Is There Such a Thing As a Sex Addict?
Everyone is conflicted about that in All-American Sex Addict/Woke AF: a clever, absurd comedy by Matt Morillo, directed by Phoebe Leonard-Dettmann. The protagonist Jack (Peter Buck Dettmann) is an ex-cop who insists he’s a sex addict, and that his autobiographical movie script will make the case for addiction.
That script is called “All-American Sex Addict/Hero Cop,” and Jack’s (offstage) agent is trying to shop it around. But everyone else in Jack’s orbit feels it still needs work. They’re all millennials, steeped in 21st-century angst over possibly, accidentally offending anyone who might find sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, or cultural appropriation in it.
Ashley (Shelby Allison Brown) gets Jack’s attention as a cos-play cop. Photo by Jonathan Slaff
Jack does sleep around. His more-or-less-steady girlfriend Ashley (Shelby Allison Brown) has spotted plenty of lines and characters that might be offensive. But citing them might drive Jack away, so she has an eye-catching way to keep him hooked. Jack’s one-time bedmate Riley (Alex Mayer) is a dancer who rails against the way his script has “sexualized” her naked performance-art. Jack has also slept with José (Mateo Parodi), a Latino gay bear who disparages the term Latinx (“‘La-tinks,’” he says, “sounds like a Pokémon.”) Jack has been interviewed on TV by Carleton (Isaac Moran) a ranting anti-woke right-winger whose program, called “C-Spot,” we see on a screen as prologue and epilogue. Finally, there is Andie (Danielle Aziza) the woman upstairs whom everyone looks to for expertise on what might cause offense because . . . she’s bi-racial.
And Jack is a congenital offender. Ashley nicknames him “Cocaine” because sleeping with him gives her a big high that always ends in depression; but he takes it as a compliment! José asks Jack if he tried gay sex only as research for his script. Jack retorts, “How many men do I have to sleep with to get my LGBTQ card?”
The set, by Phoebe Leonard-Dettmann and Lucy Roberts is spot-on as a creative fellow’s cramped city apartment, and it’s well lit by Maile Binion. Actors Danielle Aziza and Alex Mayer share choreography credit for Mayer’s dance to music designed and performed by Kendrick Strauss. I did wonder why the director has Brown’s character mug the audience to deliver some lines; no one else breaks the fourth wall. But the play barrels forward. As in every good comedy, the stage gets more congested and the action more manic as the 80-minute one-act builds to its (ahem) climax.
It turns out that Andie is the grown-up in this playground. At one point Jack declares, “I’m woker than you!” So she urges him to change his script’s title-tag to “/Woke As Fuck.” And though it’s not a curtain-line, she offers up the perfect squelch to everybody’s anxieties: “Maybe people aren’t as offended as we think they are.”
Opening photo: (l-r) Mateo Parodi, Danielle Aziza and Peter Buck Dettmann. Photo by Jonathan Slaff
Randomly Specific Theater presents All-Amerian Sex Addict/Woke AF Tuesdays through Saturdays until April 14 at Sargent Theater of The American Theater of Actors, 314 West 54th Street. Box office: 646-371-4368 Click for more information and tickets.
