Unicorn Theatre’s provocative play envisions characters as cockfight combatants

Less than two weeks ago, a young British playwright collected two Olivier Awards for plays as different as plays can be: “Bull,” a four-character one-act about cut-throat office politics, and “King Charles III,” a speculative drama written in Shakespearean verse that recounts the imagined future history of Britain’s royal family.

For Mike Bartlett, an attitudinal playwright in his mid-30s, to collect the British equivalent of two Tony Awards on one night reflects a willingness in the U.K. to give space to new voices.

But it says something about the writer himself, who has caught the attention of critics and theatergoers by telling stories onstage in audacious new ways and by rejecting most orthodoxies.

“We’ve got to get away from the idea that it’s good to go to the theater,” Bartlett told the Guardian just before his “Cock” opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2009. “It isn’t church. There’s nothing innately good about it. Most theater is still really bad.”

Basically he was saying that theater had to change and so did its audience: “It has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives. Theater about theater is the most awful, terminal nonsense.”

As though blessed by an alignment of planets, the Unicorn Theatre this week offers audiences a chance to experience “Cock,” a four-character play about love and sexual politics. It began previews this week and officially opens Saturday. It’s the first time a Kansas City theater company has produced one of Bartlett’s plays.

The Unicorn production is directed by Jeff Church, who in his day job is the Coterie’s artistic director, and features a cast of young actors who are based here or have performed often at local theaters: Jacob Aaron Cullum, Zachary Andrews, Molly Denninghoff and Matt Rapport.

Church said recently that the play poses interesting challenges for both the audience and the artists. The title carries multiple meanings, but the story itself examines what happens when John, who is in a happy gay partnership, falls in love with a woman. Implied in the piece, Church said, is that sexuality actually may be a choice.

“The themes are different than what you might expect,” Church said. “This is a theater that’s spent 10 or 15 years doing plays that imply that sexuality really isn’t a choice — and here, finally, is a play that comes along and says, ‘Wait, one size doesn’t fit all.’ Here’s a guy who takes a break from his boyfriend to spend time with his girlfriend.”

Bartlett explained the play’s evolution in an interview with a New York theater journalist by saying that he had observed people who identified as gay or straight, but whose experiences suggested otherwise. Then he traveled to Mexico on an artistic exchange program where, he was fascinated to learn, cockfights and bullfights were still an important part of popular culture.

“I didn’t see a cockfight, although I saw them take the cock around the village before the fight,” he said. “But I did go to a bullfight. And you realize that it’s an activity where you come together for a ritualized killing of an animal — where you come because they’re going to suffer, and you’re like a mob surrounding this fight to the death.”

And that’s how he came to see the characters in “Cock” as combatants in a metaphorical fight to the death. (The more recent “Bull” was written as companion piece to “Cock.”) The concept of making the play like spectator blood sport dictated how it was presented.

Bartlett stipulates in his stage directions that there will be no props, no handling of imaginary objects, no chairs or tables. Church, who saw it when it was produced in New York, said the theater was arranged something like a fighting pit.

“Everyone sat on raw plywood that had been built into a kind of arena that vaguely resembled a little amphitheater or a cockfight ring,” Church said. “The only stage direction you get besides the one that says no scenery and no furniture and no miming … is that the audience is arranged in a semi-circular pattern.”

Church is staging the show in the Jerome Stage, one of two performance spaces at the Unicorn, and he said he and his design team had devised a way to increase the rake of the seating area. Bartlett’s intent, Church said, was to demand total focus on the drama at hand and to avoid the distractions of conventional stagecraft.

“He doesn’t say no lighting, although in New York they just used fluorescent lighting and it was extremely off-putting,” he said. “We are not doing that. There will be lighting, but I feel it will not break the rules I set up for myself to not break his rules. The emphasis should be on the language, on the words, and as long as the emphasis remains on the words then we’re obeying his desire.”

Just to make sure everyone had skin in the game, Church and the actors made a challenging decision not required by the playwright.

“We made the decision as a company that in this production the actors don’t touch each other,” he said. “So there’s no touching. And if I recall correctly, that’s how it was done in New York and England.”

Church said he has directed one play that was at least vaguely similar in its approach: “The Wrestling Season” by Laurie Brooks. Church directed the show twice at the Coterie and had to obey its basic concept — that all the action would take place in a high-school wrestling ring.

The “Cock” actors, Church said, have been up to the challenge of performing a piece with so many restrictions and unique demands.

“I’m so pleased with them that they’ve been willing to experiment,” he said. “None of us has worked on a play that is as demanding in its rules. Even ‘Wrestling Season’ was less demanding that way. But the playwright probably doesn’t call them rules. I call them rules. And the actors are just so game about it.”

Bartlett’s brashness reminds Church of Martin McDonagh, the young Anglo-Irish playwright who took London and New York by storm in the late ’90s with a series of savage satires (“The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Cripple of Inishmaan”) that mocked Irish stereotypes. Like McDonagh, Bartlett seems committed to rewriting the rules of play-making.

“It’s really exciting to get to do a play that’s written by the playwright of the international moment,” Church said. “It’s great for us and great for Kansas City.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2015 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Unicorn Theatre’s provocative play envisions characters as cockfight combatants."