Playwright: Michael Bartlett. At: Profiles Theatre at the Main Stage, 4139 N. Broadway. Tickets: 773-549-1815; www.profilestheatre.org; $20-$40 . Runs through: April 6
The moment we see Katie Bell-Springmann's scenic design, with its arena seating, referee's bell and woodchip-coated floor, we guess that the play's title refers to a cockfight. Then, when the first characters to enter are a pair of squabbling gay males who circle each other like wrestlersor fighting roosterswe detect a pun there, too. Actually, Michael Bartlett's premise, though it adds new dimensions to the phrase "thinking with your dick," is founded on a hypothesis he believes to be so shockingly complex that it must be dressed up in high-concept spectacle.
After seven years together, twentysomething John announces to his corporate-exec lover ( whom the playwright only identifies as "M" ) that he's fallen in love with somebody else, and that the new object of his affections is a womanspecifically, a divorced teacher named "W" whom he befriended en route to their respective jobs, one thing leading to the Other Thing. M responds in typically British fashion by proposing a dinner party at which John will announce which way he intends to swing. Ah, but John can't make up his mind, the sheer finality of a decision only contributing to his ambivalence. M's gruff old F ( for father ) joining the fray doesn't help, either.
More than a half-century ago, Kinsey declared sexual orientation to be a continuum, but our society still prefers binary divisions. M's preternaturally accepting dad argues that men who claim to love other men should shun heterosexual attractions and instead embrace their hard-won freedom, to which John protests that the senior citizen's generation of peace and love, more than anyone, should understand that "it's not what you sleep with, but who!"
This is obviously a topic for lengthier discussion than can be afforded by the 75 minutes of Profiles Theatre's production. Fortunately, Darrell W. Cox has drilled his four actors to olympic-level physical and verbal agility, so that even when the dialogue flies at blizzard density, there's never a misstep or mumble. This is important, since major sex scenes are rendered exclusively in spoken-word discourse, keeping with the absence of realistic props. The cast is uniformly excellent, but look for this to be a breakout play for Jake Szczepaniak, whose M projects a manic excitability bordering on hysteria, his voice shooting up into falsetto range under duress in a manner eliciting our sympathy even as it explains John's fancy straying toward more placid company.