Savage Mating Dance

By T.E.K.

THE FOURSOME by E.A. WHITEHEAD

Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above-But to the girdle do the gods inherit Beneath is all the fiends 'There 'shell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. --King Lear

Down through the centuries, no civet has been found to sweeten the toxic war between the sexes. Every seeming peace is breached: no cease-fire is ever signed. Perhaps that is why the theme has exerted such a powerful hold on the imaginations of dramatists, for the playwright must rely above all things on conflict. And the scourging struggle between a man and a woman whose love has turned to hate is probably without equal.

Consider a brief and highly incomplete roster of Western drama in which this struggle, or some variation of it, is powerfully present: Medea, Hedda Gabler, Dance of Death, The Father, Strange Interlude, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Walts of the Toreadors, The Homecoming, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

While English Playwright E.A. Whitehead has not written anything that closely approximates the caliber of such works, his two plays, Alpha Beta and now The Foursome, show that he is obsessed by the battle of the sexes, and that he has a biting flair for it. Alpha Beta depicted a working-class British couple shedding blood over a bloodless marriage. In The Foursome, which was written before Alpha Beta, Whitehead focuses on four Liverpool youngsters barely out of their teens. In the present off-Broadway production, the setting and characters have been shifted to the outskirts of Galveston, Texas, and the transition has been effected with astonishing flexibility and no overt loss of authenticity.

Harry (Matthew Cowles) and Tim (Timothy Meyers) are an inseparable pair of macho punks always on the make for an easy sexual score. Marie (Lind say Grouse) and Sheila (Carole Monfer-dini) are a pair of lazily provocative talk-teasers who would have movie-mag fantasies of love if they were quite up to reading movie mags. Think of the Snopeses as swinging singles and you will get a fairly exact impression of the mentalities involved.

The boys have picked up the girls at a bar on Saturday night and almost made out with them. As the play begins, the time is Sunday; the place, a hot, deserted stretch of beach. The girls seem carnally avid but they affect coyness. They tease and taunt the boys in a long first scene that is electric with erotic tension and yet often savagely funny.

Cavemen's Trophies. In the second long scene (the play is a lengthy, un interrupted triptych), the frustrated boys get spiky-tempered, vicious and ugly. They thwack the girls unmercifully with a beach ball and shove them sprawling into the sand. One of the boys delivers a monologue on what he once found in a girls' John, which for sheer nauseated revulsion at woman as a menstruating animal is in direct descent from the diatribes of the early Christian fathers. Bruised and crying, the girls are lugged offstage like cavemen's trophies.

At the beginning of the third scene, the girls are back, strangely calm and subdued and wearing Mona Lisa smiles. After they have completed a lengthy and amusing ritual of putting on makeup, pasting on eyebrows and rearranging their clothes, the boys cut out flat, and drive away leaving the girls stranded.

The play is directed with hypnotic brilliance by Jacques Levy, and his players are attuned to each other with the harmony of a string quartet. He and they project the internal verity of The Four some as a kind of aggressive mating dance that speaks to the residual Neanderthal in all of us. Women's Libbers may well loathe it, but then the dramatist's task -- and E.A. Whitehead gives every evidence of knowing it -- is not to proselytize but to reveal. .T.E.K.

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