Tell anyone that you're going to see a play called Hello Penis: a Man-ifesto and he or she would likely assume that you are seeing either a misogynistic satire or some obscure revival of penis puppetry. In reality, the play, showing Thursday through Saturday at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, offers a thought-provoking discussion of gender roles and male intimacy, all constructed around the central question of "What does it mean to be a man?"
The cast consists of co-creators Joseph Baker and Kevin Poole, Trinity '98, who play characters named after themselves. The production opens with Joe talking about a dinner party that he's throwing for his 30th birthday. While the actors return to the dinner party scene periodically, the majority of the play consists of scenes where Joe and Kevin interact with each other at ages ranging from six to 31, forging a consistent commentary of what masculinity entails at each level of development.
Hello Penis's main focus is not the plot. Instead, the production is successfully propelled by Baker and Poole's integration of humor, intellectual ideas and dynamic performance techniques. In one scene, Baker and Poole's characters proclaim, "We've been feminized," touching on one of the play's central ideas-how men can understand their masculinity in the wake of a feminist discourse.
"The conversation [addressed in the play] was a lot about how we are not just men but how men are and have been the oppressors for a long time, and also that we don't know how we're oppressing women," Baker said. "We don't know, even now, just sitting here, how we're perpetuating the oppression of women. That started to come into our rehearsal process and our conversations, and we started talking about how we've been 'feminized.' That's sort of a catchphrase we've come up with. We've been raised this way by society, by our parents."
Bake and Poole's attempts to fully define what it is to be men lead to one of the show's most controversial and challenging thoughts, which is the idea that straight white men are oppressed.
"[The goal is] eventually to start opening up dialogue about some of the things that we've talked about with our mentors, which is the oppression of men, which initially sounds so bizarre," Poole said. "But there's a sense that we have to fit this role, that there's a lack of male intimacy. There's struggles that males are undergoing that are being placed upon them in such a pressurized and oppressed manner that is really unhealthy, and actually I think that it helps to perpetuate the bullsh- that goes on, whether it's war or oppression of women or any number of things."
In the play, the only way that Baker and Poole's characters can lessen their feelings of frustration is by opening up to each other, effectively questioning perceptions of male intimacy.
"What we started to see is that the piece was really about male intimacy.. So we have this gender role, and where in this role are we able to be intimate? Is that important? Is that what's missing in our American Wartime culture?" Baker said.
Hello Penis is compelling not only as a result of the intellectual questions that it raises, but also as a result of Poole and Baker's multidisciplinary performance style. The show does not adhere to the conventional dramatic format of a play, but rather combines several aspects of performance and visuality.
"I think that the piece itself, outside of the actual material, is about the combination of styles, media and art forms-it's bringing together dance and theater and voice and image," Poole said.
Hello Penis's fusion of controversial concepts and original acting techniques is what made it appealing to the Manbites Dog Theater company. The play is featured in Manbites Dog's Other Voices series, which has been established as a venue for innovative performances.
"It's something we haven't seen anyone else doing, and for our Other Voices series that's what we're looking for," said Edward Hunt, the co-founder and associate artistic director at Manbites Dog. "They've got a show that's a perfect Manbites Dog kind of show, and we want to present things that no one else in the area is doing and that we're not doing either."
The Other Voices series is only a small part of what Manbites Dog has to offer. The theater has been producing its own shows since it was founded in 1987 by Edward Hunt and Jeff Storer, a professor of the practice of theater studies in Duke's theater studies department.
"We started out because we were looking at theater in the area and we saw that there was a spectrum of shows that wasn't being done. They tended to be newer, more political pieces, with playwrights that weren't well-known and playwrights interested in challenging form," Hunt said. "So those were the kinds of shows we were looking to see, and we saw that we needed to be doing those and we saw that there was an audience in the area."
As a creative and intellectually-stimulating piece, Hello Penis epitomizes the type of show that Manbites Dog theater promotes. The show proves to be not only an engrossing performance, but also an opportunity to experience Durham's surprisingly successful avant-garde entertainment scene.
Hello Penis: A Man-ifesto will be showing at the Manbites Dog Theater from Oct.25-27 at 8:15 p.m. Tickets are $8 with student ID, $12 on Thurs. and $17 on Fri. and Sat.
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