Mankind

In Robert O'Hara's futuristic, dystopian fable Mankind, currently at Playwrights Horizons, women are extinct and men have evolved to reproduce without them. In an opening scene that is reasonably funny the first time, if exponentially less so each time it's repeated, Jason (Bobby Moreno) informs casual fuck-buddy Mark (Anson Mount) that he's pregnant. Despite Mark's impulse to "get rid of it," Jason ends up carrying the baby to term, because while women no longer exist, abortion remains illegal. As the play progresses, wackiness ensues: there are court trials and prison sentences, deaths, the invention of a new religion that splinters into various factions, a double marriage, many arguments, and two airings of a news-/reality-/game-/talk-show hybrid called "The Bob and Bob Show," featuring a Tom Brokaw-inspired Bob (Ariel Shafir) and a goofy, morning-show inspired Bob (David Ryan Smith).

Joan Marcus

In short, Mankind takes a lot of fantastical turns that I had no trouble buying: Absent women, the future is even more fucked up than it is now? Yup, sure. Money will win out over morality, ethics, or spiritual devotion? You bet. Various forms of lowbrow entertainment have merged with serious journalism? That's already happened, so why not? Lawyers will wear huge conical wigs and dress like the title character of The Wiz? Makes sense, especially since Andre DeShields himself plays the lawyer.

But abortion? Still illegal a century after women cease to exist? Even seemingly without the presence of some other oppressed group whose collective bodies become the endlessly manipulated tools of politics, religion, and all other aspects of culture? Sorry, buddy, you've lost me.

With Mankind, O'Hara repeatedly returns to the idea that the patriarchy destroys everything it touches: commerce, religion, intellect, law, the family, the environment, humanity. That's all well and good, but the play, which O'Hara also directs and which features an all-male cast, never attempts to wrestle with, or even approach, ways that a culture’s myriad ingrained hierarchies breed control, and thus institutionalized sexism. With some discussion of that in place--with even a fleeting examination of the fact that sexual inequality is bound with centuries of culturally sanctioned power and control ranging from the violently obvious to the impossibly subtle--O'Hara might have produced a compelling play about women's subjugation. But because he never digs below the surface--of the characters, the words they say, the world they occupy, or the ways any of this relates to the contemporary world--Mankind is simply an overlong, undercooked premise that has been explored more deftly elsewhere. The play purports to consider women's struggles for equality, but has erased women at every step. I'd say I've never experienced anything like it, but, of course, like pretty much everyone else in the world, I encounter entertainment that is overwhelmingly by, for, and about men, presented as universal, and dressed up as something more profound than it actually is pretty much every day, all my life.

Anyway, at least Mankind is too thinly developed, inconsistently written, and clunkily directed to be genuinely offensive. It comes off instead as sort of eye-rollingly typical: some man or another realizes that women have had it bad for a long time, does a smattering of research to back that eureka moment up, and then his project gets support, encouragement, and an audience. At its worst, Mankind's humor feels forced and its attempts at gravity patronizing; at its best, it's diverting. Truly, I dug "The Bob and Bob Show," especially the fine work done by Bob. The cast does what it can with scenes that go on too long, an awkward set, unflattering lighting, and a bunch of WTF costumes.

At the curtain call, the company solicits contributions to Planned Parenthood from the audience, which is nice, but feels like a hasty afterthought: a curt, pitying nod toward the far corner where the poor relatives have been seated for the sumptuous, expensive feast. I'd have appreciated the gesture a lot more had O'Hara's play seemed as if anyone involved had actually attempted to genuinely concern themselves with the plight of women--maybe, even, to have consulted with a couple in the process of writing, directing, producing, mounting, dramaturging, and writing program notes for a play that pretends to include us and help us bear our trials while so casually, even chummily, shoving us aside.