As the headlines of the past few years make clear, powerful white heterosexual males don’t exactly behave rationally when it comes to sex. In 2008, Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York after it was revealed he had a fairly serious hooker habit. In 2010, John Edwards admitted he’d fathered a child with a former campaign employee. More recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger belatedly confessed that he, too, had a child with a woman who worked for him; his wife, Maria Shriver, was actually pregnant at the same time as their housekeeper. And a week or so ago, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested for sexually assaulting a hotel maid. As an alleged former client of the same madam who kept Spitzer in trim, Strauss-Kahn’s best defense may turn out to be that he mistook the maid for one of his prostitutes.
Philip Kan Gotanda’s Love in American Times now through June 5, 2011, at San Jose Rep, focuses on another variation of the bedding practices of rich white guys, the Rupert Murdoch syndrome, in which a very wealthy, elderly man marries a younger, Asian, would-be tiger mom. In Love, Gotanda’s hero is a 70-year-old Gordon Gekko-type named Jack Heller, who J. Michael Flynn plays like Dabney Coleman with a Ted Turner implant. Flynn’s Heller is crass, obnoxious, foul-mouthed and entirely self absorbed. We absolutely should not care about him and the problems he faces due to his privilege, but Gotanda’s well-written dialogue, as well as Flynn’s convincing performance, put us squarely in the character’s camp.
Heller’s counterpart is Scarlett Mori-Yang (Linda Park), the ambitious, 33-year-old director of a non-profit organization that brings arts education to inner-city kids. Mori-Yang, with her hovering assistant and Christian Louboutin heels, is as much of a clichéd stereotype as Heller, but these two opposites have been brought together by an imperious matchmaker named Mrs. Green (Rosina Reynolds), whose spooky soliloquies at various moments in the play are just one of several elements in this world premiere that don’t quite work.
Rosina Reynolds as Abby
The play’s first act, though, is a good deal of fun. As the lights comes up, Heller and Mori-Yang are meeting for the first time in a bar whose walls are decorated with numerous trophies and totems, including three animal heads, each of which sports an impressive rack. This visual pun on the play’s subject, a trophy wife, is one of several nice touches throughout by scenic designer Robin Sanford Roberts.
