Theater Review - Sex, lives and videotape

What do women really want in the sack?

Can a name drag down an entire play? In Synchronicity Performance Group’s The Sex Habits of American Women, a German psychiatrist labors on a book of the same title, a scholarly work that could revolutionize American attitudes about sexuality in the 1950s. His name? Dr. Fritz Tittels.

The psychiatrist’s titillating moniker tells you pretty much everything playwright Julie Marie Myatt thinks about him. You imagine a heavily accented shrink with an extensive vocabulary for copulation but no insight into the feminine mystique - and you’re exactly right. Whenever Sex Habits focuses on Fritz Tittels, you can read it like a book. The play eventually generates some thoughtful ideas about what women want, but Synchronicity faces an uphill battle against Sex Habits’ simplistic early instincts.

Director Michele Pearce and the cast play the Tittels family as real people, admirably resisting the temptation to make them gross caricatures for cheap laughs. When Fritz (Eric Brooks) reads from his manuscript “Love is the screw that opens her Pandora’s Box,” we clearly can’t take him seriously as a researcher or a wordsmith. Brooks credibly brings out the role’s insecurities, but Fritz essentially embodies two stereotypes of the white male patriarchy. Like Freud, he’s an inquisitive, labeling, Teutonic scientist prone to sweeping judgments. Like the typical 1950s American man of the house, he’s demanding, emotionally remote and clueless about the realities of his family.

His domestic-diva wife Agnes (Jackie Prucha) supports his work even though they’ve largely tuned each other out. They bicker with their “old maid” daughter Daisy (Hope Mirlis), a never-married schoolteacher. When Agnes comes home tipsy from lunch or Daisy spars childishly with her father, you can imagine the Tittels as a wacky household down the street from Rob and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

Sex Habits offers a ruefully amusing, truthful moment about the Tittels in bed, with the actors standing against a vertical mattress, giving the audience an “overhead” shot. Fritz completes his manly duties and rolls over in slumber, leaving Agnes to quietly climax on her own. It’s not until nearly the end of Act One that the Eisenhower-era storyline takes intriguing turns, mostly inspired by the arrival of Edgar (Cary Donaldson), Fritz’s former star pupil and now a passionate analyst in his own right.

The real turn-on in Sex Habits is the present-day subplot intercut with the 1950s storyline. A videotaped interview, projected over the set, depicts a twice-divorced, 40ish woman named Joy (Carolyn Cook) talking about her sex life to a younger documentary filmmaker (Daniel May, almost entirely an off-camera voice).

The videotaped sections make an obvious contrast with the story from a half-century earlier. Sex researchers laid (no pun intended) the foundation of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s - which may not have made women happier, but created more opportunities for happiness and choice. But Joy’s segments would be compelling even without the Tittels as an uptight counterpoint. With candid language, close-ups of Cook’s expressive face and the flirtatious dynamic between the unseen interviewer and his subject, it can’t help but have a voyeuristic sexual charge. Some scenes only last a few sentences, but Joy becomes increasingly revealing about her history and her body, even pulling back her clothes to reveal some scars.

Both eras suggest that pinning down a woman on a page or in celluloid is an act of folly. Edgar finds women to be much more fulfilling patients than men: He’s thrilled by the complexities of their psyches, while Fritz ultimately has the soul of a mechanic. As Edgar, Donaldson conveys passionate earnestness while keeping with the clean-cut presentation of the period. Meanwhile, Joy emerges as a “typical” modern female only in the sense that all women have unique experiences and contradictions. Generalize about them at your own risk.

Too often, Daisy proves to be a flatly written character. Apart from a poetic, sensual rhapsody late in the play, Mirlis gets saddled with lines like “You take that chip off your shoulder, and I’ll stop crying on it.” Sex Habits builds to a rich portrayal of Agnes, a 65-year-old woman who reveals a far richer emotional and erotic life than we’d imagine. With unexpected depths, Prucha reveals the meaning and stakes for Agnes in the character’s increasingly complex decisions. Her performance finds poignancy in the affecting themes of mother-daughter tensions and sacrifice that redeems the play’s resolution.

The Sex Habits of American Women suffers from unlucky timing, following so soon after the movie Kinsey. The Liam Neeson biopic of Alfred Kinsey took on virtually the same premise - a researcher investigates post-war American sexuality - yet spoke volumes about societal repression, physical liberation and the limits of pleasure. Kinsey himself proved profoundly changed by his studies, while Fritz Tittels even admits that the more he learns, the less he knows. As Synchronicity’s Sex Habits overcomes its own triteness, the play affirms the adage that “Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach.”

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com