`Fat Men In Skirts': Satire With Plenty Of Bite

Theater review

"Fat Men in Skirts" by Nicky Silver. Directed by Jeff Reid, produced by Annex Theatre, 1916 Fourth Ave. Thursdays-Sundays through March 12 (728-0933, Ext. 1). -----------------------------------------------------------------

"Fat Man in Skirts," the avidly grotesque comedy by New York writer Nicky Silver, means to outrage. And, by Jove, Silver certainly knows his business.

The Annex Theatre, under Jeff Reid's direction, performs this drive-by satire of nuclear family devolution with riveting verve. And (if you chuck all standard notions of good taste out the window) the result can be viciously clever.

This is, very deliberately, the theater of shock therapy. But Silver doesn't know when to quit while he's ahead. Even an unending supply of blood lust and perversity loses its shock value after a while. And tacking a nihilistic moral on the mayhem ends the evening on a pompous note.

Borrowing a theme from "Lord of the Flies," then cross-wiring it with "Oedipus" and "The Night of the Living Dead," Silver plunges us willy-nilly into a psychodrama brimming with camp, sex and gore.

Gifted Serena Lee portrays bitchy matron Phyllis Hogan, and Gino Chekalis is superb as her stuttering, insecure adolescent son, Bishop.

Stranded on a desert isle after a plane crash, this tense twosome starts to unhinge with their first hunger pains. Quicker than the flick of a Bowie blade, they're feasting on the limbs of their dead fellow passengers - nuns, babies. And Bishop can't stop obsessing about Kate Hepburn's movies (e.g., the derangedly relevant "Suddenly, Last Summer").

When five years pass with no rescue in sight, mother and son undergo an incestuous role reversal. The jittery Bishop turns into a pint-size Tarzan in loincloth. Phyllis tosses off her designer shoes to become his passive, tremulous Jane.

Meanwhile, back in vaguely civilized Los Angeles, the callous family patriarch Howard (Mark Gallagher) is getting it on with a mercurial starlet, Pam (played with trashy effervescence by Alicia Roper).

When all four characters suddenly reunite, all hell breaks loose. Bishop spins out of control, Hannibal Lecter-fashion - and so does the play. In a disjointed sanitarium sequence, ghosts appear in disguise, and (predictably) Mommy and Daddy - and Ward and June Cleaver, and Ozzie and Harriet - get blamed for their son's cannabilistic sins.

The capper message? Scratch a human, you'll find an ape. But last time I checked my Jane Goodall, apes weren't dining on each other or having sex with their parents. And nihilism comes quite cheap these days - too cheap for a writer with the wit and imagination Silver exhibits, when he's not indulging in gratuitous gore or arch lamentation.