Good bad taste

Fat Men skirts the respectful

by Robert David Sullivan

FAT MEN IN SKIRTS, By Nicky Silver. Directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni. Set design by Nathan Pyrits. Lighting by Jeanette Service. Costumes by Mariolga Nido. Sound by Ben Arons. With Mary Kearney, Brett Milanowski, George Saulnier III, and Kay Moriarty. Presented by the Theatre Cooperative at the Peabody House Theatre, Thursday through Saturday through April 22.

Nicky Silver's Fat Men in Skirts is a fine example of disrespectful drama. The ideal staging of any disrespectful play calls for an elderly couple in the front row exchanging worried glances with each graduation of bad taste, and the Theatre Cooperative was lucky enough to have such a pair at last Saturday's performance. Often, the wary spectators are subscribers who dutifully see everything put on by a local theater company -- which, in its attempt to offend, can be accused of biting the hand that feeds it. The cliché is particularly apt in this case, for Fat Men in Skirts brings us two survivors of a plane crash who quickly become cannibals, beginning their new diet with the sawed-off arm of a nun.

The disrespectful play can also be likened to teenagers rebelling against their parents (or young theater professionals rebelling against the previous generation). Fat Men in Skirts fits this theme, too, since the two main characters are a mother and her teenage son. When they find themselves alone and stranded on a desert island, the son is at first a stuttering coward who's totally dependent on Mom. As the years pass without rescue, however, he becomes a foul-mouthed bully with an insatiable sexual appetite. First he masturbates while watching monkeys make whoopee in the trees, but then his attentions turn toward the only woman on the island, and we're treated to one of the few subjects that can match cannibalism in provoking disgust. At this point, discriminating theatergoers may ask themselves whether Fat Men is daring and funny or tired and excessive. The squirms of the couple in the front row may reassure younger audience members that it's acceptable to laugh.

The first two-thirds of Fat Men in Skirts is indeed funny, and the play falls apart only after a main character is placed in a mental institution. The problem is that the audience has already spent 90 minutes getting used to characters who are more bizarre than is humanly possible. (Cannibalism exists, but I doubt that a mother ever scolded her child with "I thought we were saving that baby for dessert.") The pathos that develops when one of these characters is actually diagnosed as insane is even less appetizing than the bloody limbs provided by the Theatre Cooperative's prop department. It doesn't help matters that Kara-Lynn Vaeni's production shifts from well-timed comedy to tiresome shouting matches.

But until that change in tone, Fat Men in Skirts is a howl. The first act, a sick-joke version of Lord of the Flies, is dominated by the personality changes in young Bishop Hogan, who's introduced to the audience as a fastidious boy with an unnatural interest in Katharine Hepburn. It's hard not to think of Bishop as gay, especially when gay playwright Silver has him tell an anecdote about Hepburn's sexual orientation. But growing up outside civilization, he becomes a savage heterosexual -- which may or may not be another joke on that couple in the front row. Brett Milanowski, who walks like Jackie Gleason and swears like Joe Mantegna, is great fun as the evolved (or devolved) Bishop. When he brags about his newly hardened body and later defends behavior that's even worse than cannibalism and incest, Milanowski is so convincing that I found myself buying into the ridiculous premise of the play.

In the first act, both the character of Bishop's mother and her portrayal by Mary Kearney are similar to what Mary Shultz brought to her chatty socialite in the American Repertory Theatre's recent Full Circle. Mom is both superficial (complaining about sand in her expensive shoes) and resourceful (ordering her son to go through the pockets of the corpses in the plane wreck). Kearney is funny here, but she's even better in the second act, when mother and son return to civilization and have troubles readjusting. Fat Men then becomes a twisted bedroom farce (in his wife's absence, Dad has found a new girlfriend, whom he now tries to pass off as a maid), and Kearney's confusion is frequently hysterical.

But then we get that damned third act, which serves up feeble attempts at wackiness (a psychiatrist wears Groucho Marx glasses) but generally seems like penance for all the bad taste that came before it. Now there's a real lack of respect for the audience.