Graham's "Any Given Monday' by Theatre Exile (2nd review)

Consider your typical Philadelphia theater audience. The stalls are populated with well-educated, middle- to upper-middle class white faces (often with matching hair), touting in their liberal- to very-liberal political opinions like matching handbags.

Then, put on a show that asks them to laugh at and endorse an honor killing. Go a step further and dress the murderer up in sexist, classist, and racist language— liberally peppered with the "n-word"— and ask them to laugh at his jokes too. In a word, make him the antithesis of everyone present.

Now, cast Pete Pryor in that role. Cue laughter and cheering, and plenty of it.

I don't know if Bruce Graham wrote the role of the murderer Mickey in his world premiere Any Given Monday specifically for Pryor, though he has penned past parts for Philadelphia actors (i.e., Jen Childs in Dex and Julie Sitting in a Tree). But I've rarely seen a new play so easily serve as a vehicle for one actor's talents.

Stabbing through the script

Pryor lunges into the role like a man stabbing through the pages of the script with a switchblade. His SEPTA subway inspector is at first reprehensible— cracking jokes about America being the only country in the world with fat homeless people (I laughed)— and dotting each sentence with politically incorrect epithets about the obese, the uneducated, the poor and those of other ethnicities.

Thanks to Harriet Power's direction and Pryor's balance of well-timed outrage and comedic sensibility, Mickey becomes likeable, then loveable— credit the necessity of his action in the play's construction— right up until the amoral, mock-heroic ending. Whatever kind of man Pryor may be in real life, on Exile's stage I'd believe Pryor capable of any crime and its justification.

Crime worth rooting for

Any Given Monday also offered me a crime whose sense of justice I could root for, one that Graham wraps up in liberal concepts that mirror similar ethical dilemmas in Christianity (though I question Graham's need to villainize the victim as a Wal-Mart developer). Throughout 24 years of marriage, Lenny (Joe Canuso) has acted like the perfect mate. In his adulteress wife Risa's own words, he's an exemplary husband and great father; and when he declines to welcome her back with open arms, she responds, with shock, "But you're so good!"

Lenny doesn't realize that his problem lies in how he's upheld all the liberal, feminized values that Pryor's Mickey denigrates as part of the "pussification of America." (Lenny even helped carry Risa's bags out to the car when she left.). Like a believer wondering "why bad things happen to good people," Lenny simply can't comprehend why his wife would leave him when he's embodied every trait that today's (educated) women claim they want in a man and a marriage.

Graham— more of a gender realist than a Mametesque misogynist— treats Risa's complaints with understanding, if not sympathy. In her accounting of the "stay column" vs. the "leave column," Graham slipped in the evening's most politically incorrect idea: that a woman will ditch a good man who embodies the false claims of what they want simply because he no longer excites them.

And given women's nature, Mickey had to put Lenny's house back in order by eliminating the interloper.

Lapses in logic

While I enjoyed the play and the plot for its insights into the modern marital landscape, I agree with Dan Rottenberg's criticisms, such as: Why make Lenny Jewish and Mickey Catholic? And why are they such good friends in the first place?

"Women," Graham's Sarah puts it at one point, "need to be thrown a curve once in a while." Here Graham implies that women can't act rationally in their own interest, but must be manipulated by men in order for a relationship to survive. Maybe so. But it's a stretch to believe, as Graham suggests, that such fun and games might justifiably include murder.

But these minor pitfalls pale beside a major moral message about how a man must behave to hold a marriage together in an age filled with politically correct lies.

Only the narration— by Genevieve Perrier's daughter Sarah— failed to work for me, especially not the play's tacked-on "South Park"-style "You know, I learned something today" ending. But I hope it worked on the young man who sat about six rows in front of me.

This kid spent the evening pawing his girlfriend like a man guzzling water after 40 days in the desert. He couldn't go a minute without stroking her hair or pulling her in for a kiss. I wanted to pull him aside to say: Dude, watch the fucking play and learn something too.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.♦
To read a response, click here.