Erratic Eros

Sweet Eros, a one act play which opened at the Theater Two in Cambridge on May 23, has had the unique distinction of being policed every night since its "virgin" performance was busted. The police spent over four hundred dollars on tickets, making the play rival the Policeman's Ball as the event of the year in the pocketbooks, if not the hearts, of our public protectors.

The bust was made on grounds of "open and gross lewdness." The scenes which brought on this charge were a strip-scene early in the play, and an act of "fornication," which takes place later on. Twelve members of the company were arrainged, and the two main actors, Lisa Ingalls and Joel Polinsky, were charged with "public fornication." Following hearings in Massachusetts and Federal Courts, the play has been allowed to continue in its original format pending further decision.

If the guardians of public morality found this play in any way appealing to prurient interests, then perhaps they missed the point of Sweet Eros. The play is not an attack on morality, but an ironic comment on the absurdity of formulating ethics.

A young woman, played by Lisa Ingalls, is abducted by a disturbed man, played by Joel Polinsky. She is bound, gagged, and strapped to a swivel chair. Her assailant proceeds to strip her while narrating the story of his life. Ultimately, he persuades her to stay with him of her own will. In Sweet Eros, the hero offers us a vision of life so meaningless, that judging the moral reprehensibility of his actions is impossible. His girlfriend committed suicide, his mother died of cancer; life to him has become an absurd game which he likens to the scurrying of ants across the floor. The kidnapping is an act of desperation: in order to insure his own survival he needs someone to share his existence. "There comes a day when what's right is what you want to do," he exclaims, offering what could be a rationale for the play as a whole.

The nudity and sex then, only reinforce this theme, for "anything goes" in the hero's view. The label of "gross and lewd" seems a misnomer to the almost visually boring scene of a girl strapped nude to a chair for twenty long minutes. The sexual act itself is performed so perfunctorily (in a record 27 seconds in one showing) that those titillated couldn't have progressed beyond what the hero remembers as his own eighth grade attitude towards sex: getting off on National Geographic pics of naked African women.

The fate of the play ultimately rests on Polinsky's shoulders. But he doesn't quite live up to the demands placed on him. During the first half, all attention is focused on him as he struts across stage, rants, raves, and philosophizes. Polinsky tends to overdramatize, and his physical movements seem so nervously unfocused that you wish someone would hand him a pacifier. Ingalls isn't given as much of a chance to demonstrate her talents. Her abrupt change of attitude towards her captor, from the moment she tries to escape to the next when she docilely hops into bed with the hero, is hardly believable. This is not so much Ingalls's fault as the play's, which has altogether too many unfulfilled moments.

Sweet Eros is not great theater, but neither is it morally offensive. Presumably, we've seen it all before and we can take it. But sex has seen its better days on stage...