All Men are Whores discusses everyone's favorite topic: sex

Mamet's dark work, centered on sex, time, and death, is timeless

Oberlin students like to talk about sex. They should feel quite at home at OSTA's production of All Men are Whores by David Mamet. This half-hour performance is more a collection of monologues than a traditional play. Director Matthew Van Winkle intends the production to be a collection of moments and unanswerable questions.

The big themes are here: death, time and sex. Mamet's major premise is the inherent struggle between biology and emotion. According to Mamet, no one escapes this bitter struggle. In the first monologue, delivered by junior Patrick Mulryan, the audience is told that we perceive time because we are conscious of the schism in our sexuality.

"The stream of life," he said, "the continuation of germ plasm, is unbroken." This speech is directly followed by the entrance of sophomore Adam Marvel, who teases the audiece with Mamet's cryptic language. His pacing is excellent and his desriptions are realistic and clever.. His speech about receiving a gift from a lover is a highlight of the evening.

Double-degree senior Emily Farrell is the only woman in the cast, and has to struggle through some fragmented monologues, most of which include some kind of violence. Her intensity is good but can verge on vagueness. She does very well with a rather chilling speech about finding the boundaries with a lover. Farrell uses the language exactly the way Mamet uses it - as a force in and of itself.

Mamet also plays with the ideas of public and private, and Van Winkle's production picks up on this. The actors are billed as themselves, and they sit in chairs talking to each other as the audience comes in. There is no set, only minimal lighting and costumes. As a result, the line between theater and reality is blurred. Mulryan in particular is riveting and direct.

Van Winkle points out that these really aren't coherent characters, and they're not supposed to be. The actors are in static positions, staring directly out into the audience and when not speaking, they regard each other skeptically from the half-light. Yet overall the speeches are not static, and the cast should be commended for that.

As the performance goes on, it becomes clear that Mamet is testing our need for human connection: even as we watch this play, the people we are watching are telling us how much we need it. And the characters never give it to us. They never interact with each other, and only just barely with us. This is typical Mamet fare. He prods you into his ideas and then when they start to get uncomfortable, offers no escape route.

All Men are Whores will be performed in Fairchild Chapel, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m and 9 p.m.

Hitched to a star: All Men are Whores, a play about that grapples with the brevity of time and the unanswerable questions of life, opens tonight in Fairchild Chapel. Sophomore Adam Marvel, senior Emily Farrell and junior Patrick Mulryan form the entire cast. (photo by Pauline Shapiro)