The odd man out at the cave party

By Tom Sime

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, where do gay people come from? Somewhere in between, maybe? That would be Earth. Which works for me; call us the Third Sex From the Sun.

I saw Caveman on opening night at the Majestic last Tuesday, on its fourth visit to Dallas since 1992 - including one gig that lasted 11 months. It's still packing them in, two by two, onto the Ark of the Marriage Covenant.

The full house laughed a lot; simply ate it up. I laughed quite a bit, too. And I could sense people falling and refalling in love all around me; it was like a Moonie wedding. Mr. Becker tries to get the sexes - man the hunter, woman the gatherer - to look at each other with humor but "without judgment."

As a theater critic, I was there to judge the show, and it got a good review. Part of that, I now realize, was my being diplomatic. There among the natives, I tried to get on their wavelength, to understand this so-close/so-far culture. All gays live surrounded by heterosexuals, and it's not particularly threatening, with the exception of Pat Robertson.

Avoidance of all things gay seems paramount to Caveman consciousness. These men don't fear intimacy with women as much as with each other. They don't talk about their feelings, hug or admire each other's appearance. They loathe terms of endearment, Mr. Becker says, and greet each other instead with such exoticisms as "Hey, butt-wipe."

Still, he insists that men are not all jerks (he actually uses a nastier word), as so many writers of pop-psych best sellers seem to believe. Men are just drawn that way, like cave paintings. So a woman asking her man if he thinks a sofa will look right in their living room is out of luck. He can't imagine anything he can't afford to buy, or, in Caveman's metaphorical parlance, "hunt."

"If I can't kill it, I can't imagine it," says Mr. Becker's Caveman Everyman. And this is supposed to be in his defense. I don't know, guys, but it sounds like a bleak existence to me. Is it only because I'm homosexual that I can shut my eyes real tight, concentrate, and picture a piece of furniture? I must be a textbook case, because I can even move the couch around in my mind, imagine it in a couple of different corners. Do I have different brain wiring as a gay man? Built-in color swatches?

A Caveman man is lost when his wife asks him if an outfit is pretty. When asked to comment on her fetching jumper, his jaw goes slack, his eyes roll back; he's stumped. He no speak language. He no get concept "pretty." He grunts, grovels and stammers while she glares, increasingly annoyed with his refusal to speak. (This is why a lot of women like gay men. We notice their clothes, their labors of love and art. Somebody's got to; it's a billion-dollar industry.)

But he's not refusing, Mr. Becker pleads; he's incapable of responding to her inquiry. Apparently, most straight men can't tell if anything other than flesh or a car is pretty or not.

And there is nothing more outlandish, it seems, than a straight man telling another man that he looks good. Mr. Becker gets huge laughs with male versions of girl-type compliments: "Hey, Chuck, your butt looks really cute in those jeans." To most of Caveman's audience, this sounds really hilarious and alien coming from a guy. But that was one of the only lines that sounded normal to me.

Now, one thing I learned at the show is that straight men and gay men aren't different across the board. We all have one-track minds, tightly focused. Any man will have to turn down the car radio when he gets lost, even if there's a show tune or an Erasure remix playing.

Tom Sime writes about theater for The Dallas Morning News.

Becker's defense wins at Majestic
Both men and women can revelin this successful one-man show

By Tom Sime

Someone ought to find out if the local birth rate goes up nine months after Rob Becker hits a town with Defending the Caveman. The one-man show - which cleverly encourages the sexes to re-examine each other and like what they see - could have been designed for just such a purpose.

Ours would be an ideal city for such a survey; his current engagement at the Majestic, where Caveman opened Tuesday night, is Mr. Becker' s fourth Dallas visit since 1992. That puts him right up there with Cats and Les Miserables. But Mr. Becker's overhead is considerably lighter - it's only him and his trademark faux-stone television and easy chair.

The show begins with a taped montage of indignant book covers (Why Women Shouldn't Marry) intercut with footage of determined, struggling sperm cells - the latter much closer to the image of males Mr. Becker would like to present.

Differences-between-the-sexes comedy is nothing new; nature invented it. That's Mr. Becker's point. He proposes that sex roles are derived from prehistory, when men were hunters and women were gatherers. Although he mumbles so quickly at times - perhaps he's on autopilot at this stage - that it sounds more like, "mennerhunners, wimmergathers."

Much of the show's humor comes from imagining what would happen if men acted like women, saying things to each other such as, "Hey, Chuck, your butt looks great in those jeans." That may not sound so improbable to some urbanites, but apparently, men don't talk that way in Mr. Becker's world, and that's the way he prefers it.

More fun are the archetypal conversations between the sexes. She: "I can imagine that sofa in our living room." He: "But it doesn't belong to us." She rolls her eyes; what a Martian.

Like the bedroom, the remote control is a major focus. Men use it to "hunt channels"; women to "gather information." She wants to take in as many stations as she can; he wants to kill them all. Mr. Becker's big victory may lie in getting the sexes to revel in the same show, with neither reaching for the clicker.

Tom Sime writes about theater for The Dallas Morning News.



Primal scream
Rob Becker's `Caveman' explores the gender gap

By Tom Maurstad

Dinosaurs aren't the only prehistoric beasts breaking box-office records.

