~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Queer Theoryby John Fisher & Libidoff by Dawson Moore

review in SF Chronicle by Robert Hurwitt

Tickets & Directions / Home / Now Playing & Coming Soon / Back to Media List / To email us

Sex and its discontents: Sexual obsessions on opposite far edges of gender theory are being explored in two of the Exit Theatre's busy venues in the Tenderloin. Dawson Moore's "LibidOff," at Exit on Taylor, combines biochemistry with misogyny to cautionary effect. A transgender-phobic professor's theories of gender fluidity take over his life in John Fisher's "Queer Theory" on the Exit's main stage.

Both plays are funny and provocative, but each needs work. "LibidOff," a co- production of Three Wise Monkeys and Unidentified Theatre Company, is about a drug created by a nerdy scientist (Carl Thelin) to destroy male lust for the sake of men who can't get laid. Bile (Reed Harvey), an unscrupulous business magnate, commandeers the drug for a messianic movement to free men from libido- driven manipulation by women. But he's foiled by his kindly assistant (W. Jay Moore) and his smarter-than-she-acts sex-toy secretary (Sarah Mitchell).

Part of Moore's "Bile Trilogy" (another piece of which is being staged this month in Bologna in a program of works from Three Wise Monkeys' annual Bay One- Acts festival), "LibidOff" is funny but repetitive. Moore has a good idea he hasn't fully developed yet -- a problem echoed in director Christopher Jenkins' journeyman staging and the earnest but uneven performances.

Fisher's "Queer Theory" has the look of an idea being tried out by the Theatre Rhinoceros artistic director and multi-award-winning playwright ("Medea, the Musical," "Combat!"). Produced by Berkeley's Impact Theatre and directed by Fisher, it begins with a haughty academic (Matt Weimer) lecturing on Greek and Elizabethan gender theory -- that female genitalia are inverted male organs -- and develops into a riot of gender and identity mutability.

It's often incisively funny, or it wouldn't be Fisher. It's also something of a mess, with gratuitous camp routines (ably performed by drag artist Matthew Martin), confused stagings, tentative performances and some good ideas in search of a script by someone like . . . well, John Fisher.

Home / Now Playing & Coming Soon / Back to Media List / To email us