Sex

SEX WITH STRANGERS Jes Bedwinek shows Sean Patrick Ward how they say hi in whoreville.

Photo: Alix Klingenberg

What appalled during Prohibition hardly raises an eyebrow post–Dan Savage. Mae West wrote this 1926 melodrama vehicle for her particular skills (and weaknesses) as an actress; its negligee-thin plot about a prostitute going straight exists solely to set up the hooker heroine’s one-liners (“What do I know about a heart? To me every man is just an asset”). Though constantly threatening to teeter into smutty territory, the material skirts anything truly shocking. The highest—and most damning—praise to be laid at Sex’s feet is that it’s utterly inoffensive.

While Prologue’s production, the company’s first, is creatively staged by Gray in a wandering promenade style throughout the North Lakeside Cultural Center’s Art Deco rooms, it fails to justify revisiting West’s script, which reveals nothing new about sexual politics then or now. The cast has been handed the unpleasant task of forgoing character for stock ’20s mannerisms and banter. Only Christopher Chamblee, as a pragmatic yet romantic sailor, escapes, doing his part in the charm department while giving his lieutenant just enough substance to make his victories enjoyable. The rest of the ensemble is often one exaggerated eye roll away from screwball Kabuki. Flapper hemlines and hairstyles telegraph a sense of period, and the space, all vintage parlors and grand fireplaces, is every bit the setting for a debauch. But unlike West herself, Sex doesn’t provoke much of a rise.

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