Bruce Norris’s ‘Domesticated’ in New York

In his latest play, Clybourne Park (2010), Norris took on the explosive topic of racism, with resounding results. Now, in his blistering black comedy Domesticated, he’s taking on male sexual behavior (of a particular kind).

Norris knows a good opportunity when he sees one. Using Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Wiener as his prototypes, he tells the story of a politician caught in a humiliating public sex scandal. If you think those fellows have suffered for their indiscretions, it’s nothing compared to what Norris puts his protagonist through.

It’s a familiar scene. Bill Pulver, a prominent politician, stands at a podium before bright TV lights, his wife Judy— stony-faced, ashen— by his side. While cameras click and bulbs pop, Pulver stammers through a painful apology for an infidelity that has disgraced him publicly and tarnished his family irrevocably.

Feminist daughter

Unlike his prototypes, however, Bill’s problems are just beginning. Becky, the prostitute with whom he was trysting, lies in a coma, and Bill is accused of attempted murder. But never mind— Bobbie, his lawyer (and Judy’s best friend) will get him off.

Act I dramatizes the pulverization of Pulver, as played by a bewildered Jeff Goldblum. Vengeful Furies pursue him, led by his self-righteous wife and his rabid-feminist daughter Casey, who flog him verbally as he weeps at the dinner table while a younger daughter and Hispanic housekeeper look on silently.

The other women (Bill is the only male in this 11-character cast) don’t help much either. The judge, the marital therapist, the school principal, even Bill’s own mother all side with Judy, the wronged wife. The female colleague whom he hired at the clinic he founded takes away his job there (Bill was a gynecologist, to boot). His female lawyer, Bobbie, humiliates him with probing questions about his sexual encounter with the prostitute.

I mean, the poor guy can’t get a word in edgewise in his own defense (and were he to try, none of them would listen, anyway.)

The tsunami of humiliation that engulfs Pulver in Act I is so over the top that it’s literally laughable. We almost feel sorry for him— no small feat on the playwright’s part.

Echoes of Portnoy

Then, at the top of Act II, Pulver gets his chance. “I’m trying to find a way to begin the conversation,” he says to a (female) bartender one night, trying to explain his sexual conduct (including 37 assignations with prostitutes). “What am I, a salmon?” he cries, defensively. “Mate once, and then die?”

It’s one of many outrageous laugh lines, but by then the bartender has stopped listening, while another (female) patron goes ballistic, attacks him, and blinds him in one eye.

At this point Pulver starts to sound like a recycled Portnoy’s Complaint. The playwright further complicates things by revealing that the women in the play aren’t angels, either. Pulver’s saintly wife Judy (an unforgiving Laurie Metcalf) turns out to have trysted with a married man in college (the chairman of the Ethics Department, no less). It also turns out that the lawyer Bobbie (also married) had an affair with Pulver herself, thereby betraying her best friend Judy.

Animal kingdom

Ultimately, Domesticated descends into a bloody battle of the sexes, in which no one wins, and no one gains our sympathy. Still, the ingenious structure of Domesticated succeeds in making Norris’s most salient point: about the isolated, lonely nature of the contemporary American male, desperate to be understood.

Cassidy, Pulver’s younger (adopted, Cambodian) 12-year-old daughter, establishes the play’s unique framework with a lecture on “sexual dimorphism,” i.e., the physiological and behavioral differences between male and female of the same species. (Are you laughing already? I was, from the first moment.) And beginning at the top of the play and continuing between each scene, Cassidy (dressed in a prim schoolgirl’s uniform) presents numerous species, whose images flash on the TV screens facing the audience in the round.

As the female descends through the animal kingdom— from the ring-necked pheasant to the hyena to the seahorse and lower— it’s all downhill for the poor male, as his size, plumage, horns, antlers, tusks and other distinguishing features diminish (not to mention his power, identity and autonomy.) You get the joke, and it’s hilarious – though in retrospect, it’s not, since it describes how Bill feels, even if he can’t articulate it.

In love with a goat

Bill Pulver and his predicament remind me of Martin, the protagonist in Edward Albee’s controversial absurdist 2002 play, The Goat. Martin’s crime is far more radical than Bill Pulver’s (Martin confesses to his wife that he’s having sex with the play’s title character— and, worse, that he loves her).

But, unlike Bill Pulver, Martin doesn’t try to justify or explain himself. Instead, Albee leaves Martin’s behavior open to a metaphoric (rather than a literal) interpretation. In the end, The Goat isn’t about bestiality after all. Martin’s anguish is deeply human: He has discovered something new and inexplicable within himself, and begs for help from those around him to understand what he cannot.

Bill Pulver’s cry is similarly anguished. If only it sounded more like Martin’s and less like Philip Roth’s or Woody Allen’s, it might fall on more sympathetic ears.

Still, like Albee, Norris had the courage to venture into the burning building of a marriage, looking for survivors. Remember Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “George and Martha. Sad, sad, sad.”