What It Means To Be A Man

Things Being What They Are

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This turns out to be a trickier question than it may seem. If MacLeod isn’t likely to be mistaken for Artaud on a formal level, she’s nevertheless dealing with a volatile social issue: masculinity in America. Even Simon’s 1965 hit turned on anxiety over the subject; dispossessed of their family roles, his Felix and Oscar spend the whole play dueling over their notions of appropriate male behavior.

Things have only gotten worse since then. As the father of teenage boys, I can tell you unequivocally that nobody has any idea what it means to be a man anymore. And that in the absence of a working definition, people are coming up with the most appalling hypotheses. The war in Iraq was one. Gangsta rap is another. It’s interesting–and about as indicative as you can get–that women’s genitalia are represented theatrically these days by the soul-searching discourse of The Vagina Monologues while men’s get contorted into fleshy balloon sculpture in Puppetry of the Penis. If that’s not a cry for help I don’t know what is.

Rick Snyder’s direction helps: always matter-of-fact and apt, especially with regard to the delicate heterosexual male business of when a touch is appropriate. Playing Bill, Timothy Gregory’s essential challenge is to move believably into and through successive layers of acceptance, and he does it with considerable grace–especially in the first act, when he makes a delightful transition from “How can I get rid of this person?” to “What a character” without sloshing over into “Be my friend?”