbie the lawyer when she’s sober and practical versus when she’s drunk and indiscreet.  Kelly McNamee presents Casey as a conflicted, anger-filled teenager who has uncritically latched onto feminism to the point where she shows no solidarity even with her supposed best friend.  Nicole Lipman is hilarious as Bill’s mother Ed, who takes a simplistic “boys will be boys” attitude to Bill’s criminal activity.  Lipman is also very funny as a society matron who drunkenly explains why she won’t contribute to Judy’s charity, and quite earnest as a fellow gynecologist of Bill’s who has to fire him for inappropriate behaviour.            

Akosua Amo-Adem is delicious as an Oprah clone who is more interested in showing her audience how much she cares rather than listening to her guests’ stories.  Sarah Dodd, normally cast as quick-witted women, has the full measure of the humour of a sorrowful lower-class mother who is still happy enough to display her sorrow and her comatose daughter on television.  And Maria Vacratsis is a treat as Bill and Judy’s Latina maid who has a low opinion of the doings of her “betters”. 

                               

These performances help lighten the burden of watching Norris’s heavy-handed satire that doesn’t seem to know whether it is attacking men, women or the institution of marriage itself.  Its unsatisfying conclusion underlines its lack of focus.  It does nevertheless provide a fine forum for Paul Gross and Martha Burns, both of whom we see far to little of on our stages.  Still, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would provide an infinitely better forum.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: Martha Burns as Judy and Paul Gross as Bill in Domesticated; Paul Gross, Abigail Pew, Kelly McNamee and Martha Burns; Akosua Amo-Adem, Vanessa Smythe and Sarah Dodd. ©2015.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.