The Sexual Lives of Savages

Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Skylight Theatre Company at the Beverly Hills Playhouse
Through August 16

The title of Ian MacAllister-McDonald’s anti-romantic comedy (or is it a romantic anti-comedy?) derives from anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s classic text The Sexual Life of Savages in North-West Melanesia, one of the great works to analyze how human sexual behavior is expressed through different cultural prisms.

With a dedicated commitment to due diligence, I read Malinowski’s tremendous book, which is particularly intriguing when it discusses what characteristics are attractive and worthy of courtship for members of the South Seas tribe. And how can you not like oral histories that contain lines like, “When I sleep with Dabugera, I embrace her, I hug her, I embrace her with my whole body, I rub noses with her, we suck each other’s lower lips so that we are stirred to passion…”  I would continue but for fear of losing our Pasadena Arts Council’s fiscal sponsorship, for descending into pornographic language. 

MacAllister-McDonald’s referencing the Malinowski title is clearly meant ironically – none of the characters is a member of Melanesia’s isolated, ancient Trobriander Tribe. Rather, they’re a nice pack of young, suburban middle-class folks living in a large American city – but they’re driven by lusts and desires that seem calculated to make them unhappy — such lusts and desires being unlikely to be realized.

Likable, nerdy school teacher Hal (Luke Cook) makes pivotal mistake, asking his long term girlfriend Jean (Melissa Paladino) just how many men she slept with before meeting him. One’s instincts sometimes suggest that one should lie about certain things, but Jean does not:  She tells him the number and it freaks Hal out, causing irreparable damage to Jean and Hal’s relationship.  They split and he starts dating a virginal, but incredibly neurotic co-worker (Melanie Lyons), while Jean finds love elsewhere as well.

Their story is contrasted by the tale of Hal’s best friend Clark (Burt Grinstead), an inveterate swinger whose online reputation on a ménage a trois website gets him into trouble at work.

MacAllister-McDonald’s play effectively conveys the point that folks are often rendered miserable (even with their “true love”) as a result of their most primitive compulsions and half-realized desires.  However, there’s something too shallow and pat about the situations, which lack the bite and ironic sass you’d expect from this sort of saucy sex comedy.  Although director Elina de Santos brings her assured skills in locating the psychological underpinnings of the play’s characters, the people themselves don’t stand up to the scrutiny of emotional logic.

Hal’s upset is possessively, patently ridiculous. Hal and Jean have been in a relationship for two years – would the kind of revelation made here – not about infidelity, but about history — be enough to split them up so entirely?  The play’s real question, and one which the writer himself doesn’t seem aware of, is that the characters barely seem to know each other, even though they’ve ostensibly been in love for a long time.  And, in truth, there’s no crisis here that these characters couldn’t resolve were they to simply talk it through.

There’s some dirty language, sure, but the piece never hits the much needed sexual edge:  There’s an old saying that you never know what goes on in a couple’s marital bed – but in these cases, what goes on merely seems innocuous.

The dialogue is conversational but repetitive; much could have been pruned to keep things better flowing. Paladino, alone, manages to hit the right note of nuance as the unabashedly promiscuous girlfriend who loves her man, but not unreservedly.  Her performance is a true, subtle pleasure, offering the sense of what a treasure this character would be as a girlfriend.  Other performances, though, lack dimension, as though defined by sexual activities or hang ups — important traits, but not all one needs to know about these people.

There’s an old joke: “Even bad sex… well, that’s not so bad.”  It’s hard to say that about this show.

Skylight Theatre Company at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Blvd, Beverly Hills; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through August 16.  (213) 761-7061, skylighttix.com.