Never mind its provocative title: “Cock” is about love. Things get complicated as people fall in and out of it, but this wonderful 90-minute show renders the emotional mess with great simplicity.
There are no props, and the story couldn’t be more basic: Boy can’t choose between his old lover and his new one.
Happily, there are twists.
The first is that Mike Bartlett’s play, a London import, is staged in the round. Sitting in a small amphitheater built inside the Duke on 42nd Street, the audience is a breath away from the actors. We look down on them as they lock horns in a makeshift ring — the marquee alludes to cockfighting.
The other wrinkle on your average Hollywood rom-com is that our hero, John (Cory Michael Smith), waffles between his boyfriend, M (Jason Butler Harner), and a female lover, W (Amanda Quaid).
“It’s absolutely OK to like both,” M says. “But not at the same time.”
To help John come to a decision — hopefully in his own favor — M decides to have a dinner party with all three of them. As if this weren’t asking for trouble, M also invites his supportive dad, F (Cotter Smith).
The characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. M is a terrible snob, W’s quiet confidence can be irritating and John’s inability to fully commit to anyone is manipulative.
Yet we care for them all, thanks to Bartlett’s insightful writing, James Macdonald’s sharp staging and a cast in a state of near-telepathic grace.
Harner (“The Coast of Utopia”) is brilliant at playing smug — check out the tasty way he says “broker” when informing W, a teaching assistant, of his job. But you can also see the pain wash over his face when he thinks he’s losing John.
The slight, youthful-looking Smith succeeds in making John’s wavering understandable, and Quaid beautifully handles the tricky sex scene between W and John. They remain fully clothed and barely touch, but the text is explicit and the implied intimacy makes audience members both fascinated and uncomfortable.
Best of all, “Cock” isn’t a screed about sexual politics, but a humane story about how hard it is to make decisions when it comes to relationships. And that’s something anybody can understand.