Defending the Caveman at the Wilbur Theatre

I was surprised to find myself at “Defending the Caveman,” – a long-running one-man comedy show written by Rob Becker that brags about looking at relationships between the genders “without taking sides.” Starring Michael Van Osch, who has been doing this since 2004, it is playing at the Wilbur Theatre through March 15. Based, as my companion put it, on “the humor of recognition,” this performance piece claims to be “the longest running solo play in Broadway history,” and has been translated into 16 languages and performed around the world by a variety of comics.

I approached the evening with a slightly sociological attitude, intending to deconstruct its assumptions about gender and sexuality. It presents an exclusively heterosexual and coupled view of the world; no hint of queers, swingers or kinky folk tinges its white-bread, Noah’s Ark-like vision. Once one suspends disbelief and accepts this underlying concept, however, it can be a gently enjoyable evening.

There is even something endearing in the old-fashioned innocence of the play’s revelations, hung as they are on two rather artificial constructs. The first is that women work through cooperation and men through negotiation. The other is that men are hunters and women are gatherers. He bases some jokes on that long-debunked idea about the number of words used in a day by men (2,000) and women (7,000) – haven’t we all sat next to a couple on their first date in a restaurant in which the guy developed the “Me, me, me and my widgets” theme well past 7,000 unrelenting words?

But again, by suspending disbelief and going with these paradigms, the wit sometimes hits with gleeful recognition - and sometimes just doesn’t – but never with its reputed rollicking laughter. Van Osch opens with the proposition – and he doesn’t mean it – that there are two genders: women and assholes. He points to the differences in how men and women greet a long-lost dear friend. She hugs and cries, ‘You’re my oldest dearest friend.” He punches his friend’s arm and says, “Are you still driving that same piece of shit?” These are, he says, equivalent expressions of affection.

Hunters (i.e. men), he says, “focus on that thing to the exclusion of the rest of the world until it is dead.” Gatherers (i.e. women) go out in groups and wander and discover. “You have to notice everything at once as you fill your basket: In short, shopping.” As a feminist, I reject the insidious edict that biology is destiny, so I just took such hackneyed ancient history as part of the play’s poetic license.

I found Van Osch’s squeamishness about inter-male affection or touching played to homophobic laughs, but otherwise his pared-down descriptions of straight male sexuality were pretty funny. “A man knows two types of sex. Having his weenie touched and waiting to have his weenie touched.”

During the evening, the audience did not gasp with laughter or explode into applause. They chuckled often, but their overall reaction was unexpectedly flat. It was a mild-mannered play built on stereotypes sufficiently recognizable that many people felt included. There was no misogyny – his approach to women is benign at worst, if not downright insightful. Do all men read their newspaper on the john as a form of escape? Probably not, but enough theater-goers have found those kind of images so familiar that their word-of-mouth has kept this piece returning repeatedly.