The Unicorn gets the most out of a hard Cock

Those underwhelmed by last weekend’s tentative Mayweather-Pacquiao fight (or appalled by a serial domestic abuser racking up a nine-figure payday) will find a far grittier skirmish on the Unicorn Theatre’s stage. 

Cock, a bareknuckle script by Olivier Awards darling Mike Bartlett, throws a hell of a semiotic punch. The brawl begins when John, recently separated from his boyfriend (the script refers to him only as “M”), falls in love with a woman (“W”).  

So he’s not gay, M contends. Or at least, not that gay. Right?  

The characters spar over romantic entanglements and sexual politics in a literal cockfighting ring. The Unicorn’s arena configuration (seating units surrounding a naked pit) lets the audience play spectator at a blood sport. But the title and the staging scheme are the only lowbrow touches on Bartlett’s satin-sleek drama, coming off like truck nuts on an Aston Martin. 

Bartlett’s play expressly forbids furniture, props and mime. Director Jeff Church seems to have added touching to the blacklist. Over the course of the bracing 90-minute show, actors use only words to slap, caress, wound and prod.  

M (Zachary Andrews), John’s stockbroker ex-boyfriend, is the lexical puppet master, playing and preying on John’s insecurities in a posh British dialect. M is the play’s most articulate figure, unleashing a torrent of wry metaphors and jabs cloaked in one-liners. He’s also the least forgiving, pouncing on John’s evasive diction and weaselly half-truths at every turn. I’ve never seen a bad performance from Andrews, but he’s at peak fitness here. 

As John, Jacob Aaron Cullum sputters with the high-strung cant of a man equally vain and insecure. Cullum lends John a certain timid tenderness, but we sense that he isn’t meant to be a sympathetic protagonist. This is a man who holds his would-be lovers hostage while whining, equivocating and blaming them for his own paralyzed indecision.  

To be fair to John, his position isn’t enviable — or as easy as his lovers make it out to be. John can’t shake the notion that in deciding between M and W, he’s choosing between male and female in general, ruling obliquely (and permanently) on his own sexuality. Just be yourself, an exasperated W advises. “But I have absolutely no idea who that is,” John answers. 

Call him a victim of our changing times, but he’s also a victim of his own cowardice, dwelling in his misery like a child scratching an infected mosquito bite. W (Molly Denninghoff) comes closest to understanding the stakes. She offers John love without labels, a nurturing reprieve from M’s sophisticated snark. She’s an idyll to him. But idylls never last. 

Denninghoff provides a welcome antidote to a growing archetype: women actors who short-cut portrayals of strength by adopting a husky power purr and appear ready, at any moment, to hop on a motorcycle and jump Bad Bitch Gorge. As W, Denninghoff doesn’t posture, and she doesn’t play strong — she is strong. Kansas City needs more actors like her. 

Matthew Rapport rounds out the cast as F, a surprise guest who appears during hostile late-play negotiations. The character is a bit of a structural oddity, a rough patch in an other­wise burnished script, but Rapport is a rich and welcome voice. If nothing else, F provides a mouthpiece for Bartlett’s — and likely many audience members’ — nagging political concern. Advocates have fought long and hard to convince knuckle-draggers that sexual orien­tation isn’t a choice. Are we regressing if we allow that, in some cases, it might be? Doesn’t the concept of sexual fluidity undermine our quest to identify the “gay gene”? 

These are heady questions, but the Unicorn’s innovative staging keeps the discussion more personal than philosophical. What we lose in hyperreal set pieces, we gain in a heightened focus on the emotional realities and responses of each character. And Church knows how to exploit them for maximum tension. In the absence of technical distractions, his directing shines: A simple shift in triangulation, a character stepping into the ring, and the heat blisters and swells. 

Cock doesn’t track neat character arcs, and its construction may frustrate proponents of the well-made play. But Bartlett has achieved something arguably more interesting: a shrewdly focused, comically fraught vortex of characters circling the drain.