Lympdick: Standing Tall

The Office for the Arts brings many odd people to Harvard. Some are musicians, some are artists, others write plays about flaccid sexual organs. Jay Critchley is one such invited guest. Critchley is the author and director of The Lympdick Diatribes: It's Hard to Be a Man, a series of short testaments to the testicles centered in the town of Lympville, where getting it up is going wrong. The show, a workshop piece inspired by the actors' improvisations, weaves together an entirely odd but nonetheless perversely witty original manifesto of cock that mocks The Vagina Monologues, embraces bestiality, and addresses such problems as a constant erection.

Without ever actually mentioning the penis, or at least without ever referring to any scientific terminology, innuendoes abound. The cast features a drag queen whose boss is a woman playing a man who is continuously aroused. This drag queen is essentially the secretary of her king, a woman playing a man who has the body of a woman, insuring that the penis of the king (a wrestler) is up and running at appropriate moments. One hysterical sequence involves the drag queen (who puts most formal-goers to shame with her swanky leggy machinations on stage) requesting that the town's lost and found office search for her boss' missing penis, which had fallen off the previous night when s/he was watching a wrestling match. Never actually mentioning the lost object by name, the lost and found description becomes a search "for an object that is soft, but can get hard, and is of tremendous importance."

Other flashes of amusing oddities include Jeff Dubner '03 as a wimpy boxer incapable of doing a mere pushup pretending to be a 245 lb. man. Through this skit, Critchley mocks masculinity, especially when the drag wrestler beats up Dubner. Also featured is a proposal to start a new colony off of Boston's harbor where all with constant erections may be free from the society of Lympville and roam about on the phallus shaped heaven.

Two of the most surprising skits deal with distortions of serious issues. One is never quite sure whether Critchley's humor is intended to mock the seriousness that the cult of political correctness brings to issues of sexuality and STD's or if Critchley is trying to use humor to break down the discomfort most people have with dealing with these issues. When trying to address what seem underneath the laughs to be serious issues one can only guess at the ultimate intention of Critchley's creation.

Two such "serious" scenes, one dealing with transsexuality and one dealing with AIDS, are interposed within the generally lighthearted humor of the rest of the show. This further confuses the potentially serious social criticism with the entertainment component of a hypothetical society's exclusion of those bearing erect skyscrapers below the belt.

The skit about transsexuality features a man who fosters an appearance of unrectifiable dorkiness. In his monologue, wearing a Brown University shirt for emphasis, he explains how he told his mother he was actually, despite having a girlfriend and the normal high school experience, a lesbian trapped in a man's body. While the monologue touches on serious issues related to transsexuality, the humor of the monologue brings the lighter side of transsexuality to the mind of the audience while addressing the difficulty of social acceptance for transsexuals.

Similarly, another skit features a Framingham construction worker turned priest delivering a eulogy for a lost friend. It is no easy feat to accept a eulogy to a friend who has succumbed to AIDS when both religion and mourning are contexutalized in the larger framework of drag queens and lost penises. Is the priest mocking those who have lost friends to the virus or those who have turned to God in their final months on earth?

Evidently, one would hope that Critchley does not intend to mock AIDS victims, but the larger point behind this skit is unclear. The omnipresent stag banner decorated with condoms in the sign of a deflated male symbol is clever, but nonetheless its continued presence in every scene makes it impossible to view any skit as possessing serious intention.

Still, most plays on campus will probably never involve men and women dressed as men speaking at Hardonics Anonymous, a place for men to go to talk about the problems and issues related to having continually erect penises. Nor will most plays on campus feature talk shows showcasing the confrontation between an overly horny, comparatively undersexed disgruntled housewife with a husband working for a nuclear power plant with lines such as "I fucked a dog, so what?" Thus, Lympdick stands erect in the culture of the other formal, well-rehearsed and plot driven plays this semester.