Fifteen years ago, following John Gray’s pop-psychology best seller, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” American culture was atwitter over the effects of hormones on the brain and how gender biology defined masculine and feminine behavior.
Soon thereafter, theater pieces, such as Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” Rob Becker’s “Defending the Caveman” and Robert Dubac’s “The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron,” began to explore the topic.
Following up on his success, Dubac returns to the fray with ‘Male Intellect: The 2nd Coming,” now running at the Acoma Center in partnership with Curious Theatre. For those of you who didn’t see the original version, Dubac revisits his initial premises in Act I of his latest effort, asking “What do women want?”
In the first show, Dubac’s motivation for asking this question is to patch up things with his girlfriend, but in the sequel he addresses the audience’s experience directly. Most of the material appears new, save for the clever blackboard routine that is carried over along with certain key concepts. Dubac is a gifted writer and comic, zinging both sexes as he covers the gamut of male-female relations, detailing predictable misunderstandings that all of us can recognize.
On opening night, however, the combination of sound system, acoustics, and Dubac’s rapid-fire delivery and pronounced dialects prevented a significant number of audience members from being able to decipher major portions of his monologue. This theater space has never taken well to amplification and, given its cozy environs, has no need for it.
Using the same colorful characters that populated his maiden voyage, Dubac delivers a multifaceted perspective of the male animal, including various chauvinistic guises, as well as the feminine side, and the voice of reason that “can only be heard when someone has found balance.”
When this occurs, the door of truth opens, and, in the second act, we see how this initiation has changed Dubac’s focus from self to society and the illusions that stand in the way of our collective truth, namely religion, politics and the media.
Mixing the stinging approach of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl with the vocabulary of George Orwell and Ivan Pavlov, Dubac deconstructs how our belief systems are programmed for passive consumerism by a daily onslaught of propaganda. Luckily, he notes, we still have the theater where we can talk about these things.
Bob Bows also reviews theater for Variety, KUVO/89.3 FM and for his own website, . He can be reached at BBows@ColoradoDrama.com.
“Male Intellect: The 2nd Coming”
MONOLOGUE | Presented by Curious Theatre, Franz Blau Media Inc. and Moment-to-Moment Productions Inc.; at 1080 Acoma St. | Written, directed by and starring Robert Dubac | 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; through Aug. 25 | 1 hour, 50 minutes | $30 | 303-623-0524 or
