A Call for Peace in the War of the Sexes

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve observed a guerrilla warfare breaking out between men and women,” declared John Herman Shaner, whose staging of his “The War Against Women” opens June 27 at the Matrix. “The play is an effort to try to understand that epidemic of violence. In the age of Freud, we said, ‘These men are sick--aberrations.’ Well, I interviewed a lot of them, and let me tell you, they don’t look very sick. They’re functioning just fine in society.”

The playwright sighed. “What I’m trying to do is explore those issues in an agitprop, Brechtian way--heavy with symbols, not realism.” The story is set in a karate dojo (studio) , guided by a mysterious sensei (teacher). “Whether she’s real or unreal we’re not sure: she is an ideologue, has a very strong, radical-feminist point of view,” Shaner said. “The War Against Women” revolves around a couple whose marriage is unraveling, and a younger unmarried couple “facing the problems of being upwardly mobile, working, and trying to work on a relationship,” he said.

Shaner, whose “After Crystal Night” played at the Melrose Theatre in ‘84, has also peopled his theatrical landscape with a variety of ethnic types, “generic representations of American society, the people who populate its terrain.” He includes himself in his investigation: “I have mixed feelings about feminism. On one hand, it’s a thousand years late in coming. But the downside is the terrible price we’re paying for it now. This play is a call for peace, rapprochement. Let this war of the sexes end.”

On another, smaller front, director Charles Marowitz, who had been working with Shaner on “War” for the past three years, left the show after three weeks of rehearsal, and was replaced by Shaner himself. Marowitz insists his departure from the project was amiable. “It was sort of a sad situation,” noted the former Herald-Examiner theater critic and Los Angeles Theatre Center dramaturge. “I just wasn’t able to do what I wanted. The normal cuts and changes I would have made, John resisted. I felt the most honorable, sensible thing was to withdraw--and let him get on with it.”

THEATER BUZZ: From the missing music department: we were wondering what happened to the strains of Joe Cocker singing “You Are So Beautiful to Me,” which underscored a heart-tugging scene between father and daughter in Israel Horovitz’s “Strong-Man’s Weak Child” (at Los Angeles Theatre Center). Following multiple critical barbs aimed at the weepy musical choice, Horovitz cut the song, replied a theater rep, confirming that Horovitz has been fiddling with the play since its opening.

Speaking of “Strong-Man,” we also had to wonder if the play’s dueling weight-lifters (Nick Mancuso and Don Yesso) are really hefting 580-pound barbells on stage. It certainly looks real. But the clanking of metal and accompanying grunts and groans are only partially genuine, admits the rep. “When they add weights, one’s real, the other two are made of wood. So they’re acting to an extent. But not entirely acting.”