It took Rob Becker four years of touring - including a lengthy breakout stint in Dallas - to get his caveman to Broadway. But since Defending the Caveman trudged into the Helen Hayes Theater in March 1995, it's become the longest-running one-person play in Broadway history. The show's 399th performance last July topped Lily Tomlin' s The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe and Jackie Mason' s The World According to Me.

"People ask if after so many performances I ever get tired of doing it," Mr. Becker says by phone. "But what can I say? It's still a lot of fun. The feedback I get from people is amazing. It's hard to get tired of that."

His 90-minute exploration of the gender gap, conducted by Mr. Becker as modern-day caveman, sitting in his stone chair with his stone TV at the center of a ring of dirty underwear, is a sensation in progress. A sold-out run at San Francisco's Improv in 1991 led to a sold-out 11 months at the Addison Improv in 1992, then a string of sold-out engagements in Chicago and Washington and finally on Broadway.

Having left the Broadway caveman in the hands of Michael Chiklis (former star of TV's The Commish), Mr. Becker is once again a wandering caveman, returning to Dallas for a 13-day run that starts Tuesday at the Majestic Theatre.

For six sold-out years, Mr. Becker's caveman has been a star player in the ongoing battle of the sexes, tracing gender differences back to the primordial days when men were hunters and women gatherers. Mr. Becker is a frequent talk-show guest; marriage counselors routinely send their patients to see his show. Last November, he performed for 2,000 therapists at a Toronto conference.

Not bad, considering it all started with a few jokes that always got the biggest laughs.

"Yeah, it's funny to think of it now, but it all started in a really simple way," says the former stand-up comedian. "What attracted me to the material in the first place was that I noticed when I talked about me and my wife and the differences between men and women, it made people laugh really hard. And I just thought, `I'm on to something here.'

"I had been reading a lot of books about plays and screenplays and mythological drama. I knew I wanted to write something that wasn' t just a bunch of jokes, that had a narrative, and I knew this was it."

The result is a work that floats somewhere between stand-up and theater, full of lines that make the audience howl, but also anchored by a character telling a story with a beginning, middle and end.

"There was never any huge metamorphosis. I still think of myself as a comedian. The show was built from my stand-up comedy work, but I structured it like a screenplay."

If it's tricky to pin down what Defending the Caveman is, precisely, it is even trickier to explain the phenomenal response it has stirred in the people who keep filling theaters.

"I think a big part of it is getting people to laugh at the misunderstandings we've all experienced. That leads to having an `A-ha' experience where you begin to understand that your mate isn't the way he or she is as part of an evil plan to annoy you.

"I also think it has to do with being surrounded by people who are all laughing at and recognizing the same things, with realizing that you aren't alone. I've had so many people come up to me and say that in one way or another - `I always thought it was just me.' "

With his own life as a source book, the line between private and professional has blurred for Mr. Becker and his wife of 10 years, Erin.

"Yeah, I guess that's pretty much true. I know that sometimes I drive my wife nuts. We'll be in the middle of an argument and I'll say, `Hey, this would be perfect for the show,' and I start writing it down and she'll say, you know, `Stick to the point, we're still arguing here.'

"The first time I talked about one of our fights during a show, I was telling her about it, and the blood just drained from her face and she got really mad: `This is our private life, you can't talk about it to a bunch of strangers.' And I was like, `I'm an artist. I can't be censored, I've got to talk about it.'

"Luckily she came down and stood at the back of the club for a show, and at the end, a bunch of women saw me with her and said, `Are you Erin? Are you his wife?' And they all started talking and laughing and swapping stories. I couldn't even poke my head in. And she saw how therapeutic it was, how much people got out of it. Since then, she's been, `You should talk about the way we . . .' or `Don't forget about the time . . .' So we are very much a team."

That team has doubled in size as the Beckers added a son, Callaghan, now 4, and last year a daughter, McKenna. It doesn't take a genius to see where this is heading.

"Sure, I'm going to call my next show Cave Dad; I've been collecting some observations. The theme will be similar - where Defending the Caveman explains men to women, Cave Dad will explain fathers to mothers.

"There's a test that demonstrates what I'm talking about. Show somebody a small child crying next to a woman and they will say, `Poor woman.' Show somebody a small child crying next to a man and they will say, `Poor kid.' I don't know why we make that assumption, and now that I'm a father, I bristle at it.

"Why do women give fathers advice like they are idiots? I think there are some very common arguments that moms and dads get into. Like, mothers spend all their time trying to calm the kids down and then fathers come along and start playing with them. My wife will say, `You're winding them up,' and I'll say, `No, I'm tiring them out.' "

But Caveman fans in search of family therapy are just going to have to wait. Defending the Caveman has touring commitments lined up for the next three years, and after that, Mr. Becker hopes to take a break. And then there are the book, video and sitcom offers piling up.

As a matter of fact, the offers have been coming in since the buzz first began here.

"Dallas is really where it took off. People from Dallas will ask me, `How come you're not a household name yet?' But, you know, the networks keep coming to me with offers, and every time I say no, they double their offer. They just can't believe I keep saying no. In Hollywood, they respect those they pay the most. I figure in another couple of years, they'll give me total control and then, who knows, maybe."