London "Cock" at the Duke

(times union)

"Cock" is the naughty title of a play by Mike Bartlett that's just opened Off-Broadway at the Duke on 42nd Street.
First staged at London's Royal Court Theatre in a much-lauded 2009 production, the play arrives with original director James MacDonald happily intact.

The tense, occasionally humorous 90 minute play has been recast with talented American actors with varying degrees of success. The intriguing premise is that of a bloke in a same-sex relationship who falls for a woman and thus mucks up his seemingly happy home to suitably dramatic effect. The title is a springboard for the metaphor for a cockfight, from the sound of a bell to delineate beats to the high-concept plywood arena seating that is the sum of the otherwise visually threadbare production.

The evening's chief strengths, besides the taut direction, include a compelling central performance by the utterly decent if befuddled Cory Michael Smith, and a refreshingly nuanced turn by Amanda Quaid. The production's other performances fare somewhat less successfully, at least partly due to the characters' sense of emotional stagnation. Jason Butler Harner is engaged and impassioned, yet his character can't seem to escape a sense of being villainized in the end. The result is that the play risks tilting towards agitprop when naturalistic drama is what the story seems to be building towards.

While the seating is eye-catching, it seems to have depleted the design budget, as there is not so much as a table or chair to be viewed all evening. While the straight sex scene is the chief benefit of this absence of scenery, the in-the-round staging can't help but prove dramatically distracting, as it inevitably does.

Given the Duke's status as a rental theater, I initially wondered why a hit play from such a respected theater as the Royal Court was not chosen for presentation by a top resident company such as Second Stage or Manhattan Theatre Club. Upon seeing Cock, it is likely its bracing, provocative, and utterly English milieu rendered it a hot potato prospect for New York's relatively more conservative producing theater troupes. That said, the play has what to recommend it, particularly for the Anglophilically inclined.