Review: In ‘Breeders,’ Parenting as a (Literal) Cage Match

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/theater/breeders-review.html

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Are parents just tame animals, housebroken and desexed?

It’s a question that seems to be on playwrights’ minds. Some, like Sarah Ruhl in “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage,” test it on straight couples exploring polyamory. Others, like Mark Gerrard in “Steve” and Peter Parnell in “Dada Woof Papa Hot,” test it on gay men embracing their newfound legal rights yet unready to let go of their outlaw prerogatives.

Either way, the answer is the same. Parents are half one thing, half another, stuck in no-win cage matches that pit domesticity against the beastliness built into human nature.

But not until Dan Giles’s “Breeders,” playing at the Access Theater, has the question been rendered so literally. The cage, too. For in this satire of mainstreamed queerness, presented by New Light Theater Project, two different couples anticipate a blessed event. In one, gay men nervously gnaw at their relationship as they wait for their surrogate to give birth. In the other, the gnawing is more literal. That couple are hamsters.

It’s about time we got a surreal gay comedy; the naturalistic kind has been running out of steam. But simply putting two overscale rodents onstage to comment on the foibles of their human counterparts does not make as much of a difference as Mr. Giles must have hoped. “Breeders,” though quite funny and thoughtful in parts, falters for reasons that many children come to understand a few weeks after Christmas: Hamsters have a limited repertoire.

Something the rest of us learn a little bit later is that humans do, too.

Not that the actors here lack ingenuity. Fernando Gonzalez as Jason, the dopey, affectionate male hamster, and Lea McKenna-Garcia as Tyson, the smarter, dominant female, give inventive impressions of cricetid behavior and look suitably cute in their fleece-trimmed ensembles. The scene in which Tyson delivers her nine pups while Jason looks on adoringly (“It was incredible!”) is both ridiculous and strangely moving.

But Tyson, apparently suffering from postpartum depression, is unreconciled to the domestic limitations of motherhood; despite Jason’s moony reassurances, she dreams of bigger things than drip bottles and exercise wheels.

Alas, in alternating scenes, the 30-something humans, Mikey (Alton Alburo) and Dean (Jacob Perkins), go through pretty much the same gyrations. Mikey, the breadwinner, is blithely upbeat about the forthcoming baby; being a father has been his lifelong dream. But Dean, who will stay at home to care for it, worries that he will cease to exist as a man once he becomes a parent: that he will be rendered a neuter “poster gay,” he says, like Neil Patrick Harris.

That fear is aggravated by Dean’s obsession with the hamsters, whom he is minding for his sister while she is on vacation. The rodent couple’s sometimes aggressive responses to each other and to their pups begin to inform Dean’s response to Mikey. Amusing for an instant, the parallels very quickly grow tiresome under Jaki Bradley’s less than light-footed direction. Worse, the satire deflates into whimsy.

But things improve as the two stories, or at least the two pairs of actors, eventually start to interpenetrate. It’s a nice touch that when Mr. Gonzalez and Ms. McKenna-Garcia show up later in the action as actual people, their hamster personalities still trail them. Their human scenes with Mr. Perkins and Mr. Alburo — one scene funny, one sad, both naturalistic — are the best in the play.

I don’t want to spoil what happens in them, or criticize too much what happened on the way; Mr. Giles is a young talent and this is his first full-length professional production in New York. He has a good eye for satire and a twitchy ear for dialogue that yanks several threads at once. When one character calls Dean dangerous, he doubtfully replies: “Dangerous? I’m lactose intolerant.” He’s too mild to pose a real threat.

That’s my diagnosis of the play as well. What Mr. Giles hasn’t yet managed to do in “Breeders” is transcend his cute gimmick. Run with it as he might, he’s still on the exercise wheel.